All of the players finally have their helmets and pads by early March, a few weeks before the team’s first game. On a gray, chilly Saturday morning, they gather on a practice field in West Eugene for the team’s first tackling drill.

First, they work their way through calisthenics and run a few laps around the field, while the quarterback’s dog, leashed to the fence, barks and whines and strains to get to her owner.

"I can’t wait to see what she does when someone hits me," the quarterback says.

"Want me to try now?" asks Crawford, grinning playfully as she wraps her neck-length brown hair in a bandana before donning her helmet.

The drill following warm-up is supposed to teach the basics – hit the runner low, wrap her up and drive her backward. The players form two single-file lines. A player from one line runs diagonally across the field carrying a football, and a player from the other line has to catch her, hit her and push her back. It’s not supposed to be a tackle, not yet.

Crawford’s first try is tentative and awkward. She hits her teammate high, her shoulder on the runner’s back, her facemask pressed to the runner’s shoulder. She pushes the runner back, but then she falls down and rolls, bringing the runner down on top of her.

"What is this, ballerina class?" someone chides.

On her next turn, Crawford faces the quarterback, whose dog is indeed going crazy on the sidelines. The hit is technically good – Crawford’s head is up, and she wraps her arms around the other player’s waist and drives her back – but it’s also gentle. The impact sounds more like a polite clap that the hard smack of shoulder pads colliding. The coach isn’t satisfied.

"You know, you do have pads on," he tells Crawford as she jogs back to the line.
She continues to rotate through the lines. During a couple of turns as ball carrier, she stiff-arms her would-be tacklers and runs free.

Then it’s her last try at tackling for the day.

The coach blows his whistle, and Crawford springs from her crouch. A teammate, holding a football tightly, dashes to Crawford’s left, trying to get by untouched – which Crawford cannot allow.

She jets toward the ball carrier, arms out, legs pumping her armored body forward. They’re on a collision course. In a few seconds Crawford will know if her hit is good enough to stop someone, if she really belongs out here.

Crawford lowers her head and drives a shoulder into the ball carrier’s hip, legs still pumping, arms wrapping around the player’s body. The runner’s feet leave the ground. Momentum propels the pair a few feet before they slam to the ground, Crawford in control the entire time.

Hmmm, she thinks, sauntering back to the other players, victorious. That wasn’t bad.

ALAN CHOATE, a former Alabama newspaper reporter who hails from Texas, is a second-year student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon