NASHVILLE, TN – Thanks to perhaps the most memorable squib kick in college football history, Vanderbilt Commodores placekicker, Sarah Fuller helped kick down the door for female athletes everywhere.
Fuller, the goalkeeper of Vanderbilt’s SEC title-winning soccer team, kicked off for Vanderbilt to start the second half of the Dores’ game vs. Missouri. While Vanderbilt would go on to lose on the road, 41-0, the final score is irrelevant, thanks to the 21-year-old’s history-making accomplishment in being the first female to ever play in a Power Five football game, and the third woman ever joining Katie Hnida for New Mexico in the early 2000s, and April Goss for Kent State to play in a FBS football game.
In getting congratulations from a who’s who of sports stars ranging from Billie Jean King, Sue Bird and Mia Hamm, the 6’2 native of Wylie, Texas has seemingly overnight become the newest role model for little girls everywhere.
As the father of a ten-year-old daughter, who watches sports with me and plays football with boys her age here in suburban Cleveland, Fuller, like the forementioned Hamm and USWNT goalkeeper Hope Solo, Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard and pop star Billie Eilish has deservedly earn a spot on her wall of childhood heroes.
In being named SEC Player of the Week as well as reportedly being set to kick again for the Commodores’ road game in Athens vs. eighth-ranked Georgia, Fuller is now more than just a kicker, but a modern-day Joan of Arc in football pads playing on the modern-day battlefield normally reserved for men, the soft-spoken and modest Fuller, as they say that the future is female, could very well be a glimpse of that.