Just One of the Boys

“Gentlemen,” the head coach says. Spaghetti-twirled forks freeze. Sixty high school football players snap to attention.

On game days like this one, the varsity players wear ties and shirts with collars under their gold jerseys. That morning, defensive back Sara Rathbun put on her father’s $16 tie and had him knot it for her. She’s wearing his black Levi’s, her No. 35 jersey and a tucked-in white Oxford shirt. Coach Rich Wheeler hates it when his players walk around with shirttails out. This team will not look sloppy.

Tonight, we’ll see what La Canada High School is made of. See if it can play with the Big Boys. In five hours, Wheeler will put on his lucky game cleats, and La Canada will take part in what amounts to a league championship showdown. La Canada hasn’t been this close in a dozen years. Now the Spartans face a homecoming crowd at Monrovia High School, No. 1 in the division with a star tailback. (“Every Division I school after him . . . gained 463 yards in one game. . . .”)

“You have a chance to do something that hasn’t been done here in 12 years,” says Wheeler, 49. His tone is conversational. “Let’s get serious about it. Let’s take a moment.”

This is Wheeler’s second season at La Canada, after 24 years of coaching in the Midwest. In 1997, he led the Spartans to their first winning season in years. Of course, he wants to win. But not with a bunch of thugs. This team will have guts and grace.

Sara, a 17-year-old senior, stands up with the team and bows her head. As a reserve, she knows she might not play in tonight’s nail-biter between the league’s two undefeated teams. But she’s not here to rack up game stats.

Sara is no Billie Jean King. She is a post-feminist athlete--not a crusader, not a groundbreaker, but a competitor in a sport charged with testosterone. She’s a longtime soccer player and varsity track-and-field athlete, but nothing pushes her, enthralls her, like football. Nothing else makes her feel like she’s a part of something colossal.

La Canada football is not 95 boys and one girl, with a freshman, junior varsity and varsity squad. La Canada football is 96 players. Anybody who survives the seven-hours-a-day summer practices is in.

Sara--5 feet 8, 138 pounds--dragged herself through Hell Week like everyone else. In 112-degree heat, she ran until she dry-heaved alongside the boys by the chain-link fence. She lifted weights until her arms shook so much that she couldn’t drive home. She charged until guys twice her weight crashed into her and she saw black blotches and stars. If she messed up, the defensive coordinator shook a finger in her face and screamed, and she took it like a football player.

Why shouldn’t she be part of this team?

The players look up at the sound of Wheeler’s voice.

“Any questions?” he asks.

“No, sir!” the team chants.

The players turn to leave, but Wheeler isn’t finished. He points to a few plastic foam cups left on a table and puts a boom in his voice that could stop a bear.

“This is unacceptable,” he yells. “Un-acceptable.”

She Wanted Fun and Camaraderie

The Spartans know what the other teams say about them: Buncha rich kids. Brains. Not a football school. Still, football is like no other sport at this small school, with 1,345 students and the stunning backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. Football defines school spirit, brings people together in a way that Sara never dreamed.

Oh, boy, game time is cool: You jog out of the locker room and, for luck, slap the Spartan mascot above the door so hard that the plaster crumbles. You trot alongside guys dubbed Opie and Cheeseburger through the cheerleaders’ outstretched banner (it usually says something like,”Go, Boys!”). The team packs in tight at the goal post for Spartan jacks: “S!” jump-jump, “P!” jump-jump. . . . Under the stadium lights, you roar with the cheerleaders, the band, the crowd--like everyone is in one big noise bubble.

“That’s what I wanted,” Sara says, “and that’s what I didn’t quite get [in girls’ sports]. . . . There was, like, something missing. Now that I’ve got football, it’s like everything combined. I saw them on TV, the pro guys, hugging each other in their big shoulder pads, and that’s what I got. I almost thought that I wasn’t going to get it, being the outsider and the girl and everything.”

High school girls have been eligible to play football since 1972, when Title IX gave them equal opportunities in sports. Nationwide, Sara is among 779 female players, according to the National Federation of State High School Assns.

In this area’s CIF-Southern Section, which covers 507 high schools, about 20 girls play varsity football. Most are kickers or receivers, says Bill Clark, the section’s assistant commissioner. They kick field goals or run and catch but don’t tackle or block. In 19 years in the section, Clark doesn’t remember another girl playing defense. (Sara decided to play defense because she knew the defensive coordinator, who had coached her in track.)

“This is the first generation of girls [routinely] playing nontraditional sports,” says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation in New York.

“None of them see themselves as barrier-breaking feminists. What they say is, ‘I just love this game. I love to play.’ ”

“I don’t think there’s any question that we have stepped back to see if this country is undergoing the first major transition in what an American woman should be.”

But most girls will still cheer on the sidelines, she says, until the locker-room jock culture spins into control. And that depends on the coaches.

‘I Wasn’t Looking for a Sideshow’

At La Canada, students scatter when they see an oncoming Coach Wheeler. So why aren’t you playing football? he will ask. As a new coach here, he is trying to build a football program. He spent 23 years coaching high school and college ball in Wisconsin and Indiana. As a coach, he has had one losing season in 24. He knows how to win. He needs athletes.

Wheeler had coached Sara in shot put and knew what she could do. One July afternoon, he cornered her when she was picking up her brother, Michael, from freshman football practice.

“So why aren’t you playing football?” he asked.

“I wasn’t looking for a sideshow,” says Wheeler, who has two grown daughters and a son. “It was a legitimate offer to a legitimate athlete.”

Sara thought he was joking. Here, at La Canada, where boys go out for football and girls go out for Rose Parade princess? Then she thought, why not?

She had played football with her brother and his friends. She loves the game--fighting for the ball, staying on the wide receiver, reading the quarterback. All her life, she had watched NFL teams on TV and followed the Green Bay Packers.

Dad, she said when she got home. Guess what?

Her father, David Rathbun, is part of an elite Los Angeles County sheriff’s squad, with SWAT, paramedic and rescue detail. David, 53, has a scar on his shoulder from surgery for his high school football injuries. He wasn’t happy when Michael went out for freshman football. And now Sara.

The next day, David met with the coaches. If Sara is serious, they assured him, she would be part of this team.

At home, David waved his wife upstairs. Listen, he said. Are we going to put our money where our mouth is?

Thirty years ago, Alana Rathbun had worn a hat and white gloves for her job as a legal secretary in a law firm outside Chicago. Her daughter would be different. David and Alana had always told Sara that if she gave 100%, she could do whatever she wanted. She should not stop at anything because of her gender.

Now, they looked at each other and sighed.

“It’s really put-up-or-shut-up time in a parent’s life,” said Alana, 52, a research secretary at Caltech in Pasadena. “Do we mean what we’ve been saying all these years?”

“Or do we come up with some baloney excuse?” David wondered.

“Michael is playing,” David said. “If we say no, we have to say no to him.”

The family sat down at the kitchen table to hash it out. Michael said, yeah, he would take some heat for his sister playing. But she should do it anyway.

Sara wavered for a couple days. She was busy with soccer, her advanced placement classes and a part-time job at a pet clinic. (Someday, she wants to be a veterinarian.) Football practice would be three hours a day, five days a week, sometimes six. Her girlfriends thought she was crazy. In the end, it was simple. Sara decided: She would play because it might be fun.

At practice, the boys had been warned. There’s a girl coming. She gets no special treatment. If she makes it, she’s part of the team.

The boys exchanged glances. She’ll last a couple days, a week at most. Guess they’ll have to stop saying things like, “Hey, you’re playing like a girl.”

Classic football line.

Sara Wondered Whether She’d Fit In

“Jimmy!” barks defensive coordinator Phillip Johnson on a cold day in practice. “You’re running like a girl.” Big game coming up against Monrovia, and his player is fox trotting down the field.

“Hey!” Sara says.

“No offense, Sara,” Johnson says.

None taken. Sara is used to the jock talk, though she was wary at first. She thought she could handle the physical part of football, but what about the guys? Sara is a teenager who speaks with ease and good humor. She is prone to full-body gestures and breaking out into song. But before football, she saw herself as a nerdy jock who would come home from soccer practice and read “Moby Dick.”

She has a 3.9 grade point average. Her closest friends are girls whom she has known forever. She wears round, wire-rimmed glasses and no makeup; she dresses in T-shirts, jeans and size 11W Nikes. She belongs to the Key Club and Students Against Drunk Driving. Her bedroom is papered with pictures of Mel Gibson and Dalmatian puppies.

Would the guys accept her?

“Well, we were surprised,” says Jeff Riddell, 17, a team captain. “ ‘Oh, what the hell is she doing out here.’ ”

The guys didn’t see how she would fit into a defensive unit that calls itself the Dawg Pound.

“It’s kinda like, ‘We’re Dawgs. That’s my Dawwwg. That’s my boy,’ ” says Jeff, a middle linebacker.

But Sara worked as hard as anyone. She didn’t flirt or complain or act girly.

“She gets yelled at as much as any of us,” Jeff says. “She’s just one of us. She just blends in. . . . She earned our respect from doing Hell Week and all the work we did. She proved to us that she can be a member of this team.”

On campus, Sara got some stares, and some high fives, when she first showed up in her football jersey. One teacher asked whether she was in a skit. No matter. Sara loves it that the football players say hi to her in the halls. Or when Coach Johnson takes her down in a headlock, the way he does with the guys.

In the locker room, defensive lineman Jim Reynolds used to look around for Sara before he changed.

“It was kinda awkward,” says Jim, 17. “You don’t know how to react.”

Now he doesn’t notice if she’s there or not. Sara changes in a small, coach’s office, off the boys’ locker room. Before the game, she hangs out in the locker room, where she is used to guys walking around in boxer shorts. For away games, she changes before she leaves.

“In a way,” Jim says, “it’s like having another guy on the team. . . . Sara’s not like most of the female population.”

Still, in the summer practices, no one wanted to face Sara in the hitting drills. One 300-pound lineman ran toward her, gave her a half hug and set her down like a teacup. Coach Johnson put a stop to that.

“Just hit her,” he screamed. So they did.

Sara was not self-conscious about the contact. She thought she was used to tackling and hitting. She grew up wrestling with her dad, brother and mixed Labrador dog.

“Nothing even comes close,” Sara says. “Not even a fifth of it. Not minutely close to the hard work.

“Now I feel like I can do anything because I’ve gone through football.”

She doesn’t even care much if she gets to play. Her mother points out that she has a game stat: one tackle. Wheeler says Sara does fine, and if she had played for four years like most of the other guys, she would be starting.

So far, Sara has played in one varsity game, with four plays against Whittier High School. Earlier in the season, along with other seniors new to the team, she played three junior varsity games, all four quarters. No big plays, but no big mess-ups, either. In one game, she pulled a ligament in her right thumb. She grins. Someday, she’ll show off her crooked thumb and say, “Old football injury.”

But for the school’s homecoming dance, Sara ditched her tank dress for a plum short-sleeved one. Her date, a friend from the football team, would understand. She did not want her football bruises showing.

It’s the Homecoming: La Canada vs. Monrovia

A packed Monrovia homecoming crowd. The air is cold and crisp. Two men lug a balloon arch to the field. Tall flags twirl in a green-and-white blur. Homecoming princesses float by in white satin and gloves.

La Canada’s locker room is quiet, except for the thump of cleats on the concrete floor and the clack of shoulder pads being adjusted. Sara is suited up and sitting alone on a bench.

“Ladies coming through,” a Monrovia cheerleader chirps, hands over her eyes, bouncing through on her way to a side room. She wears a thigh-high skirt, and a ribbon-threaded wreath in her hair. “But we’re closing our eyes,” the cheerleader flirts.

Everyone ignores her.

Sara and a couple of teammates wander outside the locker room to relax.

“Sweet home, Alll-a-bama,” she sings softly with a teammate. One player tells them to quit goofing around. Except he doesn’t say goofing.

Ten minutes to the coin toss.

Wheeler kicks away the trash can outside the locker room door, which slams shut. Four minutes later, after the team meeting, the players charge out, through a tunnel of high-fiving junior varsity players. “Dawg Pound, baby!” someone shouts.

Spartan jacks start. Kickoff.

No one can tell Sara’s gender by her look on the sidelines. The only giveaway is a nub of a ponytail in back. Throughout the game, the Monrovia players wonder if she’s around. (“Did she get in, coach?” . . . “Has that girl played?”)

Sara was so into the game that she didn’t realize until it was over that she hadn’t played.

It’s a tough loss, 42-10. Each La Canada player gets down on a knee around Wheeler. Keep your heads up, he says. We’ll see them again at playoffs.

Sara starts to walk off the field with the team and then turns. With the stadium lights in her eyes, she cannot make out her parents in the dark stands. But what was it that Wheeler always told them to do, win or lose?

Helmet in hand, she waves to acknowledge the crowd.