Alissa Wykes (born )
is a former
American football
American football, referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada and also known as gridiron football, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular American football field, field with goalposts at e ...
running back
A running back (RB) is a member of the offensive backfield in gridiron football. The primary roles of a running back are to receive American football plays#Offensive terminology, handoffs from the quarterback to Rush (American football)#Offense ...
who played for the
Philadelphia Liberty Belles
The Philadelphia Liberty Belles are a team of the Women's Football Alliance which began play for its inaugural 2009 season. Home games are played on the campus of Wissahickon High School in Ambler, Pennsylvania.
The Liberty Belles are named i ...
of the
National Women's Football Association
The National Women's Football Association (NWFA) was a full-contact American football league for women headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The league was founded by Catherine Masters in 2000, as the two benchmark teams, the Alabama Renegade ...
.
When she was playing, she was 5'6" tall, weighed 209 pounds, and was nicknamed "A-Train" by her teammates.
She led the Liberty Belles to the inaugural NWFA championship and was named the team
MVP
MVP most commonly refers to:
* Most valuable player, an award, typically for the best performing player in a sport or competition
* Minimum viable product, a concept for feature estimating used in business and engineering
MVP may also refer to:
...
. Previously, she played
softball
Softball is a Variations of baseball, variation of baseball, the difference being that it is played with a larger ball, on a smaller field, and with only underhand pitches (where the ball is released while the hand is primarily below the ball) ...
at
Upper Moreland High School in
Willow Grove, Pennsylvania
Willow Grove is a census-designated place (CDP) in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States. A community in Philadelphia's northern suburbs, the population was 13,730 at the 2020 census. It is located in Abington Township and Upper More ...
.
Biography
Wykes was one of the first active American athletes to publicly
come out
Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBTQ people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.
This is often framed and debated as a privacy issue, ...
as gay when she announced that she was
lesbian
A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...
in an article in the December 2001/January 2002 edition of ''
Sports Illustrated for Women
''Sports Illustrated Women'' (previously called ''Sports Illustrated for Women'') and also known as ''SI Women'', was a bimonthly sports magazine covering (according to its statement of purpose) "the sports that women play and what they want to fo ...
''.
Catherine Masters, owner of the league, condemned Wykes for pursuing her own "personal agenda", claiming that the league had received "hundreds of phone calls. Gay people were saying it was horrible. Straight people were saying it was great."
In 2003, Wykes participated as a panel member at the first National Gay/Lesbian Athletics Conference at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wykes joked that she felt "great empathy for the women on my team who are straight. I mean—a straight female football player?"
See also
*
Women's American football
Women's gridiron football, more commonly known as women's tackle football, women's American football, women's Canadian football, or simply women's football, is a form of gridiron football (American or Canadian) played by women. Most leagues pla ...
*
Homosexuality in American football
There has been only one player who has publicly come out as gay or bisexual while being an active player in the National Football League (NFL): Carl Nassib, who came out as gay on June 21, 2021, while with the Las Vegas Raiders. He became the f ...
References
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American football running backs
American lesbian sportswomen
LGBTQ players of American football
Players of American football from Philadelphia
Female players of American football
Place of birth missing (living people)
21st-century American LGBTQ people
21st-century American women
20th-century American sportswomen
{{LGBT-bio-stub