Sudbury Star, Ben Leeson
A volunteer for the Sudbury Spartans for nine years, Tracy Levesque is a fixture on the sideline for the local Northern Football Conference entry.
But though she hadn’t stepped onto the field itself for nearly a decade and a half, Levesque missed her playing days, first in the Joe Macdonald Youth Football League, then with the Sudbury Secondary School boys team.
“My brother, Trevor Levesque, played the first six years, when Joe Mac first started,” Levesque recalled. “He played for Central City and had five championships in six years. After standing around watching him play for three, four, five years, I decided, hey, I want to have a crack at that. My dad told me I had to put some weight on before he was going to let me play football and apparently I did, so he let me play the next year. My brother and I actually played together on the same team during my first year.”
She was standing near Spartans head coach Junior Labrosse last year when Liston Bates, program co-ordinator for MIFA Football, which oversees the NFC’s Oakville Longhorns, approached the Sudbury staff about sending players to suit up for the MIFA All-Stars in the International Bowl against Team America.
When Bates mentioned MIFA also had a women’s tackle team, she could hardly contain her excitement.
“I poke the person next to me, the trainer or equipment manager for the Longhorns, and I say, ‘Hey, how do you get on the women’s team?’ He elbows Liston and he says, ‘Hey, she wants to be on the women’s team.’ Liston looks at me and he goes, ‘You play football? Alright, here’s my number.’ ”
A few weeks later, she stepped in at cornerback for their game against Mexico.
“It was amazing,” she said. “I was nervous, because my last active year in football was 2003, so I hadn’t played in about 14 years, I was really out of shape and I wasn’t expecting to ever play football again, but when the opportunity came, he was like, ‘By the way, we play Mexico in like three weeks.’ ”
Levesque thoroughly enjoyed the experience, however, and is disappointed she won’t be able to accompany the team on a trip to Mexico this weekend. She does, however, plan to join the MIFA squad for games in Oakville and Montreal later this year.
She’s one of a handful of Greater Sudburians on the roster, part of a group that includes Kirsi Fahey and Melissa Tardibuono. A few more come from North Bay.
“We get a lot of respect, because we travel down almost every other weekend for practices,” Levesque said. “It’s all at our own expense, we pay for practices if we have to book an indoor field, we pay for our own player fees. Some of the girls have sponsorships and I’m personally going after sponsorships here in town.”
Bates is impressed with the players’ dedication, as well as with their willingness to assist one another with travel expenses and even provide out-of-town players with places to stay.
“We have players coming from all over Ontario,” Bates said. “It’s great that people from all over Ontario are working together and connecting and coming together under one roof.”
In addition to the Longhorns semi-pro team and men’s all stars, MIFA has long-running flag and winter indoor programs. In the youngest divisions, Bates said, registration of females has actually outpaced that of males.
“That’s huge, because we were targeting that,” he said. “That started going up to adult co-ed flag. We started getting the moms of the kids we coached and someone made the comment, hey, imagine if we could get them in pads. I said that was always a vision, but I didn’t see how we could play. So we created an international circuit to play an International Bowl game against one country that is serious about tackle football, which is Mexico. We took a team down there last May and played in Mexico, and it was a huge experience for a lot of women. We lost, but we came back and social media started going nuts with women asking to join and we actually doubled in numbers within a few weeks.”
Levesque is trying to keep that growth going by encouraging other locals to sign up.
“It’s fantastic,” Levesque said. “It’s hard to get the program to grow, because a lot of women don’t think they can do it, but it’s not hard.”
She encourages anyone interested in women’s tackle to give it a try.
“Just give it a shot,” she said. “What’s the worst that’s going to happen? It’s all about teaching, the women are very close with each other, we try to help each other a lot, which is nice, and the more the program grows, the easier it’s going to be on the girls who are a part of the team already.”