Shooting Stars: How a Vegas women’s football team went from underdog to contender

Full speed, full contact, they collide like cars with their brake lines cut.

A running back charges hard to the right side of the offensive line, surging past a defensive end, who fails to set the edge.

There’s open field before her; she devours it.

A linebacker charges down laterally to cut off her path.

They meet at the sideline the way an avalanche meets a sapling, the ‘backer blasting the ‘back into an empty folding chair at field’s edge — had someone been sitting in the thing, they’d be off getting stitches right about now.

The running back rests on her knees for a second, catching her breath.

The offense hoots in celebration of a 10-yard gain; the defense does push-ups for allowing it.

This is women’s tackle football and they are tackling.

It’s around 11:30 a.m. on an early Saturday in March, and the Las Vegas Silver Stars are getting after it, getting after each other, halfway through a four-hour practice at Faith Lutheran High School, their home stadium.

They’ve got less than a month to get ready for the start of their fifth season in the Women’s National Football Conference. (Their season started April 6 on the road against the San Diego Rebellion; they return to town April 13 for their home opener.)

The Stars are a team on the rise in the WNFC, a league founded in 2018 that encompasses 16 squads spread across the country, from Seattle to Jackson, Mississippi. The WNFC is attempting to do for women’s football what the WNBA did for women’s basketball: create a vehicle for professional female athletes to earn a living competing in the sport, like their male counterparts.

The league’s making headway: The WNFC has secured such well-monied corporate sponsors as Adidas, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Riddell and United Sports Brands; their games can be watched on livestreaming platform Caffeine.tv; they’ve amassed over 80,000 followers on Instagram; and the league’s advisory board boasts such pro football notables as Phoebe Specter, who became the NFL’s first-ever female coach with the Buffalo Bills in 2017; current Chicago Bears offensive assistant Jennifer King, the league’s first female black coach; Scott Pioli, a decorated former NFL front office executive whose lengthy resume includes three Super Bowl wins with the New England Patriots; and retired San Francisco 49ers All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis, who will be inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame this summer.

But those big names must confront even bigger challenges: There have been many, many other attempts at launching a profitable, sustainable women’s football league dating back to the mid-’60s — and most of them have failed. Plus, other female leagues are already in operation, to various degrees of success.

The WNFC operates on a dental-floss-thin budget where coaches volunteer their time. The players don’t get paid either, salaried only in bruises, some of them moms, others students, all of them balancing day jobs with the rigors of being a professional athlete.

“There is no glory, there is no money, there’s no fans stopping us and wanting our autograph,” notes head coach/team owner Carrie Walters.

What exactly is there, then?

A true love of the game, a sincere desire to elevate women’s place within it and hints of progress — that’s been enough for Walters and her staff to transform the Silver Stars from a bare-bones organization that debuted with a disastrous 0-6 campaign in 2019 into a legitimate title contender that’s made the playoffs and has high expectations entering their fifth season.

Their swagger is palpable.

“Everyone is so dedicated to this championship win that we are confident we are going to get this year,” boasts linebacker Jasmine Logan, a thunderbolt in cleats. “We have got it together.”

The league has taken notice.

“She’s trying to change the narrative for women there in Vegas; she’s leading the charge,” says Elizabeth Jenkins, WNFC president and COO. “Coming from what that team was four years ago to what it is now, it’s insanely impressive. Those girls there, they’re hungry for it.”

They’d better be: Walters needs to win this year.

She’s staked her livelihood on it.

The Stars are born

Sweat and exasperation commingle on her brow.

The sun’s rising, it’s starting to get a little hot — and coach is following suit.

“Pitch it!” Carrie Walters thunders at a quarterback after a failed QB keeper results in a tackle for loss. “What is it with you QBs thinking you’ve got good feet.”

A running joke at practice is Walters threatening to put on her pads and show the team how to properly tackle and run routes herself.

The threat works because there’s at least some truth behind it: a former pro linebacker and wideout, Walters really did strap on her helmet and hit people in her late 40s just two seasons ago.

“And now I’m like, ‘Let me just sip my coffee over here while I dole out some instructions,’” she says.

The edge is still there, though.

“I’m not your mom!” she barks at her younger players at one point. “I could be, but I’m not.”

Walters didn’t discover football until she was 32, but she made up for any lost time real quick when a friend of a friend told her about a new women’s tackle football team being started locally: The Las Vegas Showgirlz, headed by coach Dion Lee, which launched in 2006 as part of the now defunct Women’s Professional Football League.

Walters, who grew up playing baseball but had to switch to softball in high school because she was told that the former was a “boy’s sport,” took to football instantly. She loved the mix of the cerebral and the physical, the way so many moving pieces had to work in unison — or not work at all.

“I would say, maybe after the first month of just practices, I was hooked,” Walters says. “In football, it really is this intricate chess and dance match, where if everyone doesn’t do their job, that one person ends up getting exploited.”

She’d play for 13 seasons before Lee moved on and dissolved the team. Walters then played under Lee for a year in the Lingerie League, subsequently joining him for a time as a football coach at Bonanza High School.

She thought her playing days were over until she attended the wedding of one of her former Showgirlz teammates, where some of the vets from the squad reminisced about how much they missed the game.

“I don’t know if it was me or someone else who came up with the cockamamie idea that we would put together a team and play just independently,” Walters recalled. “We weren’t in a league; we didn’t really want it to be that organized. We just really missed playing for fun.”

After one season heading the team, Walters got a call in 2019 from WNFC founder Odessa Jenkins, a former pro player herself who had competed against Walters during her Showgirlz days.

Jenkins wanted Walters’ team to join her new league, which she’d just started the year before.

“I think the one thing that we realized quickly about Carrie was that, No.1, she had the ability to lead a team in a very, very professional way,” says Elizabeth Jenkins, who’s also a former pro football player and Odessa’s wife. “She wasn’t about the nonsense; she’s a no-drama type person. And frankly, we were looking for a competitive team in what we knew to be, arguably, a very competitive market for a woman’s tackle football team.”

A league of their own

Had Walters been skeptical of Jenkins’ entreaties to join yet another women’s football league, it would have been understandable.

After all, she’d already been through three of them as a member of the Showgirlz alone (The team also played in the Independent Women’s Football League and the Women’s Football Alliance in addition to the WPFL.)

More often than not, they’ve either been either short-lived or sexualized, a la the Lingerie League, that intensely classy mix of pigskin and hot pants.  

And many have been run by men.

By contrast, the WNFC was founded by women — women who played the sport professionally, and who want it to be taken as seriously as they did.

In high school, if you’re a bigger girl, you can’t run track, you can only throw the shot put; you can’t play basketball. Or if you’re too small, you can’t play this sport. ... But football really has a spot for every single female body type. Slow and big; tall and fast; short and thick. ... I realized that girls and women need the opportunity. So we just decided to give women and girls in Las Vegas an outlet.

Carrie Walters, head coach and team owner

For Stars defensive coordinator Christi Acacio, also a former pro, this is a crucial distinction.

“Our experience with other leagues — nothing against men — but it’s hard to work with men when they don’t know where we’re coming from because we didn’t grow up playing the sport,” she says. “Men are on a completely different level, the way they view the game. For women, it has nothing to do with anything else but the love of the sport. And that’s why I love the WNFC: We have the same passion for the game.”

Just as importantly, the WNFC emphasized heightened professionalism and money-generating business acumen with the goal of eventually paying the players. And they possessed the experience to back it up: Jenkins was a successful project manager at Charles Schwab financial services firm before leaving to focus on the WNFC full-time.

Why would someone quit a job like that to oversee a start-up women’s football league?

Because as a self-professed bigger woman, Jenkins might not have ever been in that position in the first place were it not for the confidence she got from football.

“When you grow up as a bigger woman, or bigger girl, you’re going to struggle with confidence internally,” she notes, “because the world tells you you should be a certain size or look a certain way, in order to be considered beautiful and attractive. Football changed that for me. Football gave me the confidence to be a force on the football field, but also a very confident force in my day-to-day life.”

Now, she’s paying it forward by trying to build a league that lasts — and that means establishing elevated standards and expectations for the teams that play under the WNFC banner.

“In a lot of the other leagues that came before us, if you wanted to start a team, you raised your hand, created a logo and you went and had a team,” Jenkins says. “It didn’t matter if there was 12 athletes or 27 athletes. It didn’t matter if you guys had matching helmets. It didn’t matter if you even had a quality field to play on — nothing mattered. If that continued to be the product that the world saw, if that continued to be the product that corporate sponsors saw, nobody was ever going to invest.”

To lure these investors, the WNFC has focused on quality control by fielding fewer teams than some other leagues, but with more players per roster, while insisting on standardized uniforms and legitimate venues.

They’re making progress: Adidas, Dick’s Sporting Goods and other sports-related companies have come on board to support the league.

“We want competitive matchups,” Jenkins says. “We want football that people want to watch. And that’s happening.”

Still, Walters was initially hesitant to join the league, primarily because she had a successful career as a physical therapist. To run a team on top of that was to run herself into the ground — and Walters knew it.

Ultimately, she agreed to take on the responsibility regardless, to become a part of the WNFL, because she wanted to help other women get from football what football had given to her.

As a teenager, she’d been told that she couldn’t compete in a sport that she’d spent her whole life playing simply because she was female.

She didn’t want any other girls to experience the same.

“In high school, if you’re a bigger girl, you can’t run track, you can only throw the shot put; you can’t play basketball. Or if you’re too small, you can’t play this sport,” she says.

“But football really has a spot for every single female body type,” she continues. “Slow and big; tall and fast; short and thick. And so when it came down to continuing the team after that independent season or saying, ‘That’s just too much,’ I realized that girls and women need the opportunity. So we just decided to give women and girls in Las Vegas an outlet.”

And then teach them how to knock the hell out of each other.

Let’s get physical

“You gotta be violent with each other!”

On a chilly Saturday afternoon following the previous week’s practice, Christi Acacio is teaching a group of around a dozen defensive backs and linebackers how to throw hands.

“I want you to ball up your first and punch down,” she instructs, leading a drill where the DBs attempt to strip the ball from a receiver by brute force.

If a player fails to employ the proper technique that Acacio’s just shown them, they’re in danger of receiving a glare just as cold as the winds that gust about the field as dusk begins to settle in.

Acacio’s approachable, yet intense, with a bullhorn for a larynx and a tendency to speak in all caps when she’s on the football field.

“I’m the yeller of the coaches,” she acknowledges during an interview a few weeks later. “I’m pretty tough on the field. My goal this year is to cuss a little less, because I have a sailor mouth.”

“Don’t you (expletive) cut corners,” she tells her players earlier in practice as she orders them to run a timed lap around the field.

Guess she can work on that whole cutting-back-on-the-swearing thing another day.

Acacio has long been Walters’ right-hand woman: she’s been a football lifer since high school, when in 1999, she saw a small article in the Review-Journal on the D.C. Divas, a team in the Women’s Football Alliance. She got so excited, she brought the clipping to school to show a friend.

“I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna do this when I get out of high school. I’m gonna move to the East Coast and play for this team,” Acacio says, her voice purring with teenage excitement 25 years later at the mere recollection of the moment. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I didn’t even know that organized women’s football existed at all.”

A few years later, that same friend would hip Acacio to this new women’s football team being started in town: the Showgirlz.

She was there at the Showgirlz’s very first tryout, playing alongside Walters during the squad’s entire run.

She’s also been with the Silver Stars from the get-go, overseeing the D while Walters serves as the offensive play caller.

One of Acacio’s greatest challenges as the leader of the defense is teaching women who’ve never hit before how to hit. Because girls seldom have opportunities to play organized tackle football growing up, they’re new to fine art of crushing an opponent into the turf.

“A lot of us lack in the football IQ because we didn’t get to play growing up,” explains quarterback Michelle “Mo” Oetjen, who lives in Reno and is one of five Stars who commute from out of town, some from as far away as Seattle. “And so I think what’s hard is coaching women, as adults, who are learning a brand new sport. I think coaches expect us to be at a different level, even though we’re not there yet, because we haven’t been given the opportunity.”

They’re getting it now.

This year’s Silver Stars roster consists of about 20 rookies who made the team after tryouts late last summer. They join around 25 to 28 returning players. The youngest Star is 18, the oldest 53; the median age for the team somewhere in the late-20s/early-30s, Walters estimates.

Among the new faces is Girly Tambeagbor, a native of Cameroon who emigrated to Las Vegas when she was in junior high.

Last August during a visit to her home country, she happened across an ad for the Silver Stars on Instagram.

“I’m like, There’s no way that there’s a Vegas team with women’s football,” she recalls. “That sparked my interest because before that point, I had never heard of women playing football at all.”

Neither had her relatives in Africa.

“I showed them a picture of it, like, ‘There’s women playing this sport,” she remembers. “And the ones that kind of had an idea of what football was, were very shocked, ‘There’s no way a woman is playing that sport because it’s so physical.’ And that’s the opposite of what they kind of view women as, being that aggressive, being physical.”

A longtime soccer player, Tambeagbor made the team as a defensive back thanks to her speed and athleticism.

On the other side of the ball, fellow rookie Ashlea Moore, a wideout with field-stretching quickness and a background in softball, cheerleading and other sports, has had to get to used to contact in a different way: receiving it.

“Hitting was the biggest learning curve for sure,” she says. “Contact has always been something in every other sport that you tried to avoid. Our bodies are so taught to avoid it and move different ways.”

There’s no avoiding it today.

“Yeah, Christine! Push her ass!” a player shouts from the sideline after a wide receiver strong arms a defender, shoving her hard, creating separation.

This hitting thing? They’re getting it down.

Huddled on the sideline, bundled up against the cold now that night has fallen, Stephanie Laury, mother of young defensive end Tiffani Penix, takes in her daughter’s first go at football.

She’s already noticed a difference in her.

“She can be a little introverted, a little timid,” Laury says. “But this here, this being a really physical sport, this is really bringing her out. I can’t wait for the season to start.”

We’re three weeks away.

Full-contact daycare

The little girl sits in the grass, resting against her back against her mother’s shoulder pads, which rise to the nape of her neck.

Soon, two young boys will sit down nearby and eat sandwiches wrapped in tin foil as mom gets ready to follow a long day at work … with more work.

And football practice doesn’t wait for dinner time.

It’s 6:30 p.m. on the final Thursday of March, the last full week of practice before next Saturday’s season-opening game.

The team has moved to Desert Breeze Park for this session, getting in some extra reps for three hours, which probably feel like a lot more than that, considering how hard Walters works the linemen.

“We’ve got to comfortable being uncomfortable,” she explains, making them squat into their stances and hold the pose for 15 lactic acid-inducing seconds.

“15 seconds!” Walters shouts. “You can do anything for 15 seconds.”

To see a half-dozen kids looking on as their mothers get put through the paces is a common sight at practice — what’s a mom to do when it’s time to blitz the passer and a babysitter’s not an option?

Acacio wonders — rhetorically — if her players’ male counterparts have to navigate the same responsibilities as parents.

“I can only compare it to men,” she says, “because a lot of them have a great support system as far as, like, if you have kids, these men have wives and girlfriends that can take care of the kids while they do their thing.

“For women, we don’t even have that,” she continues. “We have a friggin’ whole daycare at our practices. We’re over here trying to run plays, and half the players are trying to cater to the kids. And then they gotta go home and feed the kids and get up and go to work. Some of us work nine-to-five, or even 10- to 12-hour days, and then still go to practice at night. And then do it all over again, you know?”

And they must pay for the privilege to do so: Each player has to contribute $350 to join the Stars and then fundraise another $400 on top of that to help cover team pay expenses.

“That still barely gets us through the season,” Walters notes. “That doesn’t even really cover our playoffs.”

The league’s Adidas sponsorship means that their uniforms are free, at least.

Just to be able to be an example to my kids, is one of the best titles that I’ve ever carried. Everything that I do on the field, I do it because I want my kids to know — and not just my daughters, but even my boys as well — I want them to know that they can be anything they want, whether if you’re playing sports, if you’re doing anything, you can do it. And that makes me, as a mother, feel like I’m doing my part. They can see it.

Similiti “Liti” Lealiki, defensive tackle

But then there’s traveling to away games.

For weeks leading up to the team’s season opener in San Diego this weekend, Walters struggled to find a charter bus to take the team there and back, with numerous companies accepting the job only to later back out, ostensibly landing higher-paying gigs than shuttling a women’s’ football team hundreds of miles each way.

Same thing happened last season for a game in Denver.

“I just keep making phone calls; I just keep trying,” she says. “And sometimes miracles happen.”

And sometimes they don’t: The Stars traveled to the game by van.

So why endure all of this? What makes any of it worth it?

For Similiti “Liti” Lealiki, a veteran defensive tackle who grew up on the island of Tonga where she wasn’t allowed to play sports, and whose bulldozing physique is the very picture of power, the answer lies in part with all those kids at practice.

“I’m 35 years old, like, I know my body’s gonna eventually be done. I’m not gonna be able to do this,” she acknowledges, having played pro ball for over a decade, including time with the Showgirlz. “But just to be able to be an example to my kids, is one of the best titles that I’ve ever carried.

“Everything that I do on the field, I do it because I want my kids to know — and not just my daughters, but even my boys as well — I want them to know that they can be anything they want,” she continues, “whether if you’re playing sports, if you’re doing anything, you can do it. And that makes me, as a mother, feel like I’m doing my part. They can see it.”

Title aspirations

Every weekend she hops a plane from San Diego to Las Vegas to run for her life.

Adriana “AG” Gutierrez is one of the best running backs in the WNFC, an all-pro who led the league in rushing yards in 2022 for the San Diego Rebellion.

This season, the seven-year vet has left her hometown team to join the Silver Stars, a major addition to the squad with the potential to serve as a rocket booster for the offense, lured to the Stars by the promise of a team on the verge.

“Vegas has always been a team that has been trending every year,” says Gutierrez, who graduates from San Diego State University next month. “They’ve been a younger team, but they’ve always continued to have that upward trajectory. That’s something that really, like, location-wise and the culture, was what drew me to them.”

Vegas has lost four straight to the Rebellion, including a playoff tilt in 2021.

But as Gutierrez tells it, the Stars always played the Rebellion tough.

And she took notice.

“When I look at Vegas, I used to think they played their best game against San Diego, like they have so much grit. They gave it to San Diego, year after year after year,” she says. “They’ve always been an ‘almost’ team, an underdog team.

“We knew one of our hardest games would be against them,” she continues. “We knew they were going to give it to us every single time. They’re resilient. They’re passionate. They get rowdy at times, and they get loud, but at the end of the day, they’re very true to who they are.”

And they’ve made clear and steady progress.

The team didn’t win a game in its first year. Walters’ mother was battling lung cancer in the lead-up to the season, and she was focused on taking care of her.

Five days before the Stars’ debut game, she passed away.

”Our first season was really just about me not crumbling, and the organization not crumbling,” Walters says. “We went 0-6. It was terrible. The play calling was bad. Like, everything was bad. And I own that, because I was the one that couldn’t show up — I mean, I showed up, but I mentally couldn’t show up.

“So the next season I was like, ‘Hey, we are better; we can be better,” she continues. “And so we just really started studying film, and a couple of the players that I had played with decided to transition to coaching. We really just started grinding. We started doing grassroots reach-outs for new players and get the word out.”

Their efforts paid off: During their second season, the Stars went 4-3, made the playoffs, and were voted the league’s “Team of the Year.” Following a 3-3 record next season, they were named “Ownership Group of the Year.”

They’ve haven’t had a losing season since.

The Stars have continued to grow, expanding their coaching staff, which now includes an assistant offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach, a line coach, a running backs coach and a general manager.

In another significant turning point for the squad, Walters has left her physical therapy job to focus on the Stars full-time this season.

“When I quit my job, I just decided, ‘Hey, let me see if by really, really investing into this team, if it will work,” she explains. “Fortunately for the team, I think that it definitely has improved our football in general. I have more time to meet up with players outside of practice. I have more time to watch film. I have more time to meet with the coaches.

“But unfortunately, it worked,” she continues. “And so now, what do I do after this season? Do I not go back to work full-time? Do I keep chiseling away at my savings? Like, what do I do? So, I tell the players all the time, ‘We need to win the championship this year, so that I can really decide that it was worth it, sacrificing that for the bigger picture.”

In it to win it

Girly Tambeagbor looks into her bedroom and adjusts the bandana that’ll keep the sweat from eyes in an hour or so.

She’s getting ready for the Stars’ first practice since their scrimmage against the Central Valley Chaos in Bakersfield, California the previous weekend.

It was the first time Tambeagbor took the field against anyone other than her teammates.

Last night, they reviewed the game film during a Zoom meeting.

“I did some rookie mistakes, coach called it out, which is good,” she says. “I love when my mistakes are out there on film, because that helps me learn.”

Tackling remains her main concern.

“My biggest thing is hitting properly,” she says. “Today I’m actually going to do full-on hits to get used to it even more before game time.”

In the corner of the room sits the desk where Tambeagbor spends her days, working from her North Las Vegas home as a software designer.

She graduated from college a year ago, her education complete, though she didn’t quite feel the same way about herself.

“After school, I kind of just had this big hole in my life where I didn’t know what to do with all that time,” she says. “I was very lonely before football. I’m done with school; I’m now working, but there’s nothing else. I didn’t have that other thing apart from work.

“So when I found football, and I got to know the another girls, joined the team, it’s given me my ‘else,’” she continues. “I want to be the best player I can be to do the team justice, because they’ve changed my life more than they know.”

She thinks about how things might be different for her if girls had the same opportunity to play organized football growing up as the boys did, if she had access to the sense of fulfillment that she speaks of now back when she was a kid.

“Who knows where I would have gone, what I would have been now if I knew that I could play football in the future,” she says. “It’s just something that I just never could have imagined.”

And so it’s important to her to get on that field and leave nothing to the imagination.

“The younger girls, when they see women like us playing professional football, I think something’s going to click in that young girl’s mind,” she says. “That’s something that a lot of us growing up didn’t think was the case.

“I’m sure other girls will relate,” she continues. “We always have put ourselves in boxes. And society has put us in boxes, like, ‘This is the kind of sports you can play. This is what is girly enough for you.’ I think that what this does, seeing women play tackle football at a professional level, just breaks down those boxes, those walls that these younger girls have around themselves and view themselves in.”

Before long, Tambeagbor’s packing her gear into the trunk of her car and heading to practice.

It’s a chilly, overcast evening, the team starting practice with around 20 minutes of drills to limber up and get the blood flowing — they sprint and squat and hurl their bodies through the air.

“What you got Girly?!” someone yells as teammates push each to go harder, harder.

Whether or not these women fulfill their goal of becoming champions this season remains to be seen, but they already carry themselves like they’ve won something.

Watching them grunt and sweat and hit each other, you start to think that they maybe they have.

Because somehow, they’ve made it here, made it to this cold field on a cold night, in defiance of day jobs and long drives and homework and 6 a.m. flights and the kids that need to be fed in between tacking drills and on and on and on.

What’s that if not a victory?

“You would have never known that this group of people could come together and do something like this,” Ashlea Moore notes a few days earlier when asked what makes all the sacrifice worthwhile.

“I never would have expected to find a family,” she continues, “on a field that I never thought I would belong on.”

For Silver Stars schedule and tickets go to lvsilverstars.com.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram