EDMONTON – There was no going back to touch football once Terry Yahnke experienced the dizzying thud of helmet striking shoulder pad.
Yahnke, 40, was one of the founders of the Edmonton Storm, six-time western Canadian tackle football champs and members of the Western Woman’s Canadian Football League. As a defensive back, Yahnke also hustled and hit her way onto Canada’s silver-medal team at a tournament last year in Sweden.
“It takes the adrenalin rush so much higher than a non-contact sport,” Yahnke said. “It heightens your senses, it makes you more aware, you run as fast as you can run and tackle as hard as you can tackle.”
Yahnke has mixed feelings about Wednesday’s announcement that Edmonton will field a Lingerie Football League team next year as part of the LFL Canada’s inaugural 2012 season. Having seen lingerie football on TV in a popular Manhattan bar, Yahnke isn’t denying there may be an audience out there. And as an intensive care nurse, she’s all for women’s athletics. She won’t deny the league’s competitors are athletes.
But Yahnke thinks the game – in which competitors wear helmets, shoulder and knee pads, and numbered bikinis – is “watered down” and modified to accommodate its “sexualized” format.
“The beauty of tackle football is the range of athletes that you have,” said Yahnke. “Lingerie football only appeals to a very small athletic group: the ones with really big boobs.”
Mitchell S. Mortaza, who founded the LFL in 2009, has never denied the uniforms – or lack thereof – are what gets people’s attention. But he expects the athletics to win over the skeptics.
“If I wasn’t involved with the league and you came to me and said there’s something called the Lingerie Football League, I’d probably roll my eyes and think it’s making a mockery of the game,” Mortaza said from Las Vegas. “When you see this product and see the calibre of the athletes, it changes perceptions instantly.”
The LFL grew out of “The Lingerie Bowl,” a Super Bowl halftime show that ran for five years. It’s expanded to 12 teams, including Toronto, with plans for forays into Australia and Europe in coming years.
Edmonton’s unnamed squad will join the existing Toronto Triumph in a Canadian division, along with squads from Calgary, Vancouver, Quebec City and Montreal. A 12week season will culminate in the Canadian Lingerie Bowl in Toronto on Nov. 24, 2012, the night before the 2012 Grey Cup.
Like the other Canadian teams, Mortaza said Edmonton was picked because of its blue-collar composition and support of CFL and NHL teams. A national consultant has been hired to recruit local players with tryouts in each market.
The league is giving a nod to Canadian football rules by adopting three downs. Teams will play seven on seven in a condensed field.
Games will be held indoors in 2012, with plans to move outside and into a spring-summer season in 2013. Mortaza said negotiations with local Edmonton venues are already underway. Tickets will likely cost about $50 to $55.
Previous expansion attempts of the league have occasionally prompted controversy. In November, Oklahoma City’s mayor banned the league from all city-owned venues. In May, the Toronto Triumph roster hit the headlines when it was cracked by linebacker Krista Ford, daughter of city Coun. Doug Ford and niece of Mayor Rob Ford, Mortaza is never surprised at pushback, but the likelihood of an official uproar in Edmonton is small. Coun. Bryan Anderson, who coached high school football and basketball for over three decades, called the announcement a “non-issue.”
“It’s not worth my time to consider,” Anderson said. “I can’t believe it’s going to have any legs.”
Count Yahnke beside Anderson in the crowd of skeptics. She said she’ll probably go to a game to see what it’s about, but she’s not sure Edmonton’s existing football fans – many of them female – will keep coming back.
“I think they’ll have the novelty factor for a year, and then it’ll be a struggle after that,” she said.
Comments