Kicker Makes Her Point on Varsity Gridiron : 5-Foot-1 1/2 100-Pounder Puts Best Foot Forward for Fresno High School Team

When Dinuba High School arrived at McLane Stadium for its game with Fresno Hoover, it found banners proclaiming “57 Is Great and She’s a Girl” and “We Love You, Bridget.”

Strange messages for a football stadium, but their meaning became clear late in the third quarter when Hoover scored the game’s first touchdown and 5-foot-1 1/2, 100-pound Bridget Farris ran onto the field to kick the point-after-touchdown.

Hoover fans chanted “Brid-get! Brid-get!” and her teammates gave her the ‘go’ sign as the slender, 16-year-old with brown hair protruding from her helmet placed a flat, rubber kicking tee on the 10-yard line.

The Historic Moment

She took two steps back, three steps to the left and turned to face the tee.

Holder Mike Kandarian kneeled in front of her and center Doug Galley snapped the ball. As it hit Kandarian’s hands, Farris started a two-step approach.

“I started getting sweaty and my knees were knocking,” said her father, Don, who had been seated in the stands.

Kandarian placed the ball on the tee and Farris whipped her right size-6 football shoe forward. The top knuckle of her big toe banged into the ball and sent it sailing end over end until it fell 10 yards beyond the crossbar.

Farris’ coach and teammates rushed onto the field, risking a penalty, and embraced her. Her father grabbed her sister, Brenda, 17, who was wearing Bridget’s green-and-white number 57 practice jersey, and jumped up and down. The stands exploded.

“You would have thought we’d won the Super Bowl,” Hoover principal Elizabeth Terronez said.

Bedlam erupted because Farris had scored what California Interscholastic Federation authorities believe is the first point by a girl in a California varsity football game.

Ray Ball, former chairman of the National Federation of High School Football Rules Committee, said Bridget’s kick on Sept. 20 may mark the first point ever scored by a girl in a varsity football game anywhere.

“There have been so few girls participating,” Ball said. “Probably not more than 15 at the varsity level and they usually don’t last. I would say there’s about a 99% chance that none of them has ever scored.”

Lizzie Luna, 14, a candidate for the B team at Westchester High, has become the first girl to try out for a Los Angeles Unified School District football team.

For Farris, making history was relatively easy.

“I was nervous and I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to make it,” she said, “because I’d gotten a lot of pressure and I wasn’t sure how the fans were going to react until I got out there. Then I felt pretty confident. It felt good. It went fast. Once I got out there and set up, I just kicked it.”

The attention that followed the kick was more difficult.

Media interviews and classmates’ good wishes were a bit too much for her, she said later. A long interview and photo session with Sports Illustrated the day of her second game left her in tears on the school practice field.

That night her only extra-point attempt fell short, and two more in a later game also missed, one bouncing off one of the uprights.

Seated at the dining table in her family’s middle-class home last week, Farris said that the attention was much more than she expected.

Surrounded by Cameras

“I felt like everybody was depending on me to make it,” she said.

Calmer with the stir she created as the Hoover team (2-2) faced its Thursday night’scontest against McLane, she had been photographed hundreds of times and clearly had developed an intense dislike for cameras.

When a teammate nudged her during a recent game and told her to look at the camera of a sideline photographer, she walked away.

As she warmed up for that game, she asked that no shots be taken. “She’s nervous as heck,” her coach, Pat Plummer, said.

Farris little anticipated any of these situations when she realized a few years ago that she wanted to play football and decided that her best chance would be as a kicker.

An outstanding soccer player, she read a book on football kicking technique and started practicing last fall.

In the spring she approached Plummer, who had just arrived at the school from Western High School in Tulare, where he had won two championships in the last five years, and asked if she could try out.

“He was very nice about it and didn’t say anything,” Farris said. “He just treated me like anybody else. He told me when it was and what time spring football started.”

Plummer, 35, maintained that attitude in coming months.

“I’m out here having spring practice and I look up and there’s a young lady standing in line and ready to do exercises with us,” said the 6-foot-3, 230-pound coach, an all conference guard at California State University, Fresno, in the early 1970s. “And you know, I really didn’t think anything of it.

Practice Sessions

“I’ve been in this thing 13 years and never had a young lady try out. I just went on with things. I knew she was there but I figured she wouldn’t be there for long.

“And at the end of spring practice she comes up and she says to me, ‘Did I make the team?’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘I don’t cut anybody.’ A big grin ran across her face.

“This fall, I don’t know if I’ll see her or not. First practice and there she is, ready to go.

“That (kicking) is the only area that I would consider keeping her and letting her play. Because this game, as far as I’m concerned, is not made for women . . . (except in) a situation where there’s not that much chance of getting into a collision.

“And she kept working hard and kept doing it. And I kept looking at her. She’d grab a bag of balls and she’d go kick. She’d be over there for two hours. I’d look and she’s still kicking.

” . . . We’re starting a new thing here, you know. This football program hasn’t won in the last six years and you look for things that are motivation. . . . And I figure if we can put her out there and see if she makes it, it might just be the positive deal we need to get things going.

” . . . I thought it out the night before the game. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to put a woman in a ball game and let her kick a point.’ And that kind of excited me. . . . And there I said, you know, I don’t think there’s been anybody do this. It didn’t dawn on me until then.”

Her success won over lots of players who Farris said laughed at her or wouldn’t talk to her when she tried out.

As eight female cheerleaders practiced and scores of girls played with a marching band nearby one afternoon last week, Farris shagged balls for a field-goal kicker and kicked extra points with the football team.

While not kicking, she stood comfortably by larger players, engaging in easy small talk. Midway through the workout a big pass receiver tapped her on the head and playfully burrowed his helmet into her shoulder, imitating a tackling technique. (Plummer said the players probably block harder for Bridget than for other players because they believe that she needs protection.)

Little in Bridget’s background indicates that she would be so attracted to the sport.

Her father, Don, manager of the mail service, shipping-receiving and supply warehouse divisions at Cal State Fresno, played one year of basketball and ran two years of track at Richmond High School north of Oakland.

Her brother, Bryan, 24, a police officer at Fresno City College, played one year of football and ran one year of track at Hoover.

Pat, her mother, who supervises a grammar school food service, and Brenda, her sister, said they are not great athletes.

Farris said he considers his daughter’s grades at least as important as her football. An A-minus student in a home with two dogs, two cats, three birds and several goldfish, Bridgete said she hopes to become a marine biologist.

She’d like to kick again her senior year and then hang up her cleats unless a small college offers a scholarship to boot extra points.

Ultimately, she’d like to play women’s basketball at Cal State Fresno, but meanwhile the effects of her kick are spreading.

A few miles from Fresno at Clovis High School, Tim Simons, coach of the defending large-school CIF central section champions, said a girl has already told him she is going to kick extra points next year.

“Some people might get emotional and argue that girls don’t belong,” Simons said. “But I for one think that if they can do the job, let them.”

Terronez, Hoover’s principal, has a theory about why the kick captured so much attention.

“Here’s this 100-pound girl with braces on her teeth out there with all those big guys, and she proved that if you work, if you put in the time, you can earn the right to get out there in front of the student body and make that extra point.

“The woman part is kind of a novelty, but more than that she’s an underdog. She has paid her dues and you’ve got to respect what she’s doing. It’s sort of like when Rocky won.

“It was such a heartwarming thing. You win and you lose, but there are moments when you want to cry.”