ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – It’s a small K-12 school on Georgia’s St. Simons Island.
Frederica Academy’s graduating class this year is the largest it’s ever been -- 50 students.
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Its homecoming queen is also one of its varsity football team kickers.
No matter how big a high school is, you won’t find many female students on the football team.
But the “Home of the Knights” has fully embraced the role that graduating senior Mary Ford Fitzjurls all but stumbled into back in the 8th grade.
“During football season, our starting kicker for the middle school team, who was one of my friends who also played soccer, broke his arm, and so our team didn’t have a kicker from the beginning of the season,” Mary Ford explained.
Mary Ford wanted to see if she could foot the bill as the team’s place kicker and was excited to ask her mom, Misty Lee Williams. After all, Mary Ford had been inspired by a history-making Vanderbilt University female football kicker.
“I was definitely thinking no, no, no, not interested,” Williams recalled, laughing. “[We’re] busy playing soccer,” was mom’s final answer.
So for kicks, Mary Ford said she tried out anyway.
“I had like an informal tryout just to see if I could do it,” she said with a smirk. “I kicked a field goal and it was good and [Football] Coach Lawless...I think I remember him saying, ‘Welcome to the team.’”
But her mom had said no, so Mary Ford did what any young teenager would do.
She cornered her dad, Marty Fitzjurls.
“About 10 years,” her dad said, looking to the sky to remember just how long Mary Ford had been playing soccer. “She had always played up. So she had always played two years ahead of her age. I knew she had a strong leg.”
After a lot of questioning and discussions, mom and dad both said yes.
“The greatest thing,” dad exclaimed with a smile, “was her teammates. They were like her big brothers, you know, and they took care of her. Even though it’s their teammate, it’s like their sister, too.”
As dad was speaking with us, Mary Ford jumped right in to confirm her dad’s perspective.
“Right from the get-go, they were on board with the whole thing,” Mary Ford said matter-of-factly about her male teammates. “I never heard any boy on the team say, ‘Oh, why is she here? You shouldn’t be here’ or, ‘We don’t need a girl on the football team.’ They were on board with it the whole time.”
What surprised us was that those who gave her the most grief, she said, were adults.
“Sometimes from dads up in the stands, which that was the most hurtful to me when I would go out to kick, and the dads would be like, ‘Girls don’t play football.’ Stuff like that,” she said.
And when another teenager on an opposing team called Mary Ford the B-word, she said, “My boys took care of it.”
Her mom leaned over to corroborate how the boys on Mary Ford’s football team handled the insult to their female kicker.
“Those were some good tackles,” mom said. “The best tackles of the season.”
Mary Ford said that’s when it truly sank in, what a great support system she had.
“Even if other people didn’t think that I should be out there,” she said assuredly, “my team and my school did.”
Mary Ford has held her kicking position on the Frederica Academy Knights’ football team ever since.
Now a high school senior, she was crowned homecoming queen just last month, donning her tiara while wearing her football uniform simply because there was no time to change clothes.
“You always see the long flowy dresses that the girls wear to walk across the field,” Mary Ford said with a giggle, “and I was like, ‘Hey guys, I don’t think I’m gonna wear a dress. I’ll be playing football.’”