Coming Off the Bench

The eleven starting players for the California Quake are huddled around their coach. “We’re gonna have some fun tonight, ladies,” he tells them. “Now get in there and hit, hit, hit!” The women, in full pads and gear, rush onto the football field, eager to knock helmets, crunch body armor and tackle anything that moves on enemy lines.

“Get her!” Kelli Harris yells from the sidelines during a game against the Arizona Caliente. She plays strong safety for the Quake: “Anybody that makes it through the line, I pick ‘em up, take ‘em out.”

Harris, a 28-year-old mother of three who wears makeup even in uniform, is about the last person you’d expect to see waiting to bust someone’s chops after she’s let loose on the field. But she and thousands of other women across the country are turning to this traditionally testosterone-fueled sport for the love of the game, the athleticism and the camaraderie.

“It’s a lot of fun being able to go out there and hit people,” Harris said. “It’s the one place where it’s legal.”

Welcome to the Women’s American Football League--smashmouth football, girl-style. One of two competing leagues attempting to form national conferences of professional female players, the WAFL is the only one with a Western division. The league, launched last fall, had playoffs two weekends ago in Long Beach and will conclude its season this afternoon with the Women’s World Bowl at San Diego’s Balboa Stadium.

It is unknown whether the WAFL or its off-season counterpart, the National Women’s Football League, will succeed. Women’s tackle football has a long and unsuccessful history that dates back to the mid-1960s, when a Cleveland talent agent started a semipro league as a “gimmick.” Succeeding decades have seen various leagues come and go. All have fallen prey to lack of interest and insufficient funding. But today’s league founders are banking on America’s passion for football and an increasing interest in women’s athletics in the hopes that, finally, the time may be right.

“This is something that the players want, the fans are asking for, that has a niche in American sports,” said WAFL founder Carter Turner, 49.

Turner, of Daytona Beach, Fla., helped found the now-defunct Women’s Professional Football League in 1999. That lasted a single season before management and funding disputes resulted in its failure, prompting him to start the WAFL on his own in 2000. The WAFL has 17 teams, six in California--including the Oakland Banshees, Sacramento Sirens, Los Angeles Lasers, San Francisco Tsunami, San Diego Sunfire and the Long Beach-based California Quake.

Franchises cost $20,000 and are privately owned. Though they are set up as profit-sharing agreements between the coaches and players, no one is making any money, at least not yet. Attendance is still low; sponsorships and TV coverage elusive.

There are about 3,000 women playing football now who weren’t three years ago, Turner estimates--women for whom playing tackle football has been a lifelong dream. Women such as Mary Margaret Montgomery, a 33-year-old physical therapist with a Southern accent, a quick wit and one mean throwing arm. A quarterback for the Quake, her teammates call her Sister Mary Margaret, even though she is neither Catholic nor a nun. Then there’s Sharron Sanchez, a 41-year-old freelance sound engineer who, on any given Sunday, is parked on her couch tuned to the games on TV, and, during the week, runs full-field sprints in anticipation of her next touchdown as a Quake wide receiver.

Like many women who now play the full-contact version of the sport, Montgomery and Sanchez used to play flag football. But now that they’ve tasted grass through their facemasks, they think yanking a strip of fabric from someone’s waistband pales in comparison to a game in which players are tackled in five-car-pileups. The players are serious athletes, and they know how to play this game: Quarterbacks throw the ball in tight spirals; receivers zigzag and spin into the end zone; and defensive players aren’t afraid to mow down the competition or take a hit.

Of course, they take their lumps. In the first play of the Quake and Caliente game, a player is blocked hard, takes a blow to her chest and falls in agony to the ground. A few minutes later, another is tackled 10 feet out of bounds. Then there’s A-Train, an SUV of a woman who is able to knock down pretty much anything in her path.

Some Fans LikeWhat They See

“This is football,” says Perry Anzalone, who is in the stands at Long Beach City College for the playoffs. Wearing a Caliente T-shirt, and chanting “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi,” he is at the game to cheer on his niece.

A Raiders fan, the 44-year-old from Ceres, Calif., was a skeptic when he went to his first women’s game last year. Now he’s a believer. NFL die-hards, he says, “don’t know what they’re missing.

“When they have receivers catching the ball, which they do, when they score the kind of points they do, when they’re throwing 30- to 40-yard passes, this is football,” he adds. “Most people wouldn’t believe it because there’s never been a training ground for them.”

Very few, if any, high schools and colleges have women’s full-contact football teams. In the absence of such a “feeder system,” most players hail from college teams or clubs, such as soccer, rugby or powder-puff football. For many, the transition isn’t the physical beating but learning the sport’s multitudinous and complex rules.

With a handful of exceptions, the WAFL and the NWFL adhere to NFL regulations. They play on the same size field and by the same rules, although the ball is slightly smaller.

Some players have experienced minor concussions, shoulder dislocations and knee injuries, but no one has been seriously hurt playing in the WAFL, Turner said.

Paige Durivage, a Quake wide receiver, has broken both pinkies, dislocated a shoulder and is almost always black and blue. “I’ve come into the office wearing short sleeves and had bruises but didn’t know it. I’m sure my boss is thinking I’m some beaten wife or something,” says the 28-year-old database administrator who lives in Redondo Beach.

Like the rest of the players, Durivage makes no money from playing and maintains her own health insurance. The fledgling WAFL is in no position to pick up the tab. In fact, she covers a lot of expenses out of pocket. Even though the team bought her uniform, she still spent about $1,800 this season.

“I’m on my ninth pair of gloves at $55 a pop. My second pair of shoes,” she says. “They know me at Sport Chalet pretty well.”

Her largest expense was travel, she says. Her team charters a bus for away games, but when given a choice between busing to Portland for the better part of a day or flying, she and most everyone who can afford it take to the skies.

The sale of tickets (typically $10) are the primary source of funding for WAFL teams, but that doesn’t amount to much when the average game draws between 200 and 500 fans. By comparison, the average NFL game draws about 64,000.

For the playoff game between the Quake and Caliente, only a couple hundred people are in the stands. The crowd is dwarfed by the stadium, and the parking lot is all but empty.

The NWFL, based in Nashville, claims to have better attendance figures. About 5,000 attended its championship game last spring, according to league founder, Catherine Masters.

A 25-year veteran of the sports industry, Masters started the NWFL with two teams in December 2000. By 2001, she had 10 teams. Today, there are 22 in five divisions--the Northern, Great Lakes, Central, Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions. She plans to launch a West Coast division in 2003. Unlike the WAFL, Masters’ league operates April through July, the off-season for men’s football, when there is less competition for an audience.

“A new sport for women needs an environment where there’s a lot of attention to put on them,” said Masters, 57. “In the fall for football, let’s face it, it’s college, it’s pros, it’s high school. It’s everything but women’s.”

Building a Fan Base From the Ground Up

Even though women’s sports are more popular than they’ve ever been, and football extremely popular, women’s professional football has a lot working against it. Independently owned, the leagues are operated on shoestring budgets. Without television coverage or big-name sponsors, they are relying on word of mouth to build an audience.

Unlike soccer and basketball, it does not benefit from a built-in fan base of girls who play the sport. And unlike the WNBA, which has the NBA’s backing, or the WUSA, which used the publicity from its 1999 World Cup victory as a launching pad, women’s professional football is on its own.

Where the WNBA has benefited from LA Sparks center Lisa Leslie’s double life as a model, and women’s volleyball has benefited from the olive-skinned and doe-eyed amazon Gabrielle Reece, it is hard to trade on female sex appeal with football. Being covered head to toe in shoulder, hip and knee pads makes for an interesting figure, but it isn’t one that jibes with traditional notions of female attractiveness.

Any way you slice it, football is a body-busting gruntfest. It is brutal.

And the women who play it are seen as masculine, even though the builds of the players vary widely--from those with the soft features and grace of a ballerina to those with bodies like bulldozers. Durivage, a wide receiver with the Quake, knows football is a masculine sport. Still, she said she was surprised when a date told her he was intimidated that she played the game. “It was the first time I even thought a man would be.... If anything, I think men think we’re a joke. Women hitting, they think it’s a cat fight. It’s not. Women come out with concussions.”

NFL Watching, Waiting Before Backing Women

With women increasingly participating in other hard-hitting, male-associated sports, it could be that women’s football will soon have its day. Ice hockey, a sport that is as well known for its bloodlust as its players’ talent, is an Olympic event for women. And last year, the second-generation female progeny of boxing legends Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali went one-on-one in the ring in a well-publicized prizefight.

The only reason previous attempts at launching a women’s full-contact league have failed, Masters says, is because “women athletes weren’t real popular. Women’s sports in general weren’t as accepted as they are now. Now it’s the hot thing--finally.”

The NFL also sees promise in women’s play and has been following the various leagues since they began. Even so, the NFL is “not prepared to commit either financial or personnel resources to the organizations at this time,” said spokesman Brian McCarthy. “We need to see stability that would enable us to step in in some manner.”

He couldn’t say when that might happen, only that it won’t be this year or next.

“It will take time to develop a mass audience for these female football players,” he said. “However, we believe that the game itself, the game of football, is so strong that it would be able to help generate interest.”

Going into the final quarter of the playoff game, the Quake is holding a lead and the crowd is going wild. In the stands, Caliente fans scream and hold up cardboard signs that read, “Break the Quake!” while some Long Beach fans shake their white and purple pompoms and others wear T-shirts with the team slogan: “Did you feel that?”

Leading 16-12 with 5 seconds left, the Quake’s players and fans yell the countdown. When time expires and its victory is certain, the team bursts into screams hugging one another while the fans stream out of the bleachers and onto the field, the stadium rock of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” blaring behind them.

Today the Quake will find out if it has what it takes to win the WAFL’s first championship. The team kicks off against the Jacksonville (Fla.) Dixie Blues at 3 p.m.