Playing like a girl

Abrielle Baker sprinted off the football field at half time. 

The Lakewood High School senior tore off her football helmet, picked up her trumpet, and ran back onto the field, immediately getting into formation. As the section leader for trumpets in the Lakewood marching band, Abrielle can’t miss her mark. 

 It sounds a little overwhelming. But for Abrielle, 17, the only girl to play on the Lakewood Lancers football team in the school’s history, she’s pretty used to pressure.

“Seeing her in this football uniform with her trumpet front and center. It just, I don’t know, it gives me chills,” said Lakewood High School Principal Belinda Hohman. “Everybody else is in their full uniform, and there she is, in her cleats and her white pants and her (jersey), dancing up a storm with her trumpet.”

On Friday, Oct. 17, the Lancers will face Newark Catholic High School’s Green Wave – the only other football team in Licking County with a girl on the roster. 

Read more: See photos: Newark Catholic Green Wave vs. Lakewood Lancers football

Pyper Baesmann, 16, a sophomore at Newark Catholic High School and linewoman for the football team, is recovering from  an ACL tear in her right knee, but she is still finding ways to be there for her team. She went through surgery in early October, in hopes of coming back stronger for the next two years of her football career.

From soccer to band to football

Abrielle started playing soccer at age 3. And while she’s dabbled in sports such as track and field and swimming since then, soccer has always been a constant. That’s probably one of the reasons she is also the captain of Lakewood’s girls soccer team. 

Soccer stuck because Abrielle is a team player. Her favorite moments in the game are “when we work as a team and do something really cool,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be scoring, but just making nice passes.” 

This year, Abrielle is the soccer team’s goalie. Despite not having much experience with the role, Abrielle took one for the team and volunteered for the role.

It was a similar process in joining the football team. The football coaches approached the girls soccer team looking for a kicker, and Abrielle volunteered.

“They said that they like the fast-thinking skills of girls,” Abrielle said. 

Abrielle immediately agreed to try it out. She loves football, especially the Pittsburgh Steelers, and grew up watching football with her dad. 

“(It was) something to bond with him over,” Abrielle said. 

Once a part of the team, Abrielle practiced a lot on her own at first. She would stay after soccer practice, set up a tee, and just keep kicking. She joined team practices two weeks before the season started, when she would go for the first hour and a half before dashing off to soccer practice. 

The first football practice was the most nerve-racking. 

“I thought they were all going to hate me,” Abrielle said. “I was nervous. I didn’t really talk to many of them before that.”

Fortunately, Abrielle was not met with the animosity she was expecting. 

“All of a sudden, I had just a bunch of new friends,” Abrielle said. 

The first game she was called to kick in was a home game against Maysville. She was nervous, and her stomach hurt tremendously. But the sound of the cheers after the ball sailed through the goal post felt like magic, she said. 

“Everybody went crazy,” Principal Hohman said. 

While Lakewood’s student section has become familiar with Abrielle, she can sometimes shock the team’s opponents. 

“I like running back to the locker room and hearing everybody go, ‘That’s a girl!’” Abrielle said. 

Abrielle is passionate about science classes, her favorite being a College Credit Plus (CCP) anatomy class. Her future goals involve becoming a forensic pathologist. But Hohman doesn’t like to think about her leaving. 

“I’m going to get choked up,” Hohman said. “It’s like, ‘is there ever going to be another Abrielle?’”

Hohman credits Abrielle with setting a precedent that will allow other girls interested in playing football to consider joining the team. She’s also setting an example that students can excel in the classroom and on the field. But mostly, Hohman is proud of how Abrielle carries herself. 

“She’s not boisterous; she doesn’t brag,” Hohman said. “She’s just taking this all in stride.”

Lakewood High School Athletic Director Jamie Justus also sees how Abrielle is a role model to Lakewood students. This is his first year as the Lakewood athletic director, making Abrielle one of the first students he has worked with. 

Sometimes, that has even involved picking up Abrielle and other students from band practice and transporting them to soccer or football games. 

“She’s kind of like setting a role model for some of these younger girls that look up to her,” Justus said. He added that Abrielle has helped a lot with the youth soccer summer camp that the girls soccer team supports.  

“Some of those girls that were at that camp are now seeing her out there on Friday night,” Justus said. “So I think she’s set a very positive example for any of our younger female athletes that might be wanting to follow in her footsteps.”

On the line at Newark Catholic

In junior high, Pyper Baesmann’s best friend since kindergarten, Payton Rothweiler, persuaded her to play touch football with the seventh graders during recess. She didn’t know all of the rules at first, but that didn’t matter.

“I was like, ‘Wait, this is kind of fun,’” Pyper said. When some of the boys started to question why Pyper was there, she decided she didn’t care what they thought.

“I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do actual football,’” Pyper said. “Watch me.” 

Along with football, Pyper also is involved with Newark Catholic’s theater club, which is currently gearing up for “Seussical” the musical this year. She’s in the Newark Catholic Key Club, a student service branch of Kiwanis, and competes in Battle of the Books. Pyper’s favorite class at the moment is ceramics. 

Since second grade, Pyper has rushed between basketball, volleyball and softball practices, balancing all three sports with some variation until junior high, when there weren’t enough players at the middle school for a softball team. 

So she picked up track instead. 

By the end of eighth grade, Pyper had her sights set on playing football in high school. A four-day football camp the summer before her freshman year gave her the opportunity to test what that would look like for her. She laced up her softball cleats and joined the boys on the football field, usually going there straight from volleyball camp. 

On the last day of her volleyball camp, practice ran over, giving Pyper less than 30 minutes to get to football practice. Already sweaty and exhausted, she showed up on the hottest day of practice to that point. 

Suddenly, during a conditioning drill, Pyper felt a twinging, cramping pain in her ankle. Newark Catholic Football Coach Josh Hendershot noticed.

“Coach Hendershot pulled me aside, and he was like, ‘Are you okay?’” Pyper said. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to come out on the field again until everyone breaks down for water, and then you come back with the group.’ Even though it sucked, the coach was like, ‘I see that you’re struggling. Take a minute.’ I think that’s when I decided I could play for this guy.”

Hendershot said the team is lucky to have Pyper. She thinks before she speaks, for example, and that’s a trait Hendershot said would be beneficial for some of Pyper’s teammates to learn. 

“She’s full of energy, really funny, really caring, and she’ll do anything for the team,” Hendershot said. 

Her first time meeting the team, Pyper walked into the weight room with Rothweiler next to her. She wore bright pink shorts and a softball shirt with matching pink lettering. 

“I will never forget all of them just kind of stopping what they were saying and all collectively looking at me as I walked in,” Pyper said. “I was like, ‘Oh, God.’”

Now, in her second year with the team, her teammates don’t treat Pyper any differently than anyone else on the team. But like Abrielle, she does catch some of her opponents off guard. 

“My first play was a defensive play,” Pyper said. “I was like, just hold this guy; don’t let him move. And I don’t know if they could see just how nervous I was, or that I was a freshman, but I was able to hold the guy.”

Pyper had longer hair at the time, which she wore in a braid that hung out from under her helmet. The player she was blocking during that first play didn’t see it until she turned around, and her braid flew over her shoulder. 

“When I turned around, they went, ‘Oh, it’s a girl!’” Pyper said. “I said, ‘What? You scared?’”

This year, Pyper is sidelined due to the ACL tear. After the surgery in early October, she has to wait six months before getting back in the game. While she’s healing, Pyper has charged herself with bringing out water during practices, filming practices and carrying equipment.

And cheering for her team.

“She’s doing everything right that you would expect out of somebody when you know they’re injured,” Hendershot said. “And that’s a tough road to be on, especially when you’re a high schooler. She’s handled it really well.”

Despite the tough practices and injuries sustained from her sport, Pyper keeps at it. Her persistence has something to do with the sense of community football has given her – one that other sports have not been able to match. 

Pyper’s mom, Courtney Baesmann, always said that if Pyper decided it was too much keeping up with football, she could quit. 

“Usually, we’re very much, like, you finish the season – too bad,” Baesmann said. But this was a whole different ball game. Pyper’s family didn’t know how she was going to react to the intensity.

One day, Baesmann picked up Pyper from summer football camp. Pyper got into the car and said that practice was really hard, and she had almost decided to give up in the middle of a team run.

But as Pyper approached the finish line, the rest of her team stood at there cheering her on. 

“She looked at me and she said, ‘Mom, I’ve never felt more supported by a team in my entire life,’” Baesmann said. She said that was the moment that solidified for her that football was absolutely the right choice. Of all the teams Pyper had joined in the past, none compared to Newark Catholic’s football team. 

“I have never felt the type of family and brotherhood and the companionship … that I feel with these guys,” Pyper said. 

Maddie Luebkert writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.