I can think of some people this is really going to irritate. Good!
Is This the NFL's First Female Player?
Becca Longo is 18. She can kick a football farther than you can. She's got a scholarship. And she's just getting started. Watch and learn.
They cruise down the dusty, open road, the teacher and the pupil, the making of history only months away.
What a pair they are as they roll through the 115-degree heat outside Phoenix on Highway 202, the intense desert sunlight bouncing off the black Mercedes sedan. Together they gaze into the barren landscape dotted with saguaro cacti and mesquite trees, and both see the same vision: a future in which a woman playing Division II football on scholarship is no longer a mirage.
"You are like my second father, and you're a huge reason I'm doing this," says Becca Longo, the pupil, riding shotgun. "You've made this happen."
"What separates you from everyone else is that you stuck with it, even in the hard times," says Alex Zendejas, the teacher and a member of football's most famous kicking family. "You have all the potential in the world. Keep at it, and who knows? Maybe you'll be the first female playing on Sundays."
Close your eyes and imagine that: a woman kicking in the NFL. This is how far the dream now stretches for Longo, 18, who in April became the first female to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school when she signed with D-II Adams State in Alamosa, Colorado.
About a dozen women have played college football at various levels. In 1997 Liz Heaston became the first female to score in a college football game when she kicked an extra point for Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, then an NAIA school. But it's safe to say that no female kicker has ever possessed the pure ability of the 5'11,'' 145-pound Longo, who has kicked a 50-yard field goal in practice and routinely splits the uprights from 45.
"If you can play football and you have determination, I don't care what your gender is," says Timm Rosenbach, a former NFL quarterback and the head coach at Adams State. "And Becca can play, simple as that. She's got accuracy and she's got a powerful leg, which will only get stronger. We brought her to Adams State for a reason: to compete for a job and help us win football games."
Longo's college career will begin in mid-July when she moves into her dorm room in Alamosa and starts working out with the Grizzlies. It will mark the culmination of an unlikely journey into history, one that began at Queen Creek High in Queen Creek, Arizona.
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