{"id":1463,"date":"2019-03-27T04:47:37","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T04:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2019-03-27T04:47:37","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T04:47:37","slug":"all-girls-tackle-football-is-officially-a-trend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1463","title":{"rendered":"All-Girls Tackle Football Is Officially A Trend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Gordon, <\/span>the internet\u2019s most famous female football player, still remembers the reactions at her first practice. The Utah eighth grader tried out for the boys tackle league in Salt Lake City when she was nine years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was first in every single speed and agility drill. The coaches would look at their timer and they\u2019d be like, \u2018Oh Sam, you need to run this again. I think we clicked it wrong,\u2019\u201d Gordon, now 13, recounts over the phone. \u201cThere were, you know, a couple boys who would start chanting, \u2018Beat the girl. Beat the girl.\u2019 Sometimes a parent would come onto the field after I tackled him, or they got trucked, and they\u2019d grab their kid by the face mask and be like, \u2018Don\u2019t get beat by a girl!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, on the first snap of her first scrimmage, Gordon, starting at quarterback, ran the length of the field for a touchdown. On the first play of her team\u2019s next possession, she ran for another score. On the next possession, she ran for a third touchdown. Gordon finished her first game with five touchdowns on eight carries.<\/p>\n

Gordon\u2019s father Brent, a personal injury lawyer, captured the action on a handheld camera. He hired a professional company to film the rest of the season. In November, Brent posted Sam\u2019s highlight reel on YouTube.<\/p>\n

\u201cThree hours later, Ellen<\/em> was calling,\u201d Brent says. The video had gone viral. \u201cMy phone just started blowing up. Three days later, it was almost 5 million views.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next couple months, Gordon appeared on Good Morning America<\/em>, SportsCenter<\/em>, and Cartoon Network\u2019s Hall of Game Awards<\/em> show. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell invited her to watch Super Bowl XLVII in his suite. She met members of the U.S. women\u2019s national soccer team and the San Francisco 49ers.<\/p>\n

Then in 2015, a family friend invited Gordon to speak at an assembly at a local middle school. Near the end of her speech, Gordon asked how many girls in the audience would want to play tackle football. She says almost every hand in the room went up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had this idea,\u201d Gordon says. \u201cIf this many girls from this one middle school would want to play tackle football, imagine how many there are just in Utah, or in the nation?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Around the same time,<\/span> Crystal Sacco had a similar idea. Sacco owns an aquatic therapy school in Salt Lake City. She also played three seasons of tackle football for the Utah Falconz, formerly the Utah Jynx, which competes in the Independent Women\u2019s Football League. After hanging up her pads, she started coaching a team in the local boys tackle league, until she was approached one day by a group of girls watching their brothers play.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese girls came up to us and said, \u2018Hey, if you start a girls league, then our parents will let us us play. But they won\u2019t let us play with the boys,\u2019\u201d Sacco\u00a0says. \u201cThat\u2019s when I reached out to Sam Gordon.\u201d<\/p>\n

If this many girls from this one middle school would want to play tackle football, imagine how many there are just in Utah, or in the nation?<\/p>\n

American football has historically excluded women from playing, though not entirely. During the 1920s, NFL teams fielded women\u2019s teams as halftime entertainment, and the first all-women leagues emerged during the \u201930s and \u201940s, featuring professional fast-pitch softball players. Several other short-lived leagues popped up during the 20th century, and today three different leagues field full-contact, 11-on-11 competition in North America: the IWFL, the Women\u2019s Football Alliance, and the United States Women\u2019s Football League. This past weekend, Orlando, Florida, hosted the third annual Women\u2019s World Football Games, pitting national teams from around the world.<\/p>\n

On the youth side, the NFL launched a varsity girls flag football program in 2008\u2014it\u2019s now sanctioned and managed by USA Football. Meanwhile, the number of girls playing on high school boys teams has been rising for years: 1,964 girls at 576 schools played tackle football during the 2015-2016 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.<\/p>\n

But in Utah, Sacco wanted to create the first ever full-contact league exclusively for girls, so parents would be more willing to let their daughters play, and girls wouldn\u2019t get pigeonholed at certain positions. After witnessing Sam\u2019s middle school assembly, her father agreed to help fund and organize the league.<\/p>\n

Sacco also connected with Samantha Rapoport, the founder of the NFL\u2019s girls flag program and then-USA Football\u2019s director of football development, who provided Sacco with an equipment grant and agreed to serve on the league\u2019s board. The Utah Girls Tackle Football league launched two summers ago with 50 fifth and sixth graders across four teams, competing in 8-on-8, full-contact football, without special teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know girls were allowed to play football, and soon as I found, I was like, yeah, I want to give it a shot,\u201d Laura Goetz, a seventh grader at Elk Ridge Middle School in South Jordan, Utah, says. \u201cMy friends were like, \u2018Are you sure you want to play this?\u2019 … I didn\u2019t care what they thought or not. I was still going to play.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This summer, the league grew to two age divisions\u2014fifth and sixth graders and seventh through ninth graders\u2014with four teams each. The spots filled less than a week after registration opened. Goetz says the sport has taught her and her friends courage that can\u2019t be taught in other activities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn football, you have to do all these awkward positions and stuff and it\u2019s uncomfortable,\u201d Goetz says. \u201cAs you break down things that are scary to you, you can bring them into the actual world with friends and school, and they\u2019re no longer as scary, and you have a wide variety of things you\u2019re not scared of anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

In the fall, <\/span>the Utah league transformed from a phenomenon into a trend starter, when the second girls tackle league launched in Mooresville, a tiny town in central Indiana, population around 10,000.<\/p>\n

It started with a family fight. Emily Zimmerman asked her mother and stepfather Chad Oldham, a construction manager, whether she could play tackle football in the local boys league\u2014to no avail.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing how upset she got kinda broke my heart,\u201d Oldham says. \u201cHow many other girls out there are in Emily\u2019s shoes? How many girls get told, \u2018No,\u2019 because they\u2019re mommy\u2019s princess or daddy\u2019s princess, and they don\u2019t want them to get hurt? But the girls, that may be what they want to do!\u201d<\/p>\n

Oldham, who serves as the president of Mooresville\u2019s youth boys league, announced an all-girls league in April. The inaugural season started in August, with fifth through seventh grade and eighth-through-tenth grade divisions featuring two teams each, following the rule book developed by Sacco and Rapoport in Utah.<\/p>\n

How many girls get told, \u2018No,\u2019 because they\u2019re mommy\u2019s princess or daddy\u2019s princess, and they don\u2019t want them to get hurt?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like what real football is known for,\u201d Elise Scaggs, a 16-year-old running back, says. There were team sleepovers, rainy practices, and group outings to boys games while decked out in their jerseys. \u201cInstead of brothers, they were my sisters out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elise\u2019s team, which also featured her actual sisters, Faith, 15 (quarterback), and Kate, 14 (slot receiver), went undefeated, despite an end-of-season scare. During the third-to-last game, Elise tackled an opposing player, then took a knee to the head from a teammate running into the scrum. After the game, she was diagnosed with a concussion and forced to sit out the championship, leaving the team without its only sophomore. With Elise sidelined for the \u201cSuper Bowl,\u201d Faith stepped up, tallying three touchdowns and over ten tackles, her best game all year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had to be there for them and let them know that it\u2019s not just me on this team. It\u2019s them,\u201d Elise says. \u201cAll of us are one. It was hard, but they did it and they pulled through. I was super proud of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the happy ending, the incident confronted Mooresville with the head safety risks that have troubled youth football for years, and have prompted its declining participation. All the parents GOOD interviewed for this story said they believed these risks were overblown by the media, and Sacco and Oldham both stated their confidence in Heads Up Football certification, the sometimes-criticized safety coaching instructions regulated by USA Football. To the girls, it seems a moot point. They expressed the desire to dish out, and be subjected to, the same dangers as the boys.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning, we didn\u2019t really know if we were (tackling)\u00a0correctly,\u201d Elise says. After a late-season game, two referees, who also officiate the boys league, approached her and her sisters to say that they hit harder than most boys. \u201cFor them to say that we were hitting harder than the guys, it made me personally feel like I accomplished what I\u2019ve always wanted to accomplish. It was like a dream come true.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year the Utah league is expanding into high school, and Oldham expects the Indiana league to grow too. Meanwhile, a third league for 11-to-14-year-old girls is taking registrations in Georgia, with plans to launch this spring.<\/p>\n

Rapoport, who returned to the NFL last summer as the league\u2019s director of football development tasked with developing and promoting women for coaching, scouting, and administrative roles, calls these leagues a key part of the movement to build sustainable pipelines for women in football.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it\u2019s no longer news that we have a female coach, or a female scout, or a female official,\u201d Rapoport says,\u00a0\u201cWhen that normalizes, I\u2019ll feel like I have succeeded.\u201d
\n <\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Gordon, the internet\u2019s most famous female football player, still remembers the reactions at her first practice. The Utah eighth grader tried out for the boys tackle league in Salt Lake City when she was nine years old. \u201cI was first in every single speed and agility drill. The coaches would look at their timer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}