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KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Rob Ishihara had seen it before: a senior with no football experience coming out for the team.
“It can be hard for them,” the Kelseyville head coach said. “Even if they’re good athletes, there’s an adjustment, certain skills they have to develop.”
When summer drills opened last week, Ishihara welcomed a senior whose only “organized football” experience was an all-girls flag contest last spring between the Kelseyville juniors and seniors.
Crystal Maciel, who had been mulling over the possibility of playing with the boys since that “powder puff” game, decided the day before practice started to give it a go.
“If I didn’t go out, I was afraid I’d regret not taking advantage of the opportunity to play,” she said earlier this week.
She’s not just playing with the boys – she’s mixing it up with them, trying to knock them on their butts before they do the same to her.
You won’t confuse Maciel for the soccer crossovers of the ’70s and ’80s, the girls who helped bust through prep football’s gender barrier as placekickers, a role that rarely subjected them to getting smashed by testosterone-fueled linemen twice their size.
Maciel is a 5-foot-4, 270-pound candidate for lineman who happens to enjoy the contact of the game.
“Overall, I think I’m doing pretty good,” she said before last Wednesday’s practice and after a week-and-a-half of summer workouts.
Ishihara agrees. “Her effort has been great,” he said. “So has her attitude.”
Maciel admits she wasn’t in the kind of shape required to thrive in the heat and intensity of two-a-day workouts the first week of practice. “That’s been the hardest part,” she said.
She also knows she has room for improvement in the technical aspects of blocking and tackling.
But she feels she’s learning fast. Overall, she says, “I’m keeping up (with the boys).”
Maciel got her first real taste of contact at last Tuesday night’s practice, on a play where she was heading down field – and the next thing she knew, she was flat on the ground.
“I didn’t see it coming. But I got up. I was OK with it,” said Maciel, who’s practicing at various positions on both the offensive and defensive lines.
This isn’t her first high school team. She swam at Shasta High as a freshman and played girls soccer last fall at Upper Lake.
Though her organized football experience is limited to the one “powder puff” game, she fondly recalls as a kid playing football with her brother and cousins, and she remembers holding her own in the areas of tackling and overall roughhousing.
It was the flag football game with the girls – and the week of practice that preceded the game – that got Maciel thinking seriously about playing with the boys.
When she approached some assistant coaches on the Kelseyville staff a couple weeks ago about going out for the team, several who had apparently seen her play in the girls game encouraged her to go talk to Ishihara.
“They said I wasn’t afraid of contact,” she said. “They liked that.”
Her friends, including some guys on the team, also encouraged her to come out for the team.
Initially, Ishihara had some reservations about letting her play. But he called her a couple days before summer drills began and invited her to join the team.
According to the National Federation of State High School Associations’ Web site, 1,561 girls played high school football in the United States in 2010, up 17.5 percent from the 2006 season.
In the California high school ranks, 179 girls played football in 2010 (either on freshmen, JV or varsity teams). Statistics for the 2011 season haven’t been released yet.
Rich Mellott can be reached at
