Tualatin girls flag football Coach Bubba Lemon told his team football was like another language, but Kimberly Pineda Uriostegui was still a bit taken back.
“As someone who is bilingual, I did not expect that at all, because there is just a lot more than I thought there would be,” said the senior. “We have aux and colors – white, gold – and dog and snake. Then Bubba would be like, ’22, 53, tight on one,’ and I’m like, ‘Whoa. Come on. Let’s slow down.’”
Pineda Uriostegui said she’s having a blast as part of the school’s inaugural flag football team, language barrier of sorts and all. It’s the first year Tualatin has a team, and she’s disappointed it didn’t happen sooner.
Girls flag football was designated as an emerging activity by the Oregon School Activities Association in October, and will now have two years to see if enough schools participate to vote on making it an official sport.
Lemon thinks a part of the reason so many girls new to football have taken to it so quickly, like Pineda Uriostegui, is because he isn’t taking it easy. He’s treating it like football, and the girls are responding.
“This is something new and exciting, and you can see they have a blast at every single practice,” Lemon said. “They love how much they’re learning. We have girls walking up to us all the time asking if they can still join the team.”
Pineda Uriostegui said her friends who are coming to games have noticed the same thing.
“I thought it was going to be like some powderpuff type of situation, but this is actually football,” she said. “I’ve had a bunch of my friends come and be like, ‘Oh, wow. I didn’t know you can do that. I want to do that.’ It’s real football.”
There’s another group who has shown plenty of excitement about the team beyond the players and others at the school.
“The dads are excited, too,” Lemon said. “When they go home, we send them home with the playbook and the girls start talking about it and the dads are like, ‘Oh, wait, they’re learning real stuff.’”
Multiple girls on the team said their dads have been working with them at home, either learning how to play the game or going outside to throw the ball around.
Freshman receiver Sydney Murdick said her dad played football his whole life, and she has grown up watching the sport with him.
“He loves throwing the ball around with me and helping me work on routes,” she said.
Junior Ries Miadich is the team’s quarterback and comes to the season with some championship seasoning. She was a starter on the Tualatin girls basketball team that just won the state title in March, and her dad was a state-champion quarterback at Lakeridge.
“He was super excited,” Miadich said when she told her dad she was going to play football. “I picked number six because that was his number, and I play the same position as him. He’s been real excited to watch.”
Through the early parts of the season, the Miadich and the offense have been clicking. The Timberwolves won their opener, 54-6, against Molalla. They then dropped an overtime game 13-12 against Lake Oswego, and followed that up with a 31-6 win against Sherwood and a 19-6 win against Gresham.
While Miadich knew she wanted to play quarterback like her dad, others on the team said they tried playing all over the field before finding a position they settled into.
Murdick said she started at receiver but Lemon moved her to running back after a few games, and she’s liking the new spot on the field.
“I like running and catching, so outside and corner are my favorite positions on the field,” junior Aniya Duncan said.
One thing that has helped, Lemon said, is splitting the 24 girls who came out for the team into a varsity team and a JV team. Some girls play on both, but it has helped in the learning and development, he said.
“You’ve got a group that might be ready to go all out and a group that is just learning how to play at the same time,” Lemon said. “I think that was probably one of the best decisions we made in getting going.”
Lemon said as long as the girls are willing to put in the effort and learn, he’s happy to have them no matter their experience with the game, either playing it or watching it.
“We have one girl who actually playing youth football,” Lemon said. “Then we have some girls where I was trying to explain what we were going to run, and they’d say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What’s the line of scrimmage?’”
He said the first two days of the year were spent in the classroom going over basics on a whiteboard.
“I just told them to ask all the questions,” He said. “There were no stupid questions. Nobody knows everything. It was really fun to see them go from learning what the line of scrimmage is to where I can actually talk to them like when I coached at college.”
Lemon, who is currently the head coach of the boys basketball team at Tualatin, spent nine years on the coaching staff of the Willamette University football team.
“We’re laying the foundation for the future,” Lemon said. “After the season, you have offseason workouts and all of those things that will lead into it for the next time. It’s just going to get better.”
The girls on the team agree.
“It’s a great opportunity to be on the first team,” Duncan said. “If it keeps going on throughout the years and growing, I can say I was part of it at the start.”
