You’ve probably heard about Kalamazoo’s roller derby team, but you might not know about Southwest Michigan’s other full-contact women’s sport. The West Michigan Mayhem women’s football team has been around for 15 years - and it's doing pretty well. The team won all but two games last season.
The new season kicks off Saturday, April 2. The Mayhem will play the Chicago Force at 5 p.m. at the Roy Davis Field in Schoolcraft. The Force is one of the team's biggest competitors.
“They’re always down to either the championship game, the Super Bowl, or very close to it. So we always start our season out recently with Chicago. So it’s always a good wakeup call for the girls," says Mayhem head coach Lisa Luedtke.
The rules for women’s football are basically the same as men’s college football. They follow National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations. It looks the same too - players wear helmets and full padding.
J.P. Plummer has been on the team since it started in 2001. Two years ago, she represented the Mayhem in the International Federation of American Football Women’s World Championship in Finland. She says she’s been involved in competitive sports since her t-ball days. But when she got out of college, all she found was rec sports.
“Like rec volleyball or rec softball. Yes it’s competitive and yes it’s fun, but it really doesn’t fit that extreme competitive and I’ve always been super intense and like I said competitive. So football definitely fills that competitive void. You can’t play it casually,” she says.
On the Mayhem team there are players like Plummer who have been there for 10 to 15 years, but there are just as many rookies. Luedtke says for a coach, that can be a challenge:
“It’s not like boys college football or boys high school football where you have people that have been playing since they were 5 years old in the pewee league and anything. You don’t have that at all. So you have some girls that come in with experience that have actually played on their high school teams - which is fantastic for us to have. And you have some girls that basically are like hey, I know what a football is and that’s about where I’m at.”
Luedtke says some women travel for two hours to get to practice three days a week. No one gets paid. In fact, every player pays $300 to be on the Mayhem team.
Luedtke says maybe in a few years all of that will change. She says there are some talented female football players out there and the NFL is starting to take notice.
"We actually just had one of the players from our league -she first female intern on the Arizona Cardinals. She was a linebackers’ coach. So that was really big for us last year. We also had another player - our former player that plays for Kansas City - she was on the coaching staff for the East-West Shrine game which is a college football. So she was actually coaching for that. So you have the girls that are there, you have the teams that are listening. "
Luedtke says she hopes she'll still be around to see women's football held in the same regard as the NFL.
Kate Keister has been on the team for three years. She says she’s played just about every sport, but until now she never got the chance to play football.
“I think it’s important that the young girls know that they can break down the doors and we’re trying to do that for them so that we pave a way for them to be able to play football even from a young age," she says.
Leanne Tuuk finds time to play on the team in between working two jobs and studying mechanical engineering at Western Michigan University. She says she’s proud of the bumps and bruises she gets from football.
“I always enjoy getting them because they’re proof that I played the game. My mom always had a saying that if your jersey is not dirty then you’re not playing hard enough,” she says.
The West Michigan Mayhem's season starts on April 2nd and goes through June 4th. For the full schedule, click here.
