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Girls get more than a kick from football

Amanda Newsome and Tiffany Doctor love to block and tackle.

By JAMAL THALJI and RODNEY PAGE

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 9, 2001

Amanda Newsome can kick extra points. She can kick field goals. But real football players are supposed to do more than just kick, right?

Friday night, Newsome wanted to hit somebody.

Boy, did she.

[Times photo: Dirk Shadd] Tiffany Doctor, a defensive lineman for Admiral Farragut, runs through drills in a recent practice.

It was the last kickoff of the game, and Newsome's Pasco High Pirates were down 63-13 to South Sumter. Newsome was begging to get onto the field, but coach Ricky Thomas feared she would fall prey to a cheap shot.

Finally, he relented.

She took her place on the kickoff unit, guarding her lane as she sprinted for the ball.

"I was trying to stay in my lane, and there were like three blockers coming," Newsome said. "I sidestepped them and went for the ball."

Her shoulder attacked the ballcarrier's midsection. Teammate Maurice Standifer hit the pile as well. Down they all went. Her first high school tackle. Her teammates laughed and celebrated wildly. The sideline cheered and the stands applauded.

Afterward, South Sumter had to run extra sprints and bear crawls for, as Newsome put it, "being tackled by a girl."

"It doesn't bother me," Newsome said. "But I think it's stupid.

"I don't want to be treated any differently because I'm a girl. I want to be treated like anyone else on this team."

But Newsome isn't like anybody else on her team, or any other she'll play against this year. Of the thousands of players on high school football teams across the country last year, only 779 were girls.

[Times photo: Douglas Clifford] Pasco's Amanda Newsome carries a dummy before a defensive drill.

Even rarer are girls who want to block and tackle, and not just kick. In the Tampa Bay area, Newsome and Admiral Farragut's Tiffany Doctor stand out. They have stuck it out in a grueling, hard-nosed sport they hadn't played until this year.

Football now, maybe bullriding next

It sounded like a crazy idea. Doctor and two girlfriends were sitting around the Admiral Farragut dormitory last spring when they decided to try out for football.

How hard could it be, they thought. Those guys weren't so big. They'd show the boys just how tough they were.

After the first practice in the May heat, Doctor was the only one who decided to suit up again the next day.

And the next day, and the next and the next.

"That first practice was really hard," said Doctor, a 5-foot-4, 130-pound senior noseguard. "There's a lot of running, and you have that helmet on, and you just feel like passing out. When we first came out, the coaches were like, "You can take a break if you need it.' I was like, "Are you giving the whole team a break?' They said "No.' I said "No, man. We're part of the team. If the whole team takes a break, we'll take a break.' From then on, I wasn't going to quit."

Doctor grew up on the Seminole Indian Reservation in Hollywood, Fla. She lived with her mother, Colleen Osceola, and her stepfather, Dan Osceola. Doctor is the second youngest of four children. She was 10 pounds, 1 ounce when she was born.

"She came out like a football," Colleen Osceola said. "She was always different from the other kids. She'd try anything. She was the tomboy."

Doctor played almost daily in pickup basketball games on the reservation. She played volleyball, softball and ran track.

She has even tried boxing and bull riding. She still rides bulls in the summer and in the future hopes to ride five-star bulls, the ones professionals ride.

"On the reservation, sports is what keeps everybody out of trouble," Doctor said. "It keeps your mind straight."

Doctor says her mind wasn't straight before she came to Admiral Farragut. She was a freshman at Hollywood Hills High and was starting to hang out with the wrong crowd. A friend on the reservation attended Admiral Farragut, and Doctor's mom enrolled her before her sophomore year, with the tribe paying the tuition.

"Tiffany is a remarkable girl," Colleen Osceola said. "A lot of the people on the reservation, they stay on the reservation. Education isn't thought of as that important. But Tiffany isn't afraid of it. You dare her to do something, and she'll do it."

Doctor went from the relative freedom of the reservation to the structured life of a military academy. "At first I didn't like it because it was away from home and there were all these rules," Doctor said. "But once I got into the community of the school, I liked it. . . . At home, there's always so much trouble you can get in."

Sports was an outlet from the beginning. She played on the basketball team. She played softball before the school abandoned the sport. She played volleyball as a junior and ran track. Now she has added football to her resume. Doctor is not a starter but has played in two games. She is at every practice, ready to knock heads with whoever wants some.

"I'm not surprised she stuck it out," said coach Mike Jalazo, who coached Doctor in softball her sophomore year. "I told my coaches in the spring, "Don't be surprised at all if she doesn't quit.' We had three different girls come out in the spring, and Tiffany was the only one to stay with it. She's tough, and she's not going to quit."

And she's treated like every other player.

"At first I didn't think it would last," senior quarterback and team captain Marshall Hampton said. "But she does all right. It's like she's one of the guys."

As a testament to her team's comfort level, Doctor was knocked down hard in practice last week.

"I got blindsided," she said. "Everyone was like, "Oh my God.' But I got right back up. Don't expect me to start crying. I don't see this as something that's going to faze me. It just makes me stronger."

Doctor hopes to attend Tulane and thinks her best chance at an athletic scholarship is in basketball, which she will play this winter for the Blue Jackets.

She hopes to one day be a veterinarian.

She realizes this is likely the last chance she will get to play football. Then it's on to perhaps championship bull riding or professional boxing.

"I think everyone knows now that if I make up my mind to do something, I'm going to do it," Doctor said. "I don't give up easily."

'Amanda Sue' notches her first tackle

At Pasco High, chivalry is not dead. But don't let Anton Standifer near the life-support machine.

Standifer put the first hit on Newsome in practice. He was a wide receiver blocking downfield, and she was a rookie cornerback.

"She was going to hit me," he said, "so I went ahead and hit her first.

"I just had to introduce her (to football). She might as well get used to it. I'm going to treat her like anybody else."

When the 5-foot-9, 145-pound Newsome played her first non-special teams snap in Pasco's 59-13 rout of Mitchell on Sept. 7, there was Standifer, the safety, making sure the nervous cornerback had proper backup.

Sort of.

"Hey, I shaded to her side," he said.

Her boyfriend, defensive back Thomas Hasley, was worried.

"I wanted to switch to her side of the field," he said.

Mitchell ran the sweep to her side. She bounced off the ballcarrier. "That was the hardest I've been hit," she said.

When Newsome made her first tackle Friday night, Standifer was laughing.

"I couldn't believe it," he said, chuckling. "She just lowered him. I was surprised."

Don't get the wrong impression. Newsome's teammates like her. They just have a funny way of showing it.

She has to take more than her share of teasing. But she loves the game and her team.

"They're awesome," she said. "They're like 30 big brothers."

Newsome, a soccer standout, was persuaded to come out for spring football by quarterback Ben Alford. He saw her booming kicks during soccer practice and told her she should try out for football.

She did. Why?

"Everyone asks me that," she said, "and I still can't answer that. I've always liked football. I guess I just needed a little push."

The team has embraced her. The cheerleaders even have a special cheer for her: "Amanda Sue we love you."

Newsome and Hasley were friends before they were teammates, and they started dating before two-a-days in the fall. "It just sort of happened," Newsome said.

Her parents don't mind her playing football.

"As long as she keeps her grades up," her mother, Dawn, said, "she can play."

Thomas, Pasco's coach, is among the impressed, though he says he coddled her early on.

"She fits in extremely well," he said. "Sometimes I forget she's a female. I've had to catch myself sometimes. I have to watch the way I talk. I get pretty harsh.

"The thing about Amanda is, she wants to play defensive back. She wants to play receiver. She wants to do all that. I never have to ask her to get on the scout team. She wants to be a football player, not a kicker per se.

"Kicking is just something she does pretty well."

She is 4-of-7 on extra-point attempts . After the first touchdown in the Aug. 31 season opener, he sent her out to kick the extra point. But she was the decoy; Alford took the ball and dived into the end zone for the two-point conversion. Pasco beat River Ridge 14-12, and that was the difference.

She missed her second extra-point attempt in that game, and developed a hitch in her kick because of torn ligaments in her planting foot. For a time,she didn't tell anyone.

She healed and regained her accuracy by the Sept. 28 game against Gulf. Injuries meant Newsome was the only kicker to practice that week. Thomas didn't hesitate to put her in. This time, he did what she wanted.

He treated her like one of the boys.

He yelled at her.

"For the first time all season, I stopped her before she went out there, and I talked to her kind of harshly," Thomas said. "I told her, "You make this kick.' "

It worked. Pasco won 14-12, and Newsome's extra points were the difference.

"I don't want him to treat me any differently than the guys," she said. "It was a close game, and we weren't doing that great anyway."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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