Football!

Yes, my daughter, tessa, plays football!  No, she is not in high school or college.  And she played something more sensible in colege-like women’s basketball.  If you haven’t watched recently, that is also a contact sport.  Now that she is out in the work force and dealing with big problems and all her own “bills”, she didn’t think that football sounded all that tough.

There is a Women’s National Football League complete with several divisions.  The teams beg for sponsors and don’t get much.  Players buy their own practice gear and a lot of other things as well.  They are certainly not paid and you’ll never see them on TV.  They just love the sport.  I asked her how she got into this.  She replied that someone on the team asked to try it.  There is a team at Grand Rapids, MI, where she lives and works as an onsite project engineer and it would not be too hard to get to practice which is mosar.

tly on weekends.  They play eight regular season games and hope to make the playoffs starting the end of June (I like watching football when it’s warm).  Wisconsin has a team in the Racine/Milwaukee area.  They lost quite substantially to Tessa’s team, the Southwest MI Jaguars last year. 

Tessa had a very good rookie year.  I am no good at saving and cutting to “paste” when it gets tricky so I’ll just retype Coach Scott’s comments about Tessa’s first year of football.  “Tessa, a first year player in ‘04, played like anything but a rookie.  A terror on our kick-off and punt teams, Tessa was voted onto the All Division team as a special teams player.  Tessa finished tied for first on the team in total tackles with 62.  From her SAM LB position she recorded 5 tackles for loss, caused 4 fumbles, recovered 2, had one interception and 4 QB sacks, whew, it wore me out just typing all that.  By the end of seson Tessa was playing as well as anyone on our defense.  Her biggest game came in the first round of the playoffs versus the Philadelphia Phoenix where she finished with 12 stops and 2 QB sacks.  I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us this year.

As the mom, I can’t wait to see that next season comes to a close without a major injury.  I  do enjoy watching the games, too.  Can you tell that they are “girls” in all the pads?  Yes, It’s mostly in the way that they walk back up to the line from the huddle.

Diana Pernsteiner