Fuller wasn’t the first woman to participate in a college football game. Not by a longshot.
This past weekend Sarah Fuller became the first female to play in a Power Five football game. Vanderbilt needed a kicker, so the coach asked a senior soccer player if she would kick against Missouri. Ms. Fuller did. Her second-half kickoff, a squib kick, covered about 35 yards. Later, Fuller explained that her participation shows no female should ever doubt what could be accomplished.
While I applaud Ms. Fuller for stepping up, there’s more to this story, much more.
Sarah Fuller wasn’t the first woman to compete in a college football game. That distinction goes to Liz Heaston of Williamette College, who kicked two extra points against Linfield College in 1997. At the major college level, the University of New Mexico’s Katie Hnida attempted an extra point in 2002 (it was blocked) and then kicked two extra points in 2003. Earlier, she suited up but didn’t play as a walk-on football player at the University of Colorado. What’s more, history was made last year when two female kickers–Kyla Gordon (Willamette) and Mika Makekau (Laverne) squared off in the same game. Odds are you never heard of it, though, because most of the national press wasn’t paying attention.
While I admire Sarah Fuller and what she did last Saturday, I wonder why her accomplishment overshadowed other news–news that otherwise would have made bigger news and, in my opinion, should have made bigger news.
Just last week, Keira D’Amato, a 36-year-old mother of two and a real estate agent by profession, broke the U.S. female record for a 10-mile run. The record had stood for six years, set by former Olympian Janet Bawcom at the 2014 Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run. D’Amato’s time was 51:23 and, if you do the math, you’ll get her average time for a mile. When I did the math, it told me that (at her age) I never, ever ran a mile as fast as did D’Amato in her record-breaking run.
In other news, the United States women’s soccer team defeated the Netherlands, 2-0. While that’s good news, there’s even more. Kristie Mewis came into the game as a second-half substitute and scored in the 70th minute. It was Mewis’ second score ever for the U.S. team, her first coming in 2013. Imagine waiting over 2700 days to play again and, then, to score again–and at such a high level, too
I seek not to diminish what happened on the football field last Saturday. Still, I do question why it made headlines and received such widespread public acclaim.
So why did it? If you prefer looking at college football through a male-focused lens, then it’s easy to see why Power 5 college football is what you see. But doing so privileges Fuller and diminishes what Heaston and Hnida accomplished years earlier, and what Gordon and Makekau did last year. What’s more, it pushed D’Amato and Mewis from the headlines.
Yes, there’s something to celebrate, but there’s also a lot of soul-searching to do about how we, as a society, evaluate women’s ‘success’ in sports.
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Frank Fear contributed to this article.
