“Hit her hard!”
A fierce voice rings out across the field. It’s followed by whoops and hollers from the bench.
These players are here to play football. No holds barred. The hits are real and they’re hard. And the women on the field love it.
It’s the season-opener of the WWCFL, the Western Women’s Canadian Football League. The home team Saskatoon Valkyries are playing the Regina Riot. Saskatoon ends up winning 36 to 6 against an improving Regina team (last year’s score was 56 to 6).
The newly-formed league had its first four-game season last May and June. The players come from a variety of athletic backgrounds. Many play rugby, some are university athletes in basketball, hockey and track and field. Their shared passion is football and all are proud to play in Saskatchewan’s first women’s tackle football league.
It’s a growing sport, thanks in part to women’s rugby in high school. Football Saskatchewan executive director Jeff Yausie says five years from now, women’s high school football will be as popular as rugby. He says football appeals to athletes from all backgrounds. The sport is ideal for developing skills that can transfer to other sports.
“Football is a game for all shapes, sizes and attributes. It requires skills you can utilize in other sports,” says Yausie, who coaches the Valkyries.
Twin sisters Mallory and Burdeen Starkey are so devoted to football they moved to Regina to play it.
“Football is definitely a passion. I don’t think football is a game you can play without loving it,” says Mallory, a starting running back for the Riot.
“Football’s not a game, it’s a way of life,” adds Burdeen, backup quarterback.
The two 19-year-olds are in their first year playing for the Riot in the WWCFL, but they’re no strangers to football. Mallory was 11 when she started playing on her older brother Kaylon’s bantam team. Burdeen followed suit at age 12.
Being girls in a boys’ league wasn’t easy, and until they were 15 they were the butt of snarky comments from players and coaches. They heard comments like “girls should be cheerleaders and date football players, not become them.”
“We just kind of dealt with it,” says Mallory. “There’s nothing you could do because if we were to say anything, we figured we’d probably get in trouble because some of the refs didn’t like some of the girls playing football,” says Burdeen.
Even some coaches didn’t like it. In Grade 7, Burdeen sprained her ankle and couldn’t run. “He pretty much said, ‘You’re a girl, you’re weak, you can’t handle it.’ But I had a swelling the size of a softball on my ankle.”
Rather than get discouraged and give up, the girls persisted for the love of the sport. They practised other sports like badminton and basketball to help them with hand-eye co-ordination and footwork.
“I think it forced us to push even harder to show them that girls can play football,” says Burdeen.
Back home in Sexsmith, Alta., about 470 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, there were so many girls interested in football that the high school started a girls’ team eight years ago. The Starkeys played five years, winning the Heart Bowl Peace Country league championship three years in a row.
The sisters moved to Regina in March, a week and a half before the Riot started practising.
In only its second year, the Regina Riot isn’t on the radar of many sports fans, maybe because its regular season is only six weeks long, or maybe because people don’t associate tackle football — an intense and potentially dangerous sport — with women.
“There’s still, of course, people who believe girls shouldn’t play football and in a lot of ways I understand, because you get hit wrong and it could cause serious damage,” says Mallory. “You may not be able to have kids, you might break bones. But it’s kind of like that with any sport.
“There’s definitely people who think girls shouldn’t play football, but it’s just like people thinking girls shouldn’t work in the oilpatch. It’s not a typical girl thing, so people would prefer girls to be girls and don’t see it as something a girl should do,” she adds.
As much as the Riot has been overlooked, the Lingerie Football League’s Regina Rage has received a lot of attention — “more for the fact that they’re in their underwear,” Mallory estimates.
Though both leagues are football, the Starkey sisters see no comparison between the LFL and the WWCFL.
“Compared to a women’s tackle football team, the talent is in different areas,” says Mallory.
“They’re not playing the same calibre of football as us,” adds Burdeen, “I think mostly because they don’t have the equipment and I think for them it’s not the same type of football. They’re not getting the same protection and you probably won’t be hitting as hard.”
While they wouldn’t choose to play in the LFL, the sisters aren’t offended by it. They understand that LFL players have their reasons for choosing that league.
“Some of them might figure that they can’t cut it on the tackle football team because they’re smaller or maybe not as tough, or they don’t think they can take some of the same stuff because it does get pretty rough out there. And some of them might be in it because they figure there’s no other option for girls football because tackle football isn’t widely known yet,” says Mallory.
Jessie Buydens, president of the Saskatoon Valkyries, says safety should be an issue for the women.
“If you’re getting slammed into the boards, that means all of your organs are exposed. If you get a low hit by someone wearing a hockey helmet, it’s probably going to hurt really bad because you’ve got no padding down there.”
In addition to the Valkyries, Buydens plays rugby for the Saskatoon Wild Oats and coaches two rugby teams.
“I don’t love being hit but I do love hitting people. It’s a bit of a stress reliever and I think it’s good fun,” says Buydens.
In the gym, she’s been known to dead lift more than kilograms. Buydens is competitive in her career as well. She’s an attorney at a small general practice in Saskatoon and a sessional lecturer at the U of S, teaching classes on the sociology of law and women in the law. She loves the challenge of court.
Buydens has always had to fight for what she wanted. She gave birth to her son William Jacklin-Watt at the age of 16. Dropping out of school was never an option. In fact, she missed only three days.
“I had friends who had babies before I did and the ones that had dropped out never came back. That wasn’t something I was interested in doing. I don’t know that I always wanted to go to university but I definitely didn’t want to work at Wal Mart beyond high school.”
For Yausie, coaching women has taught him some new things. Women learn faster, he’s found. They ask more questions.
“It causes us to think about what we’re doing. The girls ask ‘why?’ They really soak it up.”
The Regina Riot’s next game is this weekend in Brandon against the Manitoba Fearless. The team’s next home game is on June 10 at Mosaic Stadium.
