Women ready for some football
During the workweek she litigates; on weekends,she crushes bones. Lawyer jokes aside, Lynn Lewis, the 175-pound lawyer cum linebacker for the New York Sharks professional women’s tackle football team, said her two passions suit her like cease and desist, law and order, block and tackle.
“I’m pretty tough, so it’s very aggressive,” she said. “And being a lawyer, you gotta be tough, so the two go together, I guess.”
Lewis, a Bay Ridge resident who since 1999 has been roughing it in the Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL), will strap on the shoulder pads for her first game of the season on Saturday, April 3, when she and the Sharks face the Atlanta Xplosion in Queens.
But Lewis, who shares the field with Veronica Simmons, another Brooklyn-born linewoman, said her sights are set on other foes.
The season, which spans eight games through June, will give the Sharks a second chance to beat the Sacramento Sirens, who last year defeated Lewis and her teammates 41-30 in the IWFL Championship game, the league’s Super Bowl.The loss surprised Lewis, whose team was the defending champion and ended the regular season undefeated.
“When that game comes, we will win,” she said, boldly predicting this season’s first meeting between the teams.
The 44-year-old Bay Ridge native and Fort Hamilton High School alum has torpedoed the pigskin since she was a kid, when she competed with the boys in afternoon games of touch football.
Even after her mother scolded her for playing with the boys, Lewis continued, now with a team full of police officers, nurses and stockbrokers.
The Sharks were formed in 2000, after a Manhattan businesswoman scooped it up andadded it to more than 20 women’s tackle teams nationwide. In Lewis’ first-ever game with the team, the Sharks beat the Minnesota Vixens12-6, proving that New York was ready for some football.
Besides the 5-foot-8 Lewis, at least five other Brooklynites play on the Sharks, including Rose Addison, of Bay Ridge; Darleen Hall, ofPark Slope; Lori DeVivio, of Marine Park; and Virginia “Cha Chi” Leon, a Coney Island-born running back now living on Staten Island.
“We have more Brooklyn roots this year in terms of coaching,” said Lewis, whose Sharks practice three times a week at Fort Hamilton High School.
The team, comprised of about 40 women ranging in age from 19 to 44, has won one championship, when it beat theAustin Outlaws 24-4 in 2002.
Before then, however, Lewis played flag football for the T-Devils, as in Tasmanian Devils, she said.With that team, forwhich she began playing in 1988, she rose to the ranks of captain in 1994, the year she and the team began a four-yearchampionship streak.
As she prepares to begin her 16th year in organized football, Lewis admits that one of her biggest opponents is age.Each year, new, young women join the team, each stronger than the last.
“They’re faster than I am,” said Lewis. “They’re coming into their prime and I’m dwindling. I mean, my aches last weeks. But experience takes the place of quickness.”
by Jotham Sederstrom
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