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Chattanooga: Soccer no option; Tatum kicks PATs

By: Jaime Lackey
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Stacey Tatum spent a long time praying she would have the opportunity to wear a Grace Academy uniform this season.

She didn’t realize she might need to specify what kind.

The door closed on Tatum’s high school soccer career when the TSSAA denied a hardship request that would have made the senior transfer student eligible to play for Grace this fall, but the decision led the way to an unexpected football career.

Three days after kicking a football for the first time in her life during the school’s powderpuff game, Tatum made two extra points in Grace’s homecoming win over Lookout Valley last Friday.

“My hopes were to play soccer,” Tatum said. “That was my plan for my senior year, but once you take a step back, you realize how much more amazing God’s plan for us is than the one we have for ourselves. It would have been awesome to play soccer, but then again, how many girls can say that they’ve played on a high school football team?”

When Tatum made the difficult decision last January to transfer from Ooltewah and join her younger sister at Grace, she knew the move could jeopardize a soccer career that began when she was 4 years old. As her hardship request went through the appeals process, Tatum held out hope that she would be able to join the Lady Golden Eagles on the soccer field.

Despite her disappointment after finding out she wouldn’t, Tatum continued to practice with her would-be teammates and support them at Grace’s matches. Then last Tuesday, she joined her classmates on the football field for a powderpuff game as part of the school’s homecoming activities.

When she was asked to kick extra points midway through the game, Tatum was as surprised as anyone that her attempts were successful. Her kicks drew the attention of athletic director Leslie Compton, who called football coach Mark Mowery to ask who would back up kicker Jefferson Walker in case of an injury.

“The story probably starts earlier than that,” Mowery said, “with me looking at our team and realizing that Jefferson plays 100 percent of the time on defense and probably half the time on offense. For a month and a half I’ve been worried about us having a secondary option if something were to happen to him. I knew the need was there, so when I got the phone call, I went up to check it out.

“She struck the ball very solidly. It has that good thud sound. She knows how to kick.”

Mowery’s arrival led to an introduction, an impromptu tryout and then a whirlwind few days for Tatum.

“I didn’t even know he was the football coach,” Tatum said. “I didn’t really know what was going on, but I just kept scooting back, and they somehow kept going in. Afterwards, he asked if I’d be on the football team, and that day I got shoulder pads and a helmet and went to practice.”

There have been plenty of adjustments for Tatum and her teammates — from finding dressing facilities to learning how to hoist shoulder pads over her petite frame —but she said the difference between kicking a football and a soccer ball isn’t all that great now that coaches have helped her apply the skills she already possessed into a new sport.

But preparing to dress out in the school’s homecoming game was far more nerve-racking than any soccer match.

“All day Wednesday and Thursday I was so nervous, almost to the point of getting sick,” Tatum said. “Then Friday I just prayed for God to give me peace about it. I couldn’t go another day feeling like that. And then I was not nervous at all, not the slightest bit. Then once you go out there, you don’t have time to be nervous; you just have to go.”

With the Golden Eagles comfortably ahead in the fourth quarter of Friday’s game, Mowery twice sent Tatum in on extra-point attempts, and both sailed through the uprights. She also kicked two in Grace’s junior varsity game this week and has made 40-yard field goals in practice, but her focus is on being ready to put an extra point through if she’s ever needed to do it with the game on the line.

“We had never practiced with live rush, so I wanted her to have experience in case she does have to kick that extra point when it’s really important and people are selling out to block it,” Mowery said. “She was dead-on. I know a lot of Class A teams don’t have a single kid that can kick an extra point. This was a very serious move on our part to help our football team get better.”

In return, Tatum said she’s been given a new appreciation for Grace’s football players, as well as for the coaches who gave her the opportunity to join them on the field. And besides the pride in finally getting to wear a Golden Eagles jersey, part of her motivation the rest of the season will be to prove wrong the people who think she doesn’t belong there.

“Here at Grace, everyone is a big family, and everyone’s been supportive,” Tatum said. “But I’m not naive. I know there are some people who think that because I’m a girl, I’m not capable. I want to prove them wrong. There are a lot of things I’ve worked on my whole life that I can’t show on the soccer field, but now I can show on the football field. I just want to be a teammate. I don’t want to be looked at just as the girl kicker.”

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