COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL OCTOBER 18, 2017
Continued from B1
because of her skill; a girl who has had dreams of playing foot-
ball since she was little.
“It really started when I was in second grade,” said Tayla who
during a non-contact practice before a recent game is the only
one wearing running shorts and a ponytail. “I’ve wanted to play
ever since then just because my poppa and my dad and my un-
cles kept telling me stories and stories of how awesome it was.”
And so it was decided. Tayla was going to play football
amongst the boys and that was that.
“She really has that self-driven attitude. She always has, she
always has. I mean, I’ve told her, you were born stubborn and you
have not changed,” said Tayla’s mother Rebecca Swearengin.
It was in this grit, this determination, this resolve, this stub-
bornness that led Tayla to start playing. From a young age she
was insistent that she was going to play despite her parents’ at-
tempt to steer her away from a game of tackling and collisions
(“It took me awhile to talk my mom into it,” recalled Tayla).
They warned her the boys might be mean and that it might not
be fun but nothing would sway her resolve. So in fi fth grade,
when football is fi rst offered in Elkton, she was ready to go.
“It was the fi rst practice she walked on the fi eld and there was
one boy that said one rude thing to her and when practice was
over he apologized to her and she has not had a single problem
since. Not one. It’s just been Tayla is part of the team,” said
Rebecca.
Now as a part of the team, the game that she had been warned
against, she has fallen for.
“My very fi rst game that I played, I just loved it so much,”
said Tayla. “But I was exhausted. I was dead. Like I just went
home and laid on the fl oor. I knew that if I didn’t want to be like
that I had to put in a lot of work.”
And so Tayla did just that. In sixth grade she became a starter
and soon after, started weights with Mike Hughes – her sixth
grade and current coach at Elkton High School.
“She has no fear. I mean, she doesn’t. She is extremely com-
mitted to what she does. She has natural strength,” said Hughes.
“For example she started lifting with me when she was in the
seventh grade because I lift with the kids in the weight room.
And now, on the leg press machine, there isn’t a boy on this
team that can out press her. She’s pretty close to 600 pounds and
she does it easy.”
This constant work into making herself better has brought her
to this: her freshman year at Elkton High School. No longer
competing with the middle school boys, Tayla has now entered
into the world of 1A football. Because of the school size in 1A,
there is no freshman or JV team but just the varsity team. This
means that 14-year-old Tayla can conceivably, and consistently,
be facing off against 18-year-old boys on the line of scrimmage.
“I didn’t worry all these other years because, like I said, she’s
always taller and bigger than most of the boys,” said Rebecca.
“Whereas this year, she is not. Most of the boys are bigger than
her.
This is the fi rst year I’ve worried about it. But with her, it’s
not going to do anything to worry. She’s going to do it anyways
so I guess I’ll just, if something happens, we’ll deal with it.”
One adjustment that Tayla did not have to make was fi tting
in with her new team. While there were some players that she
had not played with, since Elkton is a town of 200 and two of
her teammates are her cousins, everyone knew who she was and
they were ready to embrace their new teammate.
“She just fi ts in perfectly with everybody. Same sense of hu-
mor, yeah just fi ts in,” said Jayden Woody who is a captain on
the team and one of Tayla’s cousins. “It’s pretty awesome. It’s
pretty cool knowing that my cousin is a badass. She’s the only
girl on a football team and that’s pretty cool.”
Aside from having to change in a different spot before prac-
tices and games, she is just one of the boys on the team.
“It’s unique, it’s different but it hasn’t been uncomfortable or
weird at all,” said head coach Bill Shaw. “She fi ts in perfect-
ly and… she’s just part of the group. No worse, no better. Just
normal football stuff. There’s never any, ‘Hey, go easy on her.’
There are other kids that I’m more worried about people going
easy on than her.”
While the team fully accepts her and understand what she is
capable of, she can still come as a surprise to her opponents.
“They’ll always whisper something to their buddies,” said
Tayla. “Or they’ll just stare me down, and then I obviously stare
right back at them and we’ll have an intense competition there.
And then they go easy on me because they think, ‘Oh, she’s
a girl. We can take this play off.’ But then I hit them and they
keep coming back harder and harder as I keep going harder and
harder.”
This was the case earlier this season when the Elks took on
Camas Valley on the road. Camas Valley, currently ranked 5th
in 1A, beat Elkton 52-6. In a game that would seemingly be one
to forget, everyone remembers one particular play.
“I told her that when she got into high school that I’m going
to put you on the fi eld and there is going to be some guy on an
opposing team that is either going to not take you for granted
or say a derogatory comment or something like that and when
that person does that I want you to pancake them,” said Hughes.
“So we were at Camas and I put her in there and I think it
must have been the fourth quarter,” Hughes continued. “And
she lined up against, and I mean this kid was, oh I guess 180,
190 pounds. And she came up perfect. Perfect skill, perfect tech-
nique and everything right in the chest plate, turned him and
next thing you know he’s right on his back.”
“She gets ahold of this kid, rolls him over and puts him on
his back on the ground. Just watching that on fi lm is cool stuff,”
said Shaw. “I mean, it means she’s all in and that’s the exciting
part of it. She’s really a football player.”
“It’s funny because against Camas I ended up right next to her
and witnessed the whole thing and was like, ‘Oh god,’” said Jes-
se Abraham, a senior captain on Elkton. “When she fl at backed
that kid we were all like, ‘Oh wow.’”
“And the referee goes oh, a couple adjectives you can’t say,
and he goes, ‘Oop sorry.’ And then I guess one of the coaches
from Camas goes, ‘I told ya, I told ya.’ So I mean, if you under-
estimate her that’s a mistake,” said Hughes.
“I love it when they realize that I’m a girl and that I’m kicking
their butts,” said Tayla.
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Tayla chases down and sacks Prospect Charter's quarterback during a game on
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