Behind Milwaukie High School, there is a football field that seats around 1500.

In addition to serving as a home for various Milwaukie High School athletic competitions, it's also the home of the Oregon Ravens, a women’s tackle football team that plays in the Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC)—a 17-team, nationwide football league with both tackle and flag football divisions. Owing to the Portland metro’s unusually robust women sports viewership culture, the Ravens sell out their games most weeks, and were thus determined to be the ideal host for the league’s Western Conference playoffs. The Western Conference final, played on June 7, saw the Texas Elite Spartans, the winningest team in the history of the WNFC, face off against the San Diego Rebellion. 

The Spartans stomped the Rebellion right into the dirt for 48 straight minutes, and going home with a 36-0 win and a ticket to face the Washington Prodigy in San Francisco on the 21st. At one point, the Rebellion managed to get into the red zone, where they were slowly dissected and pushed back, yard by yard, penalty by penalty, until they were sitting thirty yards behind the end zone with no way of shortening the distance between themselves and the goal, paralyzed by the drastically superior front line of Texas. Meanwhile, Texas scored at will, blew up California like a balloon, and ran out the clock when it came time to head home. A blowout, vicious and unchecked. The Rebellion didn’t stand a chance.

To call the WNFC a professional league would not be strictly true, because its players do have to pay to play, don't have a college paycheck, and work other jobs to support their passion. But they have a streaming deal, will be playing their title game on ESPN2, and they already possess a lot of the trappings of a proper pro league, from professional logos to a raft of sponsorship deals. They are working at a razor’s edge to make this happen: the event staff, right down to the chain gang, were Oregon Ravens players, volunteering their time to make the title game happen. I asked the people working the chains what they would have done if the Ravens had made the title game: they weren’t sure, and seemed a little relieved that they didn’t have to find out.

What the WNFC is trying to do is seed a proper women’s tackle football culture to be a kind of pro league in waiting that can harvest the efforts of USA Football and the IFAF’s attempts to make women’s tackle football into a totalized youth-to-college-to-pros product. 

Odessa Jenkins, the founder and CEO of the WNFC, as well as the coach of the Spartans, played running back for the US National team and briefly worked as a coach for the Atlanta Falcons. “I always loved tackle football and saw that there wasn’t an actual sports property that was creating branding, marketing,  and revenue opportunity for women in tackle football. I wanted that path, and I was in a bunch of startups, tech companies, so instead of putting all my dollars and time into tech, I decided to put it into something that was my passion.”

“I was always a girl playing with the boys,” says Jenkins. “I played tackle football with the boys up until eighth grade—that’s when my coaches said, ‘hey you should play a girls sport’.” Jenkins moved over to basketball, well enough that she played at Cal-Poly, a division one program. “I didn’t resent it, because I didn’t know better. I resent it now.”

“When I got out of college, I went looking for the thing I loved the most, which was football, and I couldn’t find it. Then I moved to Dallas, and Googled women’s football and found that there were people playing in club leagues. By 2017, I won a couple of gold medals with the women’s national team and got recruited to coach in the NFL.”

Tammy Moore, an offensive lineman with the Texas Elite Spartans, didn’t mince words when asked why she played football: “I love football because it brings me peace. It brings me controlled chaos, to be violent and get praise instead of being taunted. I always keep it between the whistles, but it allows me to just be myself, for once.” 

Brittani Lusain, an outside Linebacker for the Rebellion, started playing for the Rebellion when “my teammate found me lifting weights in the gym, and it just went from there.” What does she like about it? “Hitting people. Hitting people hard. It’s legal, I don’t get reprimanded for it, I usually get praise for it... it’s a release.” 

Janice Masters, the commissioner of the league, played Division 1 softball in college and professionally before she took up tackle football in Pittsburgh for 11 years. “My knees are shot, everything hurts,” she tells us. 

“I just prefer being physical,” says Jones, when asked about why she was attracted to a contact sport. “The strategy of it, the contact of it.” 

Over the last twenty or so years, the question of tackle football as an ethical practice has come into question here and there. You’re probably familiar with these conversations, and have opinions about it. 

But what always gets lost in these conversations that tend to pivot around money, status, or the place of football in broader American culture, is that people enjoy playing tackle football. They like the tactical superstructure, they like the hitting, and sometimes, they even like getting hit. These are aspects of human nature that civilization encourages you to ignore as much as humanly possible, and football gives you somewhere to put that thing.

People got injured at this game, like they do at every football game. One person got laid out badly enough that they had to lie on the field for twenty minutes, waiting for an ambulance to arrive to take them off the field. (I personally believe that anyone playing an organized tackle football game should be required to have an ambulance on site—a tax that might aggravate a cash-strapped enterprise like the WNFC, but would have made the extended gasp that accompanied that night’s injury less horrifying for everyone involved. The Ravens tell me that “They are okay.”) 

Football is not safe. But everyone knows that, and they do it anyway. However for them, without it they would lose something in its absence—something that hasn’t ever been seriously granted to women in the first place.