'This is the only place they can: the only all-girls tackle football league in America.'
good. She’s just straight-up good. At the end of a long battle to win a game, her teammates hoist her up onto their shoulders. They love her, they say in interviews. They trust her. They want to protect her. She is their quarterback, after all.
Several girls mention that they wear two compression sports bras to make their boobs fit under the pads. If your boobs are too big for even that to work, you have to push them down under the pads so they stick out. But this has its own problems. The way football players block, they often grab near the bottom of the shoulder pads, so if your boobs are sticking out, you get blocked there, and it hurts. Plus, playing football does not stop high school girls from wearing acrylic nails.“It’s typical.
But on game days they have to focus. They forget the comments, the snide remarks, the questions about their safety and their gender, and they braid each other’s hair and paint on each other’s eye black and help buckle every shoulder pad into place. The only thing they care about on Saturdays is winning.
that aired during the Super Bowl. She wears a red dress and holds out the ball saying, “You want this? Come and get it.”“I kept telling the girls [on the Lightning] to say they beat the Herriman team. She’s not the whole team.” says Melissa Worthen, a mother of a high school player on the Lightning. When you watch a team play Herriman 1, they do target Gordon, though, and it’s easy to see that she’s the one they all want to beat. She may also be the one they all want to be.
In some ways, though, every girl in this league is forever indebted to Gordon, and off the field, they all speak highly of her. “It sucks to play her for sure, but without her, none of us would get to be here,” Allysha Johns, a fullback and middle linebacker for the Lightning, says. “I love this game so much, and I’m so glad that I get to play it.”
That first year, the league started with 50 players. The next year, they doubled in size. Then they doubled again. In 2018, 300 girls signed up to play tackle football. This year for the league’s fifth-anniversary season, there were 446 girls. That’s an 892% increase in five years. Girls 4th-12th grades play on 24 teams, and they all seem to love it.
“Football works for all girls. It’s the great thing about the sport,” Shawn Goetz says. “Some of these girls aren’t athletic. But it’s not soccer where they’re running up and down the field. You don’t have to be fast and thin to play football. In fact, a lot of the time, it’s better if you’re not.” That’s why the members of the Utah Girls Tackle Football League are suing their school districts. They want to play on Friday nights, too, under the big lights.
According to discovery documents in the case, the three school districts are down 2,200 girls athletic positions. With 18 high schools between them that comes out to about 60 spots for girls. Girls football wouldn’t create all of those spots, but it would fill a lot of them. “Oh. If we had a high school [tackle] team I think all those girls would play, and probably more,” Kaili Ackerman, who plays for the Bingham team, says.“It takes a lot of time and fighting to go out for the boys team, and I think a lot of girls don’t want to do that.”
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