She’s kicking down barriers
Vanderbilt’s Fuller proving women belong on all fields
Sarah Fuller is further proof there’s no reason women can’t play football.
Fuller, who made history on Saturday as the first woman to play in a Power 5 conference game, will travel with Vanderbilt to play the No. 9 Georgia Bulldogs on Saturday.
“She indicated that she wanted to continue,” interim coach Todd Fitch said Tuesday during media availability. “We’re gonna put the best people out there and if she’s our best option, we’ll continue to work with her and we’ll do the best we can for the team.”
When Fuller stepped onto the field in Columbia, Mo., last weekend, poised to kickoff the second half of Vanderbilt football’s game against Missouri, she did so with little pressure in her mind. Fuller, a star soccer player for Vandy’s women’s soccer team, won an SEC championship the weekend before.
Ex-head coach Derek Mason, whose team had been lacking in the kicking department because of the coronavirus, had approached Fuller’s coach, Darren Ambrose, asking for help providing him with a player still in the university’s testing protocol that could help with a kick or two if needed for their upcoming game.
Fuller happened to be available and she agreed to help out, in more ways than making a kick.
At the half, Fuller called out her new team for its lack of camaraderie. If the players weren’t actively trying to encourage each other, how could they possibly hope to get themselves out of the hole they were in, she detailed over a Zoom call. Coaches applauded her speech.
The Commodores were losing 21-0 to the Tigers by the time she was put into the game. So Fuller, a goalie, stared down the football the same way she stared down a soccer ball ready to kick it to the opposite end of the field.
Fuller, arm stretched in the air signaling her start, took four strides, swinging on the fifth and squibbed the football to the 35yard line. Missouri pounced on it there. Play over. It was perhaps the most well executed play of Vanderbilt’s terrible day.
For those who doubted Fuller’s ability to boot the ball, she posted a clip on social media of her effortlessly booting the ball down the field in a soccer game.
Had it not been for Fuller, there would have been no other reason to pay attention to the game, which was already expected to be a beat down for a team without a number of its starters and already 0-7 on the season before that loss.
Fuller didn’t even get a chance at a field goal or PAT because Vanderbilt never got the ball that far down the field. That didn’t matter because her perfectly-executed kickoff already cemented her place in history as the first woman to play in a Power 5 conference football game.
“I just wanna tell all the girls out there that you can do anything you set your mind to,” Fuller said in a post-game interview on the field, “and if you have that mentality all the way through, you can do big things.”
And all it took was a global pandemic to nearly wipe out a team’s kicking specialists for a coach to go looking elsewhere for help and to make the move to break down another gender-based barrier.
News flash: there are hundreds of other women who play football out there who are just as qualified as Fuller to play football who don’t get a second look just because they are not men.
Wake up! It shouldn’t take one of the most extreme circumstances in modern American history to break down gender barriers set by those intent on keeping the status quo exactly where it is. Mason probably wasn’t that desperate for more players, but what are the odds he would have made that call any other season?
When I saw the first image of Fuller, suited up in the pads with “Play Like A Girl” on the back of her helmet, I cried. It was beautiful. She made the biggest statement in action when she made that kick, all while she proudly wore “Play Like A Girl,” a statement so long used as a criticism, as if playing like a girl is such a bad thing (even if Fuller’s was meant to draw attention to the charity and not just the statement).
Well that “girl” just made the best play of that sorry program’s year, and for one day, made them relevant to the national conversation. Mason was fired the next day after losing 41-0 to Missouri, going 0-8 this season and ending his seven-season tenure as head coach at 27-55. His biggest highlights were beating rival Tennessee three consecutive times and losing in two bowl games.
By Monday, Fuller was named SEC co-special teams player of the week for her one kick. Fuller, a soccer player who agreed to help the football team on a whim, changed the game entirely while recognizing the other women who made kicks before her without the privilege of doing it for a school with a top conference affiliation. And on Tuesday, she was back on Vanderbilt’s practice field preparing for the next game.
Can’t you see by now what opening doors can do?