ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Years ago, I met a little girl named Kristian Long — cute as a button and every bit as tough.
Kristian was 9 years old and loved football more than anything. Even cheerleading.
She had grown up on the sidelines watching her brothers, falling in love with gridiron play.
Then one day she announced, “I want to play.”
That was the first remarkable thing I remember about her story. The little girl saw no limits on her future. The second is that few in the North Georgia Youth Football League saw any either. There was little wailing and gnashing of teeth because Kristian Long wore skirts and a ponytail.
Maybe everybody thought she’d tire of it and give it up. Maybe she’d decide she didn’t want to take any more hits.
But by age 9, she was a starter on the league’s 105-pound Division 1 team, the equivalent of a varsity team, and making a name for herself as one of the best cornerbacks in the league. They called her “No. 2, ” sometimes “No. 1,” depending on the jersey she wore. But she was always “Bulldog” Long. And just as vicious.
I thought about her last week when news hit about Jen Welter, the former Boston College rugby player, becoming a coach with the Arizona Cardinals. She is believed to be the first female coach in the National Football League.
That’s right up there with the Steelers’ Franco Harris catching a deflected pass on a 4th-and-10 play in the final seconds and running 60 yards to win the game against the Raiders.
Yes, we have a mile to go before things are perfect, but women have come a long way.
Just in the past decade, Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the country’s first African-American U.S. attorney general, Mary Barra was tapped as the first female chief executive officer of General Motors, and Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director.
That’s a lot to cheer about, but this year? This year, the good news just keeps on coming and from one of the most unlikely of places — male-dominated sports.
Twice this year, women have broken NFL barriers, starting with Sarah Thomas, who became the first full-time female referee in the league’s 95-year history.
Now comes Welter, who was tapped last week by the Cardinals to work with inside linebackers as a training camp-preseason intern coach. If being an intern sounds like small potatoes, remember that’s how most careers began, including that of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who started as an administrative intern in 1982.
So, go Cardinals!
And let's not forget the NBA. Becky Hammon is an assistant coach with San Antonio and served as the head coach for the Spurs team that won the Las Vegas Summer League championship.
For her part, Welter played 14 seasons in women’s pro football and was the first woman to play a non-kicking position in a men’s pro league — as a running back for the Texas Revolution of Indoor Football League. She’s also a veteran at coaching men, moving to the Cardinals from the Revolution, for whom she was linebackers and special teams coach.
“I want little girls everywhere to grow up knowing they can do anything, even play football,” Welter said last year on NBC’s “Today.”
That might seem odd given recent history, but four years after telling Kristian’s story, I met another little girl who loved playing football, too, but the story was decidedly different.
Her name was Kacy Stuart. She was 14 and some thought her playing football was, well, un-Christian.
When I met her in 2008, Kacy, after months of waiting on the sidelines, was finally going to get the chance to play with the New Creation Center Crusaders.
The opposing team didn’t like the idea of a girl in cleats, and they wanted everyone to know it. To make their case that night, the announcer read a pregame statement over the intercom. It quoted Romans 12:2. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
The passage, while vague to some, was interpreted by others as a warning against Christians conforming to un-Christian ways of the world. In the case of Kacy, it was about girls playing a physical sport with boys.
“I just stood there with a straight face,” Kacy told me just days after East Atlanta Mustangs coach Alan Hawkins issued the statement. “We didn’t really care.”
It was a huge leap from ancient Hebrew doctrine to contemporary sports, but it shows the length some people will go to keep women in their place.
To every woman out there chasing your dream — you go, girl!
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