I loooved football growing up and played with my brothers and the neighborhood kids as often as possible. As a younger girl, I loved to go with my dad (high school varsity FB coach)to the practices and afterwards watch films with the coaches.
At the end of 6th grade, I begged my dad to let me play 7th grade football (and little league baseball), he said absolutely not, you are a girl and will play girl sports if you want to play anything. At the end of the summer before the start of 7th grade, I was again playing tackle football with the neighborhood kids. Unbeknownst to me, some of these boys had started puberty (they just looked taller:)). I took a shot so hard that I was cured of my desire to play full contact sports ever again with boys. I went on to play collegiate level sports and never again felt anything like the bone jarring hit from my last game of tackle football!
Yeah, they hit kind of hard don’t they. LOL! ;-)
As a kid we played touch football. Dads, old kids, young kids, boys, girls, etc. The front line could get rough with the blocking - but everything else was just touch and no hard blocks down field.
My secret weapon was a 9 year-old girl that could really catch the football and run. Of course after a few throws she wasn’t that much of a secret - although we always had new kids playing and they wouldn’t worry about her at first.