One giant kick for womankind
DALLAS — A few years ago, toward the end of many seventh-period Wylie (Texas) girls soccer practices, the school’s football coaches may have foreshadowed history.
Waiting for their own practices to start, they’d watch goalkeeper Sarah Fuller direct set plays during the last portion of the soccer sessions, nailing goal kicks and punts more than twothirds up the pitch, connecting with teammates in stride.
“Man, that’s a good leg,” Wylie soccer coach Chris Benzer remembers them saying. “We could use her on Friday night.”
This week, Vanderbilt’s football coaches thought the same.
Fuller on Saturday became the first woman to play in a Power Five college football game. Less than a week after anchoring Vanderbilt’s SEC women’s soccer tournament championship, the 2017 Wylie graduate’s unexpected transition to emergency kicker put her at the centre of conversation about sports and gender barriers.
Against Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, she was the only active kicker on Vanderbilt’s roster — because of several specialists in COVID-19-related quarantine — a source of pride for the Wylie soccer community watching back home and an inspirational figure for girls and women across the U.S..
“I just want to tell all the girls out there that you can do anything you set your mind to,” Fuller said after the game. “Like, you really can. And if you have that mentality all the way through, you can do big things.”
Fuller’s history-making moment came during the secondhalf kickoff. She executed a squib kick toward the right sideline to the 35-yard line. The 21-year-old senior didn’t get the opportunity to attempt a field goal or an extra point because Vanderbilt’s offence rarely drove past midfield in a 41-0 defeat.
Wearing a “Play Like a Girl” decal on her helmet, Fuller won plaudits from her fans.
“She’s trying to break down ceilings and walls, and be able to be a role model,” said Hugh Bradford, Fuller’s coach with the local D’Feeters Kicks Soccer Club in high school.
“All of us are so proud that she’s able to show other young women that the sky’s the limit. If you can dream it, you can achieve it.”