These women play the field -- and tackle

Ask aspiring professional female football players why they enjoy the sport, and most answer with all the subtlety of a straight-arm: They like knocking their opponents to the ground. Sure, there’s satisfaction in throwing a tight spiral or dodging tackles with fancy footwork, but the ultimate thrill comes from the crunch of body armor.

“You get to hit people,” explained Rachel Gallagher, a security guard and football fanatic who’d gladly trade her work uniform for pads and a helmet.

Earlier this month, the Riverside 21-year-old had her chance. During the first of two tryouts for the National Women’s Football Assn., she and six other women ran cones, fielded passes and practiced handoffs in front of a cluster of coaches, who paced the grass with clipboards, evaluating their every move.

Gallagher, who already plays softball, basketball and soccer, has been aching to play tackle football for years. She plays the game with “my buddies -- a bunch of big, burly guys who like to slam me into the ground,” she said. But it isn’t with a team, and it isn’t against other female players. And that’s where the NWFA comes in.

Gallagher isn’t alone in her ambitions to deliver crushing blows on the field, nor is the NWFA the only league to give her that opportunity. Hundreds of women have been champing at the bit in recent years, anxious to upgrade from flag football to full contact, and three major leagues now give them the opportunity. The NWFA is the latest entry into an already crowded California arena. The Women’s Professional Football League was launched in 1999. Based in Houston, it has four teams in the state--the L.A. Amazons, Long Beach Aftershock, San Diego Sunfire and So Cal Scorpions. The Independent Women’s Football League, based in Austin, Texas, also began in 1999. Two of its six California teams are in the Southland--the San Diego Sea Catz and the California Quake, out of Long Beach

The NWFA, launched out of Nashville in 2000, plans to have four teams, beginning with one in Palmdale and rounding out the division with teams in Santa Barbara, San Jose and San Diego. A spring league, the NWFA hopes to get all four teams up and running in time for an April 2005 kickoff.Whether that will happen depends on the league’s ability to field a team. Just seven players showed up for the first round of tryouts, and 16 for the second round Saturday -- a fraction of the 35-player minimum requirement. Even so, General Manager Kelli Harris noted that “the talent I see is actually wonderful. I see a lot of athleticism. A lot of determination.

“And that’s a great catch,” she said, clapping her hands for a player who’d just snatched a ball from the air.

It isn’t for the money

The tryouts this day were a decidedly casual affair taking place not on a football field but in the center of a public park in Palmdale. Players were outnumbered by a clan of neighborhood soccer players on one side and a pack of jungle-gym-climbing toddlers on the other, and if it weren’t for the airborne footballs, you’d never guess the players were anything other than casual fans who’d gone to the park to goof around. While some of the players looked brawny enough to play the game, others were small -- and one in particular was unusually petite.

That would be Ana D’Amico, 21, who at 5 feet, 103 pounds looked as if she’d break into bits if she were sat on, let alone sacked. Her build seemed more appropriate for soccer, softball or cross-country running -- all of which she participates in. But she showed the coaches she’s also got the goods to play football -- catching every pass that came her way and zipping across the grass at lightning speed.

“I like physical stuff,” said D’Amico, who’s from Torrance. Like many NWFA wannabes, she drove more than an hour to get to tryouts -- something she’d have to do regularly if she made the team.General Manager Harris understands the sacrifices women will make for the sport. She used to play strong safety for the California Quake in Long Beach, commuting to practice five days a week, two hours each way from Edwards Air Force Base, where she lives and works. The 30-year-old mother of three wasn’t paid for her efforts as a player. In fact, she forked over quite a bit of her own hard-earned cash -- not just for travel expenses but for uniforms and other safety equipment. She isn’t getting paid for her job as manager of the NWFA’s first West Coast team -- and neither are most of the coaches and players involved with women’s football.

Faced with the prospect of watching her team go under, Andra Douglas decided to buy it. “I really had no intention of owning a football team, but I took it out of my 401(k) just so we could all run around in pads and helmets,” said Douglas, who bought and plays quarterback for the IWFL’s New York Sharks. To do it, she took $20,000 out of her retirement savings.

Was it worth it? “Oh, yes. It’s kind of like I told my rookies: There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that we as women football players have to support ourselves. We have to earn the money and do what we have to do to stay alive,” said Douglas, who continues to work her real job as a creative director in the entertainment industry. “The good side of that is that no one can take it away from us.”

Many leagues of their own

The IWFL, WPFL and NWFA are all “professional” sports leagues, but the term refers more to the possibility of attracting sponsors. The reality is that few companies have stepped in with support and most likely won’t until the sport proves itself. There are any number of factors working against that happening: too few fans, too little visibility and too many leagues competing for the same small piece of the pie. While some women’s professional football games can pull a couple thousand fans into the bleachers at the high schools and city colleges where they play, most are lucky to attract a few hundred. Without fans, the sport just isn’t attractive for television, which needs to reel in exponentially more viewers. While the NWFA has signed a contract with the Football Network, that channel has yet to find a cable carrier. Even if it does, it’s hard to say whether the network will succeed with its format of second- and third-tier games.

The most complicating factor, however, seems to be the lack of a single, defining league. The three major leagues field almost 80 teams. Independent exhibition teams push that amount over the 100 mark. It’s surprising considering there is no feeder system for female tackle football. Most of the women who play the sport professionally are athletes who hail from other sports. While some high schools and colleges allow women on their teams, they are few and far between.

“It’s a struggle for men’s and women’s professional sports to get started,” said Donna Lopiano, chief executive officer of the Women’s Sports Foundation in New York. “This is not an easy business. It took nine tries for the NFL to appear in its current form. It took 30 years for the NBA to average more than 10,000 in attendance.”

Women’s tackle football is no different. The sport has a long and mostly 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, but most have fallen prey to insufficient funding and lack of a decent fan base.

Interest among players, however, remains strong. Dee Ritz stands at the edge of Palmdale’s McAdam Park in a hooded red sweatshirt and jeans, looking out at the women who’ve shown up for tryouts, trying to decide if she’ll join in.

“When I was 8, I would have died to play football with the boys, and I did, in the schoolyard,” said Ritz, 41, who read about the NWFA tryouts in the local paper and decided to take a look.

“Then you grow up a little bit, and there’s no place to play. There’s no college football for girls, so you do other things -- you play basketball or softball or whatever we’re allowed to do, but you don’t really forget it,” said Ritz, who said her hamstring was too sore to try out during the first and second rounds but who may give it a go at the NWFA’s third round, scheduled for Feb. 7. “It’s just a love. You love it and want to do it and you find anyway you can, and wherever you can, and I think that’s why these girls are out here too.”