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NEW CASTLE NEWS, THURSDAY, JULY 5, 19H4Girl punter wants on high school clubSLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. (UPI) -Denise Adams intends to play football with the boys this fall or to fight the powers that be trying.The pretty 16-year-old junior, who may be the nation’s only scholastic football player in the fall, is trying out for punter on the varsity Glassboro (N.J.) High School Bulldogs.Adams, a girls’ scholastic field hockey and softball player, is learning the fine points of the punting craft at Slippery Rock University Tuesday through today at a punt-kick camp, conducted by Professional Kicking Services of Sparks, Nev.The traveling camp drew 25 high school kids to Slippery Rock from Pennsylvania and surrounding states at about $200 a crack.Seattle Seahawks’ kicking coach Steve Hoffman, a camp staffer, says Adams, who has a near perfect 3.85 grade point average, “Does better than a lot of guys as far as technique goes. . . . She is smaller and lighter and will have to maximize energy transfer to get all she has into the ball.”But 5-foot-3-'2, 110-pound blond sees storm clouds gathering.She said several years ago a girl at Kingsway in Camden, N.J., made it through a grueling two-week football camp only to be told by the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association her gender barred her from playing scholastic football.Adams intends to show them a bit about competition if necessary.“I’ll fight them (if they bar her),” she vowed. “They already turned somebody else down. But I see no reason that if I work as hard as every single one why I should not have the privilege to play.”Her father, a building inspector, didn’t believe she was serious until she sat both parents in the school bleachers and punted some balls. “From then on they were for me,”she said, noting her two sisters aren’t as athletic as she.Denise has boyfriends, likes parties and is convinced football won’t diminish her femininity.“I'm strictly a football player on the field and my social life does not interact with this,” she said. ‘Tm still the normal Denise.”She also eventually would like to punt for a college team and return to Glassboro High as a math teacher and its first female athletic director.Adams said 35 boys tried out last season and all made the Bulldogs at the small 650-student school. “The coach says I have a good shot” at making the squad, she noted.And while the punter is back, he punted only eight times for the championship team last season. Denise is “pretty confident’’ she can beat him out.4She said she has played sandlot tackle football wearing no pads with neighborhood boys and girls for nearly a decade and, “I get hurt in everything else but football.”While she calls herself ambivalent about the women’s rights movement, Adams said she was given courage by a recent television movie about a girl from Oregon who became her high school’s starting quarterback.“I always dreamed about becoming a football player since I was little.” she said. “(The movie) kind of gave me the initiative to go aheafl.”Ticket applications mailedThe letters of application for season tickets have been mailed to all of those who purchased season tickets last year to New Castle High’s football games.The Red Hurricane will open its seven-game home schedule at Taggart Stadium on Aug. 31 with a nonleague game against Youngstown South.
Newspaper Details
New Castle News
New Castle, Pennsylvania, US
Thu, Jul 05, 1984
Page 25
Full Page
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Anonymous
FL, USA 28 Feb 2025
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