After the Superbowl, I was telling some friends how I always loved playing football and spent many  afternoons with my brothers and the neighborhood boys playing in one of the vacant lots. I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite movies from my childhood:  Quarterback Princess. Not  many people have heard of it even though Helen Hunt plays the starring role. It was one of the first movies we video taped with our VHS VCR, and so I watched it for years after it came out.

For those not familiar, here’s a quick synopsis. A teenager moves to a new town and wants to play football. The small town and PTA are pretty sexist and don’t think girls should play football. She tries out and makes the team anyway, and she’s good, and they start winning. And she begins winning the favor of her teammates. So over the course of the movie and with some of your teammates who become allies, the sentiment towards her changes. At the end, she is also voted homecoming queen.

The movie came out in  1983, which was 20, I mean 30 years ago. Every now and again, I see a story in the news about a teenage girl playing football, but for the most part, things haven’t changed much in all these years.

There’s this article from last summer: Sami Grisafe, USA All-Star Female Quarterback, SLAYS National Anthem At Worlds

And evidently, this just came out last week–The Tackle Girls: One Team, One Mission

It turns out the Quarterback Princess is available on YouTube.

<And on a side note, the Superbowl ads would also have us believe that men do ALL the driving, too. I’ve never seen so many ads for cars and trucks.>