Female soccer goalkeeper Sarah Fuller was used as a fill-in kicker for the men’s Vanderbilt football team last Saturday, booting the ball 30 yards in the opening kickoff of the second half.
That kick, apparently, brought male players to tears from the sideline, quarterback Mike Wright said.
“There were some people on the sideline tearing up,” Wright says in a segment for College GameDay.
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"It used to be an insult. … Playing like a girl is a compliment, it's something you want to strive for."
After making history last week, Sarah Fuller is changing the narrative and inspiring young girls around the world.
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David Hookstead at The Daily Caller mocked the “PR stunt” of a kick and the apparent crying.
“When is this nonsense going to end? This was nothing more than a PR stunt, which didn’t save Derek Mason’s job, and we’re now out here talking about players crying,” he wrote. “Are you kidding me? This can’t possibly be real. From the way people talk about Fuller’s kick, you’d think she was the first woman to walk on the moon.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh argued last week that Fuller’s kick, despite the media gushing, “proved why women don’t belong in men’s sports.”
“[B]ack here in reality, it was not perfectly executed, and it was not a squib, a mortar, or an onside kick,” Walsh wrote. “There is no designed kick in all of football that calls for a kicker to boot it 20 yards to the sideline. And if there was such a designed kick, it’s not the play you’d call when you’re down 21 at the start of the third quarter. No, this was just a bad kick. Probably not much worse than what any schlub off the street would do, including myself, but not much better, either.”
During a post-game interview with ESPN reporter Courtney Cronin, Fuller revealed that she gave the Vanderbilt boys a half-time speech, despite the athlete only practicing with the team since four days prior.
“If I’m going to be honest, I was a little pissed off at how quiet everybody was on the sideline,” Fuller told Cronin via a Zoom call, Outkick reported. “We made a first down, and I was the only one cheering and I was like – what the heck? What’s going on? And I tried to get them pumped up, and I was like, ‘You guys need to start [cheering] your team on.'”
“My main thing was during the SEC tournament, my entire team was cheering the entire time,” she continued. “It didn’t matter if we were in the locker room or if they were on the sidelines, I think that’s what won it for us. Everybody was cheering non-stop.”
“I just went in there, and I said exactly what I was thinking,” explained Fuller. “I was like, ‘We need to be cheering each other on. This is how you win games. This is how you get better, by calling each other out for stuff, and I’m going to call you guys out.’”
“We need to be supporting one another,” she said. “If we get a first down, if an interception happens, it’s our fault. We need to be lifting each other up. That’s what a team’s about.”
“I think this team has struggled, and that’s been part of it,” diagnosed Fuller. “We really just need to build that team camaraderie where they can all lean on one another. It was an adjustment going from that team mentality where – hey, we’re all here supporting one another, and I just wanted to bring that to this team.”