Are You Ready for Some … Women?

At halftime, things looked grim for the Kansas City Tribe.

The Tribe — the latest addition to the collective of women’s football in Kansas City — traveled to Texas to play its first-ever game April 12 against the Dallas Diamonds. On that cool Saturday evening, the powerhouse Diamonds unleashed their star player, Jessica Springer. The linebacker and running back, who wore No. 46, demolished everything in her path. At the end of the second quarter, Dallas was up 35-0.

In the locker room, though, the Tribe women were still determined. A volley of voices echoed off the cinderblock walls of the high school stadium’s locker room.

“I know you guys are better than this. I’ve seen it weekly,” one of the players yelled.

“We’re not going to leave here with a goose egg,” said another. “I don’t give a fuck about the score. We can’t leave here with a goose egg.”

The coaches waited outside so that the team could vent. The players were tired, frustrated and pissed. With their helmets off, the women spread out in the locker room. They took swigs of water and ate bananas. Toward one corner of the room, Mindy White sat on the floor. A red skullcap covered the top of her head, and two braids framed her flushed face. She went off on No. 46.

“She’s like a fucking pingpong. A fucking freight train. You have to get her early before she gains speed. Give her two steps, and boom!” White punctuated her sentiment by making a chugging train sound and propelling one arm in a forward motion.

Head coach Ed Williams, followed by his staff, entered the room. Everyone stopped talking, and for a few seconds the only sound was the loud, persistent buzz of the fluorescent lights.

In a quiet voice, Williams said he wasn’t worried about the score. It could be 10-0 or 7-0. But each unit wasn’t doing what it needed to do. He chastised the team for not heeding the coaches’ instructions.

“Unfortunately, you don’t listen. You don’t take direction that works,” he said, his voice steadily growing louder. Soon it was a roar of displeasure resonating in the bare locker room and within the players. “Bottom line: It’s all about character and you. Who you represent, who you want to be seen as.

“Let’s decide. The score could be 80 to nothing, and we can go home. Or the score can be 36 to 35. You have to make that choice. So when you walk out of that locker room, you have to say, ‘You got to nut up.'”

“Nut up, bitches! Let’s go!” a player yelled. They huddled the middle of the room and shouted, “Tribe!” before storming out of the locker room.

“Now we’re going to see what type of team we got,” assistant coach Torris Babbs said as he walked onto the field behind the team. “Will they lie down or keep fighting?”

The first half of the game was an inauspicious beginning for the eight-month-old team. In Kansas City, the sport of women’s football dates back to 2003. It started with a now-defunct team called the Kansas City Krunch and another team called the Storm. The Tribe, a semi-professional team, is the third group to take the field. The intertwined history of these three teams has been, for the most part, rocky and divisive. Making it through the season without losing too much money is one challenge for the Tribe. Another is earning some recognition in a town that’s all about the established, big-name men’s teams.

But the immediate challenge for the Tribe? Putting some points up in its first game.

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A day earlier, a charter bus sat in a Hen House parking lot. The lumbering machine made a diagonal slash against the white grid pattern on the blacktop. As the wind whipped around outside, Tribe players toted pillows and blankets onboard.

The bus speakers blared “California Dreamin'” and other songs from the ’60s Vibrations satellite station. A tough-looking player with short, spiky hair and a hefty build carried a football-shaped pillow. Players of varying body types — ranging from slender to beefy, short to statuesque — filtered onto the bus. Two latecomers straggled on, sporting form-fitting track jackets and tight jeans. Designer-looking sunglasses and mussed ponytails completed their look. One carried a white Arden B. shopping bag.

Then White entered the bus. The bubbly 30-year-old is the general manager and part-owner of the team as well as a veteran player who defected from the Storm. She opened a large cardboard box in a front-row seat. In it were the white jerseys with red trim and navy-blue numbers that had arrived that morning. If they hadn’t shown up, the ever-efficient White had a backup plan. It involved diverting the bus to Melvern, Kansas, her hometown, where she would borrow jerseys from her high school.

She stood at the front of the bus and started handing them out. Her teammates were delighted. “Oh, they’re so pretty!” a few of them cried.

“I feel like Santa Claus,” White said.

“Don’t wash it with red,” someone instructed.

“Wash it in cold,” advised Williams, who was settling into the other set of front-row seats.

“Model it! Model it!” Laura Leeds told White.

“My ass is too big,” White said.

“Model it anyway! Model it anyway!” Laura Leeds chanted. White found her own jersey and pulled it over her head.

About an hour and a half into the drive to Texas, the bus passed the exit for Melvern, which White jokingly called “the thriving metropolis of 425 people.” She grew up on a farm, where she watched her male cousins play football. She played basketball, volleyball and rec-league softball — the only sports available to girls in Melvern.

During her senior year of high school, her basketball team lost the state championship game in Hayes. The next morning, she got an early-morning call at the hotel from Kelly Fischer, the coach at Allen County Community College, who also happened to be a family friend.

“Mindy White, if you let that be the last competitive game that you play, you’re the biggest pussy I know,” White recalls Fischer saying.

White played basketball, volleyball and softball, but a back injury during her junior year ended her collegiate career. During her first year at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s law school, White joined a flag football team. At a coed tournament in 2004, two of the players from the Kansas City Storm approached White and her best friend, Rusty Sowers.

White fell in love with the game. “Football is so much more of an intelligent game than any other sport that I’ve played,” she said. She didn’t shy away from the tackling. “The fact that you can just run as hard as you can and just wrap someone up and drive them into the ground — it’s really a sense of empowerment for a woman,” she says. “There are so few times that violence is encouraged for our gender, and it’s just so outside the box, the norm.”

When White joined the Storm, the team was made up of players who had split from the Krunch over a management dispute. They charged that the owners weren’t being forthright about where their money was going. But similar problems plagued the Storm’s 2007 season. The weekend before the final game of the 2007 season, the team traveled to Des Moines to play its rival, the Iowa Crush. The playoff-bound Storm won, 19-0. The next morning, the players received an e-mail from the Storm’s owner, Nance Wernes. She had decided, for financial reasons, to cancel the rest of the season, including the playoffs.

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White and her teammates sent a formal grievance letter to the Independent Women’s Football League, which later revoked Wernes’ franchise license.

Meanwhile, White says, league officials approached White to see if she wanted to own a team. She would have to raise $3,000 for the league’s yearly dues. She asked friends for help. Colin Stoner, a law-school friend, and John VanSittert, a firefighter and developer, agreed to put up portions of the fee.

The new owners had two months to scramble to set everything up before the offseason training camp started in November. (The regular season goes from April to June.) White had to find practice facilities for the workouts and line up trainers, EMTs, referees and concession vendors. She had to figure out how to put together a media guide and arrange transportation to the away games.

Finding a home field was a little more challenging, though. The team wanted to play near midtown. The athletic director at one school quoted White a price that was three times what he charged men’s teams. “Well, I don’t really know how much you guys would tear [the field] up. I know it’s not real football, but at the same time … ” White says he told her.

“He was, frankly, an ass,” White says.

White found brand-new turf — and a cooperative staff — at Bishop Miege High School.

Making a profit remains another matter. Half of the team’s $30,000 budget is spent on travel. It’s $1,200 per game to rent the field, and the team must hire referees, trainers and EMTs. White and her co-owners say they will lose between $5,000 and $7,000 this season.

The coaches volunteer their time. The 30 players pay $500 each to play. They can sell tickets, attend fundraisers or sell media-guide ads to reduce that amount.

The Tribe has a players’ council to prevent the lack of communication that plagued the other teams. “I think it’s really important because there’s nothing to hide,” White says. “My God, we’re losing money hand over fist, so it’s not like we’re trying to hide anything along that line.”

In the meantime, the Storm reformed and switched to the National Women’s Football Association. Wernes dismisses claims that she misrepresented the team’s financial situation to players. “I have nothing to hide,” she says. “I’m honest.”

About four hours into the Dallas trip, the bus crossed the Oklahoma border. At 9:30 p.m., vivacious blonde Lindsay Davis, who sported sweatpants with the word “Pink” written on the butt, asked the driver about a pee stop. “If we were at practice and someone hit me,” she said, “I’d probably pee a little bit.”

At 10, the bus stopped for dinner at Furr’s Cafeteria in Oklahoma City. A horde of women rushed to the bathroom. After dinner, two of the women — including Davis — decided to expend their energy by running around. They circled the restaurant, then raced back and forth from the front door to the grassy knoll that abutted the highway.

Game day was sunny and beautiful. The players gathered at midafternoon in the parking lot behind the hotel and waited for a yellow school bus that was to take them to the stadium. Against the backdrop of the Denny’s that shared the hotel lot, one of the quarterbacks, Ursula Copeland, threw to a receiver.

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On the bus, Aaron Sawyer, the defensive-line coach, talked about seeing the reaction of the 12 rookies on the team. “It’s their first time getting hit. It’s a fight-or-flight situation. They either hit back or get shell-shocked.” He pointed out how some of the players needed to get hyperactive before the game to psych themselves up.

“I don’t get hyper,” Adejoke Agbaje said in a soft voice. The 24-year-old, who sat behind Sawyer, was silently praying during the short bus ride. She prayed for an injury-free game for herself, for her teammates and for the other team.

Agbaje — her teammates call her “Ah-day” — grew up in Kwara State, Nigeria. She ended up in KC because her dad moved from Nigeria to teach at J.S. Chick Elementary School. She got a degree in chemistry from UMKC and is now applying to pharmacy schools. She grew up playing soccer and running track. When she arrived in the United States, she started watching football on TV and loved the game because she immediately understood the rules. Then, one day, as she ran on the track at the UMKC gym, a Storm player approached her and invited her to a minicamp.

Before her second season with the Storm started, Agbaje entered a national contest, and the IWFL declared her the fastest woman in the league. She ran the 40-yard dash in 4.9 seconds — not a good time for her because she was still healing from two broken ankles. Still, her quickness — as well as her position as defensive end — invokes another nickname: the Nigerian Nightmare, after former Chief Christian Okoye.

Back when the Storm had a game at Arrowhead Stadium, one of the coaches, Ralph Scopo, kept screaming her name. Finally, she asked him, “What do you want?” He pointed to Christian Okoye’s name, which appeared on the stadium wall’s hall of fame.

“OK, so what?” Agbaje says she thought.

“He’s good. You’re good, too! You both play defense,” Scopo explained.

“I don’t think I’m that good,” she said.

The bus arrived at Pennington Field, the 10,500-seat high school stadium where the Dallas Diamonds play. The bus passed a group of Dallas players and fans clustered around their black, white and silver pickup trucks and SUVs.

“I don’t know about the girl with the beard,” Sawyer joked.

When the bus stopped, running back Tonille Williams stood up and said in a fierce tone, “They piss like we piss. They bleed like we bleed.”

On the first drive of the second half, with the Tribe down 35-0, the Dallas quarterback handed the ball off to a fullback, who ran for 7 yards before Yolanda Ramirez tackled her. On the next play, Kansas City blitzed the quarterback. Agbaje timed it perfectly; she delayed just long enough for the Dallas center to turn her head to focus on a combo block. Agbaje streaked by her and disrupted the handoff. That led to the loss of a yard.

“Like that!” Sawyer yelled.

KC held Dallas to just a field goal — but not without an injury. The Tribe’s Megan Penrod, a 5-foot-3 defensive back, dislocated her shoulder. A trainer popped it back into place, and she went back in for the next drive.

A 15-yard face-mask penalty against Dallas on the kickoff gave the Tribe excellent position at midfield to begin the drive. Sowers, playing running back, followed up by picking up 9 yards. A couple of plays later, quarterback Jenny Schmidt completed a short pass for a first down — the first one in the game.

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“That’s what the fuck we’re talking about!” said Jamie Cason-Randle, a defensive tackle who was standing on the sidelines.

On the next play, No. 46 barreled toward Schmidt, who threw the ball away.

“I saw enough,” Babbs said. “They won’t score another touchdown. If we go out there like we just came out, then definitely.”

The burst of momentum was short-lived. With a minute and a half to go in the game, the score was 58-0. KC got possession of the ball on its 45-yard line. The drive looked promising: The Tribe moved it to the 39-yard line. Then, with about a minute left, Schmidt threw a beautiful spiral. It was intercepted. The Diamonds regained possession. They took a knee and let the clock run down. The Dallas fans screamed, “Whose house? Our house!”

The Tribe players showered and slowly made their way to the bus. They were sore and tired. Penrod had an ice pack taped to the outside of her T-shirt. As she entered the bus, she had a thought.

“Just for the record,” Penrod said, “I think No. 46 has a penis.”

The game ended around 10 p.m., and the plan was to stop for dinner at Red Robin, the Dallas Diamonds’ after-game spot, before driving back to KC. But after going in and seeing the crowded conditions, the Tribe went to McDonald’s.

Two players stayed behind at Red Robin and drank shots with Tribe owners Stoner and VanSittert and the handful of friends from KC who drove down with them to the game. The two players came back on the bus in a boisterous state and started a rousing game of “I Never.”

“I never faked a motherfucking orgasm!” roared one of the women. Everyone drank, meaning they’d faked it, too.

“I never had sex in a church!” said another player. One of the guys on the bus drank, to the scandalized delight of the other women. He explained that it happened when he was in college.

Players broke out cans and bottles of beer as well as bottles of some of the harder stuff to ease their mental and physical pain. Soon, people started mingling in the narrow aisle of the bus.

“It’s like a club, only without the music and the strobe lights,” Sawyer said.

The veterans, who sat toward the rear of the bus, squeezed forward to talk to the rookies. Christina Pinkley, a 30-year-old who had never played football before, was stunned by her first full-tackle experience. She commiserated with Leeds, one of the longtime players.

Agbaje, who cracked one of her ribs during the game, curled up on an empty seat in the front and pulled a fleece blanket over her head.

When the bus stopped at 4:30 a.m. for a bathroom break in Beto Junction, Kansas, some of the women were still drinking. One player went into the stop to buy one of the giant cinnamon rolls that’s the specialty of that truck stop. As she walked off the bus, she carried a half-full bottle of beer. A few others sported weird makeup splotches on their faces — half-rubbed-off mustaches drawn in black eyeliner, blush marks in line patterns.

“Mindy and I used to work here,” Sowers said. “It’s near Melvern.”

A week later, the Tribe played its home-opener against the Iowa Crush. On that warm Saturday evening at Bishop Miege, the crowd numbered about 350, including kids and team family members and a group of about 15 vocal Iowa fans.

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The smell of grilled burgers wafted through the air. Right before game time, the Tribe women stood in a single-file line just outside the field’s gates. Next to the entrance was the house band, the KC Tribe Chico Thunder Touchdown Band (aka Cretin 66). The musicians played a sexy, funky, bass-heavy tune, and some of the players started dancing in place. Then the announcer — a friend of the owners who had been pressed into service that morning — called each player to the field for an introduction. Throughout the game, the band added to the festive atmosphere with riffs on “Hey, ho! Let’s go!” and a refrain from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

“Thank you, hair band,” the announcer said after one musical interlude.

The Tribe showed significant improvement over its first game, though a number of dropped interceptions and penalties hindered the team. The defense handled the Crush’s running game and put consistent pressure on the quarterback. The offense moved the ball well, thanks to some power runs and well-executed passes.

One play, though, showed off the Tribe’s attention to fundamentals and boded well for the future. After a clock stoppage, the coaches sent in Tribe quarterback Schmidt. “Square your shoulders!” the coaches hollered.

Schmidt took the snap and rolled left. As she reached the far sidelines, another teammate crossed into a cleared area, just in front of her defender. Schmidt turned her shoulders and slung her right arm, delivering a perfect pass to her target’s outer hip. The receiver cradled the ball as she slid toward the out-of-bounds marker. The team picked up a first down.

The Tribe won 19-6. As a bonus, the gate took in about $700.

Since then, the team has traveled to Des Moines, where it beat the Iowa Crush in a low-scoring, 6-0 game. A week later, the women headed to Kenosha and defeated the Wisconsin Warriors 20-12. Last weekend, the Tribe hosted another powerhouse team, the Detroit Demolition, and lost 38-0.

The Tribe’s next home game is May 31, a rematch against Dallas. This time, the women will be prepared for No. 46.

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