Burlington Flag Football Association
Brian Hemming can rattle off the story like it happened yesterday. How he’d just been named director of the Burlington Flag Football Association and how when he was at a party for his daughter Holly’s hockey team, he and some other parents looked out of a window and saw the entire team throwing around a football, having a blast.
“We said, ‘You know what we should do? Nobody’s ever done this, let’s put a girl’s team in,’” Hemming says, sitting at a table at QB Sports Bar Grill in Burlington.
“So we did. That was them prying the door open. Since then we’ve kicked the door open.”
That’s the origin story of the Wildcats, the first all-girls flag football team to play organized football in the BMFA. The view out of that window took place in December, 2012. Six full seasons later, the girls have grown up together, the majority of them playing hockey in the winter and stepping onto fields around Burlington every Saturday from the end of April until the end of June. They’ve played together against all-boys teams, against co-ed teams and eventually against the other eight all-girls teams that would make their way into the league after them.
They’re all in grade 12 now, with university and a new chapter in life waiting for them in the fall. Before that, though, they have this one final season together.
“We’re going to leave a mark this year,” Hemming promises.
Holly, the Wildcats’ centre, sits to her dad’s left. Jenna M., their quarterback, is next to her. Alyssa M., the Wildcats’ safety, sits across from Jenna. Ava S., a defensive back, sits next to Alyssa (the girls’ parents requested that last names not be used).
As they eat pizza and reminisce over these last few years, their finish-each-other’s-sentence familiarity is hard to miss. They laugh at the ridiculous things that kids do when they’re on trips together, like dragging all of their mattresses into one room, turning it into a sleepless sauna. Over that time, Holly has become the team’s de facto video editor, documenting their moments on and off the field together. The highlights, the lowlights and the day-to-day laughs are shared over every type of group chat imaginable.
“We talk all the time. We’re always in constant contact with each other,” Holly says. “We have a Snapchat group chat, Instagram, messages group chat…” the list goes on.
“They got put on a team and they became teammates and now they’ve become a family where they’re real tight,” Hemming says. “I’m dead sure that if any one of the 10 of them or me said, ‘I’m having a problem, I need to talk to you.’ The other 10 would have a three-word answer: on my way.
“That has happened,” Jenna says.
What has also happened while these girls have been having their unassuming fun on the field is that they’ve become pioneers of sorts for the rest of the community. Hemming, a lifelong football coach, remembers that first season. He knew he had athletes but had to immerse them in a new game. He used hockey terminology with them to start and kept things simple. They run seven or eight defences now. Back then they ran two.
“They got it. They’re brilliant,” he says. “Great athletes and smart.”
The four girls at the table didn’t remember any negativity in their first games against boys. Other than nerves about playing a new sport and questioning if they knew what they were doing from play-to-play, it felt like the beginnings of any other sport they’d played.
“I don’t think it was an odd feeling for this group,” Hemming says.
“It may have been on the boys’ side and typically, because you can’t get away from it, a 12-year-old boy will go, ‘We’re playing a girls’ team, ha ha ha.’
“We won our third game we ever played. That’s pretty serious. I had to go to that coach and say, ‘You’re in the record books for all the wrong reasons now. You’re the first guy to ever get beat by an all-girls team. Have a nice day.’”
Hemming seems to get some joy out of delivering that type of news.
“He does,” all four girls laugh.
“I’ve been coaching for a long time and it never happened,” he says in his defence.
“We had no idea (what to expect). We could have gotten smoked 75-0 all season long and no one’s coming back ever after that. It didn’t work out that way. I was really, really lucky to have gifted athletes in my stable. And smart.”
As the Wildcats showed they could hold their own against the boys, other girls started to notice. Hemming says the flag league is now 10 per cent female.
“My sister is three years younger than me and she plays now on the all-girls team and she really likes it,” Ava says.
“I think she’s gotten some of her skills from watching me. I started playing before her and that’s how it happened with hockey, too. My sister seems to follow in my footsteps.”
“We do our fundraisers and we see little girls playing with the boys and they’re outrunning them all, playing their hearts out. It’s like, good for you,” Jenna says.
“We’ll always cheer for the girls,” Ava adds.
“I don’t know if they think about it that much, but when they do there are eight other teams behind them of sisters who are out watching football,” Hemming says.
“We’re at 10 per cent female football participation in the BMFA, which was until (2013) was totally dominated by men.
“These girls have earned the respect of everybody they’ve played. No one takes them for granted. They’re playing against some pretty good male football players and nobody takes them for granted. Every year a few times there are 10 confused young men looking at their dads saying, ‘I don’t know what happened, dad. They beat us.’”
Hemming has seen enrollment in his flag program explode over the last six years. They were at about 350 players when he became director. They’re over 1,100 players now.
Last year, Hemming was presented the Michael V. Young “What Ya Gotta Do” award by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for the growth of the flag league.
The girls have improved each year and Hemming swears they were on their way to a gold medal at nationals this past year before a slew of injuries hit them at the worst possible time. Their rusher — “the best rusher in the country; she had MVP written all over her,” Hemming says — blew her ACL. Their top receiver couldn’t get back from a family vacation in Europe after her mom got food poisoning. Ava ended up crutches with an ankle injury. Another girl had a whiplash injury. And Holly had the bursa sac in her knee break. While she watched it balloon on her, her teammates did what they could to get her help.
“We were going back to the residence and there was a shopping cart, so they put me in it and pushed me to the residence and then pushed me to the hospital,” she says. Another story that gets huge laughs out of her teammates.
Through 50-plus-years involved in football, Hemming has picked up accolades. He won the Michael Young award last year and is an inductee in the Golden Horseshoe Touch Football Association’s hall of fame.
“None of that comes anywhere near this,” he says, pointing to the Wildcats’ logo on his jacket, the same one the four girls are wearing. He thinks back to a few weeks ago when he came home from work and a group of the girls were at his house with Holly. He wanted to talk to them about his plans for next year. He wants to teach flag football to handicapped kids and offer a clinic to underprivileged parts of the city.
When he called out to them, they all took a knee, right there in his kitchen.
“They all took a knee, that’s nuts. I’m thinking back, how did that happen?” he says.
“Football is life, right? It’s going to be clear to everyone (when they go to university) how good these girls are and how much they’re leaders, without trying to be a leader. They’re going to be obvious leaders with their skills and the way they approach life.”
