It’s kickoff time, ladies!
We’re not talking about watching the Super Bowl from the comfort of the couch — or, worse, serving up cold Bud to a room full of guys who are.
The event in question is the start of the 2007 women’s football season.
No, it’s not the Bears vs. the Colts, but it is the real deal: On 80 teams across the nation, women are donning pads, hitting hard, breaking bones and launching the ball in a way that gives an entirely new meaning to throwing “like a girl.”
Skeptics who see a game quickly become fans, says Jodi “Moose” Houglum, fullback for the Minnesota Vixen.
“They come to the games and they say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you’re hitting that hard,’” she says. “Then they say, ‘Wow, I have to bring my friends.’"
Still, as one of the last frontiers in male-dominated sports, football is rough turf. Although many women have the passion and athleticism for the game, making an institution of women’s tackle football faces more obstacles than a kickoff returner 5 yards deep in the end zone.
Tough turf
Probably the biggest is making it a successful business. While the behemoth NFL expects some 140 million Super Bowl viewers on Sunday, women’s teams in cities such as Cincinnati, Seattle and Tampa Bay struggle for local media coverage, sponsorships and ticket sales.
For the players, it’s clearly not about the money. Most still pay to play so teams can cover the costs of travel, renting playing fields and other expenses. A few of the most commercially successful teams, like the Dallas Diamonds, pay players a nominal fee — enough to buy a pizza or two.
Many players also are squeezing in practice and games while juggling jobs or kids, or both.
And they’re risking serious injury for the privilege of playing. Women football players suffer knee injuries at higher rates than their male counterparts. The worst injury in women’s football took place in 2005, when a 32-year old player on the Seattle Majestics suffered a spinal injury in a game that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
Do the shuffle
But there is no shortage of passion, which quickly became clear to Elbert L.“Ickey” Woods, who played running back for the Cincinnati Bengals from 1988-1991 and now owns and coaches the local women’s football team, the Cincinnati Sizzle.
After retiring from the NFL, the creator of the so-called Ickey Shuffle — an end-zone jig he performed after every touchdown — first took up coaching kids and men’s semi-pro football. He was talked into buying the Cincinnati license in 2002 by his ex-wife.
Woods admits he was skeptical at the start.
“(But) I got into coaching (and saw) how eager these women were to learn, and how they absorbed everything we told them like a sponge — and then to see the type of athleticism they had... I'm enjoying myself.”
The Sizzle has just started training for its third season, which begins in April. At a recent session at a Boys and Girls Club gym, the air was heavy with the menthol scent of Icy Hot muscle balm and sweat. The squeak of tennis shoes on the wood floor was punctuated only by grunts and blasts on Woods’ whistle. Two players still sidelined from last year’s knee injuries tossed a medicine ball back and forth.
“I think it’s awesome,” says Robyn King, catching her wind between drills. At 48, the dean of students at the Air Force Institute of Technology is the oldest member of the team. Though a veteran of other sports, she's a rookie to contact football. “I wish they had it when I was a girl, but I’ll take it now.”
It hurts so good
The youngest player on the team, 23-year-old Tiffany Kraemer, had played flag football, soccer and volleyball when she joined the Sizzle last year. Then she discovered something guys have known for some time — football can be therapeutic.
“I had lost a good friend, and I was very angry,” she recalls. “After the funeral, I went to a practice, and I started hitting because I was so angry. I had wanted to be a receiver, but I realized I liked hitting, so they put me on the other side of the line.”
After compiling a 2-6 record in 2005, the Sizzle improved to 3-5 last season. Woods is looking for further improvement this year and expects the team to compete for the league championship in the next year or two.
That will be crucial if the team is to build its fan base and improve its ability to attract badly needed sponsors.
Right now, home games typically draw 700 to 1,000 people. The team makes enough only to pay players’ room and board when they travel.
“We don’t get the respect we should, but once we get more people in the seats, we’ll bring in some money to pass on to the girls,” says John Comodeca, the Sizzle’s defensive coach.
The good news is that each year stronger, faster and younger players try out for the team. The bad news is that several veteran players recently moved away for professional reasons -- their real jobs. Now the Sizzle must scramble to get new players up to speed.
Building from Z to A
Another big handicap for women’s football is a shortage of experienced players. Although the sport attracts some impressive athletes, few have ever played full-contact football. That is a far cry from the NFL, which gets to pick from thousands and thousands of college-age athletes who have likely been playing since they were in the pee wee league.
And even girls who do play tackle football growing up often end up seeing it as a dead end for their sports aspirations.
Jackie Uecker, who excelled in half a dozen sports in school, including cross-country, volleyball, softball and swimming, was invited to join the otherwise all-male high school football team at Glen Este, in Cincinnati. She declined, but not because she didn’t think she could handle it.
“I had always played football with guys growing up,” says Uecker, now the quarterback for the Sizzle. “I had to decide where I was going to get the most playing time and where I was going to get a scholarship.” She decided to stay with the women’s sports, where she was able to get college scholarships.
Nationwide, 1,173 girls played on high school tackle football teams in 2006.according to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations. NFHS spokesman Bruce Howard said he is not aware of any all-girl’s football teams at the high school level.
Pop Warner and other youth leagues also allow girls to play with the boys, but the numbers who do so are still miniscule.
“I’ve built my league Z to A, starting with women, and then back down to girls,” says Catherine Masters, owner of the National Women’s Football Association, one of the three main women’s leagues. “… It’s going to take time … to be accepted as a mainstream sport like women’s basketball.”
The lineup
The Women’s National Basketball Association, initially conceived by National Basketball Association owners as a way to fill up arenas in the offseason, is the model that offers hope to the fledgling football leagues. After initially struggling a decade ago, the WNBA has blossomed into a healthy sports business, with 13 teams, a solid fan base, TV coverage on ABC and ESPN2, and a lineup of heavy-hitting corporate sponsors, including Toyota, Adidas, AOL.com, Discover Card. Most players are paid salaries in the $30,000 to $90,000 range.
By comparison, women’s football is a Wild West scene, with a constant churn of teams and ever changing divisions.
The three leagues all play the same game, with minor deviations from NFL rules, but they approach the business in very different ways.
The Women’s Professional Football League, formed in 1999, is the only woman’s league to go head-to-head with the men’s college and pro seasons in the fall. The WPFLbills itself as the most accurate replica of the men’s game and as the league with the highest standards — enforcing minimum roster requirements, and ensuring that owners have the financial wherewithal to keep a team playing, even if ticket sales flounder.
“We are studying everything the NFL does,” says Jody Taylor, WPFL media relations director — from the halftime entertainment to how water is delivered to players — in an effort to make WPFL the household name for women’s football.
The WPFL fields some of the strongest women’s teams in the country, including the Dallas Diamonds, which maintains a 52-week training schedule, and regularly draws some 3,000 fans. But the league has lost teams in recent years, pushing up travel costs for the remaining 13 teams scattered across the country.
Masters, a former marketing consultant with the WPFL, saw playing against the men in the fall as a losing proposition and, in 2000, established a rival league that became the National Women’s Football Association.
Her business plan is based on increasing exposure for the women’s game.
“A big part of it is television,” she says. “… Until you get TV you’re not going to get the revenues you need to model yourself after any professional league.”
Although the NWFA is growing, Masters also has seen several teams defect to join the upstart Independent Women’s Football League in the past two years. The departures have come amid growing criticism of what some see as her autocratic management style, high license fees ranging between $20,000 and $35,000, and controversial marketing tactics — including a recent pay TV reality show titled “The Gender Bowl,” which pitted some of her league’s best players against a group of middle-aged men whose playing days were well behind them.
The IWFL, a nonprofit that started with four exhibition teams in 2001, now has 31 teams, including one in Montreal. Teams pay just $3,000 to $4,000 in annual membership fees and league decisions are made collectively by the team owners.
Although it includes some of most successful teams in the country — like the New York Sharks with a roster 50-60 strong — it also opens its doors to fledgling teams that can barely fill all the positions. To try to give such teams a fighting chance, the league is launching a multi-tier system that will allow less accomplished teams to play at their level until they improve enough to be competitive at a higher level, similar to the professional soccer structure in Europe.
“Since our focus is providing an opportunity for women to play the sport, we kind of measure our success in terms of how many women we have registered to play,” says IWFL CEO Laurie Frederick. “There were 1,281 last year, up from 60 women at first. We define that as pretty successful.”
The quest for NFL blessing, and backing
The deciding factor in the three-way battle for female football supremacy ultimately could be the NFL, which could lend instant credence by throwing its support behind one of the leagues.
So far, the league is staying on the sidelines. An NFL spokewoman declined to comment on whether it has plans to support any of the leagues.
“We currently do not provide financial support to semi-pro leagues — male or female,” wrote NFL Corporate Communications Manager Adina Ellis in a message to MSNBC. “However, we focus our attention on promoting football on a grassroots level with numerous programs, such as NFL Punt, Pass and Kick, NFL FLAG football and other educational programs in which girls and women participate.”
But individual teams and players already have stepped up to help local women’s teams.
For instance, the Tucson Monsoon persuaded the Arizona Cardinals to donate their uniforms. And the New York Sharks have cut a deal with the New York Giants to run football clinics for teenage girls at Giants Stadium in March. If those go well, the team says it will ask the NFL to launch the program nationwide, working through the IWFL.
But there is growing consensus that three leagues are two too many. And many involved in the women’s game say their sport will have to undergo a painful consolidation before owners and players can even dream of turning it into a profitable venture.
“There is no way 80 some teams can be profitable…” says the Vixens' “Moose” Hoaglum. “If we want to be big, even WNBA big, there has to be consolidation… so that the NFL does take a look at it and says, ‘OK here’s the top 30 teams, here’s our WNFL.’”
