Female players love the intensity of tackle football
Forget Botox. Christine Beamish suggests trying tackle football if you want to look younger.
BY THE CALGARY HERALD JUNE 26, 2008
Forget Botox. Christine Beamish suggests trying tackle football if you want to look younger.
It worked for her mom.
"(Mom) always jokes that taking up tackle football was part of her mid-life crisis," Beamish, 20, says of Pat Duthie, 41. "But it actually kind of made her younger, because it made her happy to do it."
Duthie, a defensive end with the Edmonton Storm, the city's first women's tackle football team, picked up the pigskin after years of sitting in the stands watching her son play the game. The veteran player has been with the team since its birth five years ago.
Beamish is the newbie, recently attending her first practice.
She says her weight always held her back from joining the team. "But then my mom was like, 'It's going to be good to get out there, you're going to be sweating, you're going to lose some weight anyways, and you're going to get stronger'," Beamish explains.
Once she learns the proper form of the game and the intricacies of the tackle, "everybody's going to be in trouble," she warns, laughing.
Ah, yes, the tackle.
There are many misconceptions about women's tackle football, says Darcy Berger, the Storm's head coach. One is that women will get hurt. Another is that women have to be big and muscular to play. And a third is that women aren't aggressive.
Learning proper technique and wearing proper gear protects a player, explains Berger, who adds that no Storm player has had to quit the game because of injury.
You might get the odd bruise here and there, says running back Joanne Huggins, 38. "But I've heard if you keep your body in a good physical state, you can play up to the age of 40 or 41," she adds.
"It actually is quite intense and it's one of the hardest workouts I've ever done because of the padding and helmet you have to wear," Huggins says.
Society may be hung up on skinny women, but there's a football position for every female body type, Berger says, and he means it.
Yeah, you need to be aggressive to play tackle football, he admits, "and I think most women are as aggressive as men. I know society raises them to believe they're not, but the facts are they are aggressive people, they love intensity.
"Everybody loves intensity. It's a legal drug."
Every woman on the team remembers the exhilarating feeling the first time she hit someone, but few can put it into words. They only know that almost instantly, they knew they had found their game.
"When you hit somebody, it's absolutely amazing," says quarterback Karin Simmons. "It gives you a surge of adrenalin that goes right through your body, and you start to vibrate. It's very empowering."
Linebacker Lianna Wilson, 18, began playing tackle football on boys' teams when she was eight.
"Overall in my life, I just like hitting. I've got a lot of built-up anger, and this helps relieve it," Wilson explains.
"You get to hit people and you don't get arrested."
Wilson's friend, linebacker Chantal Segouin, 19, who played with her on the men's football team at Ross Sheppard high school, says, "We're not out here to kill people, but I've tried other sports -- hockey, wrestling -- and there's just more to football."
Nicole White, 32, also drifted to tackle football after finding hockey wasn't challenging enough. The empowerment that came with the game has spilled off the field into her personal life.
"I'm not more aggressive, in the sense of being meaner outside of football," White explains, "It's more like I can stand up for myself better. I'm more self-confident and proud."
The avid Edmonton Eskimo fan says the women's team isn't anywhere close to being able to play like her favourite CFL team, but she would love to be able to play football full-time.
Unfortunately, teams like the Edmonton Storm, which are about on par with Prairie Junior Football teams, are as good as it gets right now, says head coach Berger. There are no women's university or college football teams, or women's junior football teams.
Women's tackle football is where women's hockey was 15 years ago, Berger says.
He thinks the biggest problem standing in tackle football's way is the huge popularity of women's rugby.
"It's not our intent to steal players from other organizations, but I personally believe a lot of women play rugby because there is no football," says Berger, who has former rugby players on his team, as well as swimmers, hockey players and other sport enthusiasts.
Besides Edmonton, there are teams in Calgary and Winnipeg, and talks are ongoing for Saskatoon to suit up a team, which would be enough for a four-team western conference, Berger says. A small faction is also trying to start a team in B.C.
In the East, there are five teams in Nova Scotia and a professional women's team in Montreal.
Football Canada is working on developing a national women's league, which Berger says he'd like to see called the CFFL (Canadian Female Football League).
He figures it's only a matter of time, judging from the popularity of women's tackle football in the United States and the hotbed in Grande Prairie, where 180 high school students are playing on eight teams.
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.
