Written by:
Nancy Einhart
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol.11 #8
The heat is on for women who are taking football to the pro level. An overview from players in the lead.
Compared with soccer star Brandi Chastain’s shirt-tossing victory dance or the soap-operatic antics of women’s tennis, the girls of the gridiron tend to lie low in the world of women’s sports. In fact, news from the women’s football front has pretty much stayed on the sidelines for 80 years, since the early days of the National Football League, when all-female tackle teams went head-to-head as halftime novelty acts.
Now, after various failed attempts at leagues since the 1960s, four women’s tackle football leagues have finally hustled their way onto the scene. Organized into nearly 40 teams in every region of the country, women’s professional football has already seen its share of chaos and controversy. Though new teams continue to form rapidly, older ones die out or defect from one league to another. Even the team owners get confused. And while women shell out their own cash to keep the teams going, “professional” remains a very loosely defined term.
But despite the start-up strife, an important fact remains: All over the country, women play football. Here, five of football’s women warriors explain why, this time, women’s football might actually stick around.
Maggie Mayo
Defensive Lineman, Syracuse Sting
Independent Women’s Football League
On the Kahnawake Indian Reservation, where Maggie Mayo grew up, it wasn’t exactly standard procedure for girls to play football. But at age 16, after years as a backyard football player with brothers and cousins as teammates, Mayo decided to try out for the guys’ municipal football team. But making the cut wasn’t as simple as proving her athletic might.
“There were a lot of protests, so I had to take a complaint to the highest football authorities,” Mayo says. “It came out that in all the rules, it says, ‘the player.’ Nowhere does it deem male or female. So I made the team.”
The team, with Mayo as kicker, won the provincial championships in Quebec that year. But when Mayo showed up for football camp the next season, she realized she might have to rethink her chosen sport. “The boys I had played football with the year before had turned into men,” Mayo says. “I didn’t bulk out like the guys, and there was no way I was able to compete. That’s where my football career ended.”
Now a right defensive tackle for the Syracuse Sting, Mayo has seen her football career start up again. A police officer of 11 years for the Kahnawake reservation, Mayo balances a full-time job with four-hour drives from Quebec to Syracuse for weekend practices. And although her physical size kept her off the guys’ field in high school, she now finds that being a woman affords her football opportunities that men envy.
“The greatest thing about women’s football is that our prime, in my experience, is not necessarily when you’re young,” Mayo says. “Whereas men like my brothers, if they haven’t hit their prime by the time they’re 18, they’re looking at just flag leagues. There’s that kind of jealousy, like, ‘Hey, my sister’s playing professional football, and she’s 34 years old.’”
But after only three years of football, Mayo plans to retire as a player when her own team, the Montreal Blitz, makes its debut in the IWFL’s second season, which runs from April to June. She’s already spent $35,000 to get the team going, and although she’ll miss playing, she thinks it’s important to give other women the chance to discover football. Many women, Mayo explains, don’t understand the appeal of the game, simply because they’ve never felt the thrill of playing. “Guys who play football, they know the excitement of being part of a team, of being down and gritty,” she says.
Andra Douglas
Owner and Quarterback, New York Sharks
Independent Women’s Football League
Very few people have held the title of both homecoming queen and football quarterback. Helen Hunt did in the 1983 television movie Quarterback Princess, the tale of a teen who does double duty for the football team and the homecoming court. Andra Douglas has, too, though she now dismisses her homecoming queen past as “silliness.”
But Douglas, 42, is more than willing to talk about her athletic pursuits, and she shares a set of woes common to women who grew up wanting to play football with the neighborhood guys. “The boys wouldn’t choose me because I was a girl. Then I’d get onto the field and beat the shit out of them,” Douglas says.
Now the New York Sharks’ team owner and quarterback, Douglas wants her stories down on paper. So when she found some spare time between running a football team and her own business, Douglas got to work on an autobiographical novel, and now she’s shopping the book around. “I never aspired to be a writer, but this was just too rich to let pass,” she says. “It uses football as a vehicle, but it talks all about growing up as female and the rejections that you face.”
Though Douglas’ gender no longer keeps her on the bench, her problems aren’t completely solved. In order to devote more time to her team, earlier this year Douglas quit her job at Money magazine and started her own company, Nutshell Entertainment, which handles creative direction for the entertainment industry. While her business has succeeded, she still pours thousands of dollars into her team to keep it going.
“It’s way tougher than anyone can imagine,” she says. “I’ve heard a lot of players say they should get paid, they shouldn’t have to pay for the jersey, not realizing that 20 years ago, I would have given my life to play this game.”
But because Douglas has found so many women willing to dedicate their time and energy free of charge, she thinks the sport will endure, ideally with all of the teams putting aside their differences and uniting under one league. “We have a good product, and if we can just stay alive a little bit longer, I think we’ll be fine.”
Donna Fox
Owner and Defensive Back, San Diego SunFire
Women’s American Football League
As an on-air reporter covering New York sports, Donna Fox had to keep her hobby as a rough-touch football player covered up — literally.
While reporting from the sidelines of Jets, Nets, Knicks and Islanders games for News 12 Long Island, Fox developed clever ways to cover up her football wounds. “I had stitches in my forehead, and I had to wear bangs for a month to not let anybody see the bandages,” she says.
So after a stint with the New York Gems last season, Fox, 36, decided to become her own boss in more ways than one, migrating west to act as team owner for the San Diego SunFire. The SunFire started playing during the WAFL’s first season, which began in November and culminates with a championship game in January. Fox also hosts her own women’s football highlights show on the local sports channel. “Now,” Fox says, “I don’t have to worry about a news director saying, ‘Is that a black eye?’”
A former competitive body-builder, the mother of two teenagers and a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, Fox says the male coaches on her team had to adapt to her unique brand of femininity.
“The only women they usually deal with are cheerleaders and the women they meet at bars,” Fox says. “And here I come, all 5-foot-2 of me, and they think, ‘Who the heck is she supposed to be?’”
Fox says that for now, male coaches have the most football experience. But she hopes that in a few years, female football players will absorb their coaches’ expertise and begin coaching on their own. Until then, Fox still embraces the fact that women all over the country can share a football experience beyond just watching the NFL on television. “Now women are able to say, ‘I’m rough and tough, and I’m still all woman.’”
When the team goes out for drinks, they go to both gay and straight bars, to keep everyone’s interests in mind. “I tell my girls, whether they’re lesbian or straight, everybody’s gonna go here, because we’re all part of the team. Maybe this isn’t your thing, but we got some girls here who do feel comfortable with this, and you’ve got to embrace that. You’ve gotta feel good that they feel good.”
Andrea Littlejohn
Defensive Back, Houston Energy
Women’s Professional Football League
Throughout her childhood in Louisiana, Andrea Littlejohn played all kinds of sports. She ran track, studied tae kwon do and even played in a high-school girls’ powder-puff football league.
But the experience that became most relevant when she joined a tackle football team wasn’t playing a sport. It was having a baby.
“Of course I can play football,” Littlejohn says with a laugh. “I’ve had a baby. Physically I could play football and physically I could care for a child, but mentally I had to be prepared for anything.”
“Anything” in the world of women’s football turned out to mean rearranging her work schedule, sacrificing some time with her son, and, along with other Houston Energy players, contributing $600 of her own cash to get the team through the season.
“I paid to play this year, and I don’t know if we’ll see that change in my career,” she says. “[Team owner] Robin [Howington] tried her damndest to see that we didn’t have to pay any money this year. But you do what you have to do.”
Just as her 5-year-old son, Andrew, helped inspire her to get through college with a degree in biological engineering and a minor in English, hearing Andrew cheer from the stands keeps Littlejohn going on the field. “He’s my biggest fan,” she says. “To know that he’s proud of his mommy, that is the best thing in the world.”
Now in the WPFL’s second season, Littlejohn just enjoys proving all of her nay-sayers wrong. The 5-foot-2 Littlejohn, who jokes that she’s maybe 120 pounds with her gear on, gets a lot of surprised reactions from people when they learn she plays football. “If you saw me, you’d think I was a cheerleader,” she says.
When she first announced she’d earned a spot on Energy, everyone from her co-workers to her mom to her fiancé warned that she was too small to play. But by the end of her first season, she’d helped her team defeat the New England Storm in January’s WPFL Women’s Super Bowl.
A marketing director for an environmental engineering firm, Littlejohn, 26, thinks that in order for women’s football to succeed, the higher-ups need to market the sport differently than they would men’s football. She says marketing directors should draw crowds by playing off people’s natural curiosities about women and football.
“We are still women. Market us as women,” she says. “Some of us are feminine, some of us are big girls who are beautiful. When you get the fans to the stands to see if the girls are cute, then you show them you can really play football.”
Alissa Wykes
Fullback, Philadelphia Liberty Belles
National Women’s Football League
Alissa Wykes was one of those kids who never knew what it was like to go home right after school. Instead of plopping down in front of the television, Wykes stuck around for practice — softball, basketball, swim team, marching band, pretty much any extracurricular group that she could find hanging around the schoolyard.
So when Wykes, 34, had to work a professional football season into her schedule as an adult, she’d already had plenty of practice with time management. Playing for the Belles meant being bussed around New England from March through June until the mammoth road trip to Pensacola, Fla., for the first NWFL Super Bowl. In a game that drew nearly 6,000 fans, Wykes’ team creamed the Pensacola Power 40 to 7.
“I’ve kind of been conditioned for this,” she says. “Balancing activities has been a lifelong pursuit. Mostly I try and remember that I do most of this stuff because it’s fun.”
For nine years, Wykes has worked as a quality control manager at an adhesive manufacturing company. For the past six years, she’s also served as women’s head rugby coach at Bryn Mawr College. She’s currently working on a master’s degree in sports administration. She plays flag football and rugby during the pro football off-season. And she takes care of 12 cats.
But for Wykes, owning 12 cats is an exercise in restraint. She and her partner of six years, a Belles teammate who asked that her name not be printed, volunteer through an animal rescue group by offering their house as a foster home for stray cats. “At one point, we had, like, 25 cats,” says Wykes.
Wykes admits that her penchant for orphaned cats isn’t quite in keeping with a football fullback’s image. Neither is crying during sappy movies and songs, another of Wykes’ quirks. And since she’ll tromp onto a rugby field with no gear at all, she says wearing a helmet and hip pads took some getting used to.
“I’m one of those people who always cuts the shoulder pads out of my shirts,” she says. “I thought, I’m gonna look so scary in this stuff. I mean, when I go into the women’s bathroom, they say, ‘Sir, this is the ladies’ room.’ But when I get onto the field, it’s OK. It’s where I find positive feedback and enjoyment.”
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