Jamie Council hadn’t lost a kicking challenge for the Atascadero High School varsity football team, yet the kicker spent most of the senior season on the bench.

Why?

Not everyone wanted a girl on the football team. 

It all started after some of the football players coaching the high school’s powderpuff team saw her nailing her PATs, point after touchdown, and field goals. They thought she was better than the varsity kicker, so they encouraged her to try out for the varsity team.

While Jamie became the first female to score a point for the team, that accolade didn’t compare to the pain of watching her team’s kicking woes from the sideline, knowing she could have made some of those kicks.

“That was actually really hard to see us struggle on the kicking even though I was winning all the competitions and stuff,” Jamie said. “I wasn’t really given my opportunity.”

She doesn’t want to shed a bad light on the team. That’s ancient history as far as she’s concerned. 

“It was a great experience, not always positive, but things don’t always have to be positive to be a good experience,” Jamie said.

After reflecting on that experience, she has an odd request. She wishes the coaching staff gave her the opportunity to fail.

“Females deserve the opportunity to fail just as much as men do,” Jamie said. “That’s the biggest thing kicking for the [Tri-City] Rush. They gave me the opportunity to fail, and I’ve been the most accurate of all their kickers.” 

Jamie thought her days as a kicker ended with her senior season. It was time for her to turn her focus to the other football, which she would be playing for Minot State University. But a decade later in 2022, fate had a different plan for her. 

Now working as the sports director for KNDU, KNDO and SWX in Tri-Cities, Washington, Jamie spoke at a local youth and high school football event. True to her personality, Jamie opened her presentation with a joke.

“I was like, ‘If anybody thinks that I’m not qualified to work in football, I do have a varsity letter.’” 

The head referee, who was a good friend of Brandon Tate, the owner and head coach of the Tri-City Rush, the town’s American West Football Conference team, happened to be in the crowd. He knew the team’s kickers struggled with accuracy, so he shot a text to Tate, saying he found the Rush’s new kicker. 

Within three days of that text, Jamie was working out for the team. 

“From day one, Jamie’s come out, [and] she’s been tremendously accurate,” Tate said. “We asked her out at a park one time for a workout, and she was just kicking the middle of a tree, you know, just to show us how accurate she was. It definitely opened up our eyes right away that this is someone we need[ed] to add to our roster before somebody else steals her.”

After the team’s first replacement kicker went down with a groin injury, Jamie’s number was called. On Saturday, May 30, Jamie made her debut for the Rush. Despite it being a decade since she last kicked in a football game, she nailed five of her eight PAT attempts. 

“Her accuracy is one of the things that have helped push us to the next level,” Tate said. 

With one quick look at an indoor football field, it’s easy to see the field is significantly smaller than the 100-yard one you’d find in an NFL stadium, but that’s not the only difference between the two. NFL regulation field goal posts are 18 ½ feet wide with a crossbar 10 feet high. Jamie has to kick between field goal posts that are only nine feet wide and have a crossbar 15 feet high, meaning she’s working with half the space an NFL kicker gets.

“In arena football alone, it’s tough to make a field goal,” Tate said. “We didn’t even make one field goal all of last season, and within her first I think two games, she had already stepped up and made a 23-yard field goal for us.”

Jamie experienced the difficulty of arena football kicking in her second game. She struggled early, going 1/5 for PATs. 

“I was just like, ‘This sucks. I’m failing,’” Jamie said. “But after every kick they’re [her teammates] like, ‘You got the next one.’”

She made it and the next six. 

After her Rush teammates rallied around her, a stark contrast from the reaction she got in high school, Jamie finished the night 8/12 and made the first field goal in Rush history.

“They’ve been so supportive,” Jamie said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.”

Despite the support from her team, she has still experienced her fair share of internet trolls. One social media user commented, “Oh, they’re letting you kick again.” Jamie has to remind herself that she earned the right to kick.

“It’d be great to get to a point where it’s just about doing the job,” Jamie said. “If I don’t do good, it’s not a reflection of me on me. It’s a reflection on females, and people are gonna see it that way.”

After her first game, the Rush posted on Facebook about Jamie being the first woman to play in an American West Conference Football game and potentially the first woman to play in a men’s professional football game. Jamie quickly pointed out the latter. 

Patricia Palinkas held for PATs and FGs in 1970 for the Atlantic Coast Football League’s Orlando Panthers, and Abby Vestal became the first woman to score in a professional game in 2007 while playing for the Kansas Koyotes of the Champions Professional Indoor Football League. 

She’s not the only active woman player on a men’s team either. Melissa Strother currently kicks for the Rapid City Marshals in the Champions Indoor Football league. She has made 2/6 FGs and 11/17 PATs this season.

“At the end of the day, an athlete’s an athlete, but I think it’s just huge for her and huge for other women, just so they can show that they have that ability,” Tate said. “She’s out there competing, just like another athlete and earning her spot and showing the team what she can do.”

Jamie will continue to aid the Rush in their quest to win their second consecutive AWFC Championship in just their second season in the league. Having finished the season undefeated, the team secured their spot in the 2022 championship while their future opponent battles it out in the playoffs.

Regardless of how the season ends, one thing’s for sure. Jamie will be grateful for the opportunity the Rush gave her to fail — or hopefully in this case, to succeed.

“If I’m gonna do this, I want to win. I want to succeed. I feel like I still want to prove a lot more to myself.”

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