Wish her nothing but success.
Sounds good. Winnipeg Free Press stuff is behind a paywall on my phone.
If you’re still interested in reading about her, I wrote a piece on her last season;
use the reader view as soon as the page loads
Making her mark A year after becoming the first woman to play and score in Canadian university football, Maya Turner is stronger, kicking longer and settling in as the Bisons’ starting kicker By: Mike Sawatzky Posted: 6:12 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 5, 2024
Mike Sawatzky6:12 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 5, 2024
Maya Turner is a trailblazer but she does not seek the limelight.
The spotlight found her.
On a warm fall day almost a year ago, she became the first woman to play in a U Sports football game, score points in a U Sports football game and kick the winning field goal, giving the Manitoba Bisons a 27-24 victory over the Regina Rams in double overtime.
It was only a beginning.
CHERYL HNATIUK / FREE PRESS
“I’ve never thought of myself as a rebel or that doing this was a rebellious thing. I wanted to do what I wanted to do and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me,” Maya Turner said.
By the end of the 2023 Canada West season, the 22-year-old from Maple Grove, Minn., had played in six games, hit on 11 of 14 field goal attempts with a longest of 48 yards, went 16-for-16 on conversion attempts and averaged 52.3 yards on 16 kickoffs.
And her encore performance in 2024 promises to be even better.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a rebel or that doing this was a rebellious thing,” says Turner, usually reticent when it comes to media interviews. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.”
Despite her success, Turner knows she’ll never fully silence her critics. Some thought her joining the Bisons was a gimmick. Online trolls were even crueler. Even her teammates, initially, needed convincing.
But Turner, through her relentless work effort and singular focus, is proving them wrong one kick at a time.
Turner’s decision to pursue the dream of football at the college level came at the expense of her NCAA Division I soccer career at Loyola University in Chicago.
After one season, feeling burned out and unfufilled, she told her parents, Bart and Jen, and older sister Morgan she was finished with the game she had played since she was a child.
“I think they just wanted to support me in whatever I wanted to do and they just wanted me to be happy and do what I wanted to do,” Turner says. “They didn’t give any push back.
“I’ve been told I’m strong-willed ever since I was young. I’m just really determined and I’m gonna do what I want to do.”
Her family supported her desire to aim for what had been previously tried only a handful of times before.
“I was with her every step of the way in the process and I remember when she first expressed an interest in playing football, I was super excited for her, because I wanted her to continue playing sports,” says Morgan Turner, a former Division I soccer player who retired from the game after a year as a professional in Portugal.
“And she’d always had an interest in football, and so when she said she wanted to play on the club football team at Loyola, I really encouraged her to do that.”
With limited game experience in Chicago, Turner needed video to show coaches her ability had potential on the field.
“She had never played football outside of one club season, so she didn’t have a ton of film,” Morgan says. “And she had never actually kicked the football until a few months before she was trying to get recruited. She had to work on her technique and she had to find coaches to teach her how to kick a football and to help her with her technique.”
Turner started the 2024 Canada West regular season as the University of Manitoba’s No. 1 kicker and her right leg, more powerful after another off-season in the Bisons weight training program, matches her ambition.
Last Saturday, Turner booted field goals of 25 and 38 yards, missed narrowly from 41 yards out for a single, and hammered four converts in Manitoba’s season-opening 37-24 win over the Saskatchewan Huskies
But go back two years, truth be told, the cynics were out in droves when head coach Brian Dobie announced he had signed Turner, although Niko DiFonte, an all-Canadian transfer from Calgary was on the roster and she would go on to spend her first year in Winnipeg as a redshirt with the Bisons as a practice-only player.
“I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that I wasn’t skeptical one bit,” says Markos Bockru, the starting strong outside linebacker on the 2023 squad and now an assistant coach responsible for the team’s defensive backs. “I feel like that’s human nature, especially being a football player.
“I’ve played football my whole life and when I think of football, I think of a man’s sport and the testosterone-filled rooms that you’re in when you’re with these guys and all that.
“So yes, I was definitely skeptical but what really blew my mind was how quickly she turned that skeptical feeling into belief and trust from her teammates.”
Teammate De Shawn Le Jour shared Bockru’s initial skepticism.
“Is she on our team just because it makes us look good or is she actually a player able to help us win?” says Le Jour, a third-year receiver. “And I think that was very evident in 2023 when we had a kicker who was in for the first two weeks of the season, who was not doing well at all, and he was a man. Then we make substitution and the rest is history.”
Dobie, in need of a kicker, had been intrigued early in 2022 when he watched the video attached to Turner’s email, one of more than a hundred she had sent out to college coaches across North America, hoping for a nibble.
Turner visited the Fort Garry campus that spring, and with snow still dusting the turf at IG Field, she proceeded to outkick graduating Bisons kicker Cole Sabourin. Dobie and a few eyewitnesses were believers but traditionalists were unlikely to be moved so easily.
“Everybody knew that if she failed, that there would be X number of people that, ‘Hey, it’s a publicity stunt,’” says Dobie. “To this day, by the way, I’ve only heard it once to my face… I’m sure there were a ton of people up there that were going, ‘Dobie’s trying to make a point or sort of a statement on gender equity or whatever?’ Nope.
“Now, do I believe in gender equity? Absolutely, I do. But I also believe that you need to earn it and you need to be the best at your job to earn a spot over somebody else, regardless of your gender. And that’s what Maya was looking for.”
Chris Husby knows about kicking.
For the past 14 years, he has tutored dozens of kickers and punters at his Special Teams Football Academy based in Maple Grove, Minn., while also serving as a special teams coach for the Maple Grove Crimson high school team.
It is not unusual for Husby to get a female student – he estimates mentoring more than 20 female kickers over the years – but Turner, who had played varsity girls soccer at nearby Wayzata High School, was something else.
Although she had a limited football resume, kicking only briefly for the Loyola men’s club team in the fall of 2021, Husby immediately saw how powerful her leg was.
He had about six weeks, with additional help from Chicago-area kicking guru Chris Nendick, to refine her technique enough to pique the interest of NCAA college programs.
“A lot of it is the eye test but sometimes coaches don’t know about a person, so somebody recommends them and then usually the college coaches are like, ‘Well, send me some film so I can see something that matches up with what you say’,” Husby says.
“And then they want to see it in person, obviously, because coaches know that a highlight film is highlights of your best stuff. So with Maya, you’ll see with a lot of the YouTube video we did a lot of uncut video, which means you’re not editing up your best stuff, right? It’s consecutive stuff. You can see her consistency. That was a path that I felt that we needed to do.”
Husby had also taken pains to market his kickers in a more objective light and to do that, he created a database in which he tracked kicking data (field goals, kickoffs and punts) in more than 1,000 college games, from NCAA Football Bowl Series to the Division III level.
He also enlisted a statistics professor to create algorithms that could help to identify college-ready kickers.
“We tested her on it, just to see if she could meet some of the standards that you would see at different levels,” remembers Husby. “And so right away with her test, she qualified as a Division 1 field goal kicker… And then I think on kickoffs, she was kind of borderline, like a Division III qualification. So at least we kind of knew she was in the vicinity of having that ability.”
After three more weeks of training, Turner had elevated her punting to a Division II level.
Then, at an evaluation camp in January 2021 at the Minnesota State Mankato indoor facility, Turner outkicked more than half of the males in attendance.
“I had colleges that said, ‘Hey, we like her. She would be good enough for our team, but our roster is full,” says Husby, admitting some other coaches were just not comfortable bringing a female kicker into their locker room.
“A coaching friend of mine that was at a Division I school (in California) had interest in her, but the roster was full. He would have been down to give her an opportunity.”
Turner’s presence at the U of M took a serendipitous turn last season.
Sergio Castillo, a veteran placekicker with experience in the NFL, CFL, XFL, was re-signed by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the 33-year-old Texan brought his easy-going nature and volunteer spirit with him.
Castillo had mentoring high school and college kickers at most of his previous pro stops, including Simon Fraser kicker Kristie Elliott, who became the first Canadian women to score a point in an NCAA game when she booted a pair of converts against Linfield University in 2021.
Castillo agreed to help Turner fine tune her technique. After all, the Blue Bombers locker room is only a few yards down the corridor from the Bisons home base.
Lately, the old pro has noticed specific improvements in Turner’s game.
CHERYL HNATIUK / FREE PRESS
Despite being a trailblazer, the University of Manitoba Bisons starting kicker Turner prefers to avoid the spotlight.
“She put on some muscle this year too, you can tell,” says Castillo. “When she got here she had kind of a soccer physique and now she looks lean, right? You can just tell by the pop on the ball, which just comes with repetition. Now, you can tell she has a little bit more pop and not so many mishits.
“She can kick as good as anybody and I think the mental aspect is where she’s stronger than most, right? Because she’s had to go through more barriers.”
Adding 10 pounds of muscle to her 5-foot-9 frame was a deliberate path to adding to her power. After hitting from 48 yards away in 2022, her field goal range is closer to 55 yards now and her kickoff lengths are upwards of 60 yards, an improvement of almost 10 yards.
“The goal with our off-season program is not necessarily to make her the best kicker we can — it’s to make the best athlete we can and that’s what she’s done a really good job of doing,” says Cole Scheller, the school’s lead strength and conditioning coach.
Turner’s grinding off the field hasn’t gone unnoticed.
CHERYL HNATIUK / FREE PRESS
Turner warms up on the sidelines as the Bisons take on the Saskatchewan Huskies last Saturday
“She hasn’t missed any training in the whole time she’s been here,” says Scheller. “She’s super reliable and then what kind of ends up happening is, over time, with kicking practice and with continuing to put on a little bit of mass and put on a little bit of strength and a little bit of explosiveness and power, she’s just kind of chipping away at adding a bit of range.”
Adds fifth-year wide receiver AK Gassama: “One thing I respected right away was that she was about her business. You talk to anybody in this locker room — in her first off-season she didn’t miss one workout, she didn’t miss one meeting. Everything that she’s done she’s earned.”
Turner has earned a reputation as a worker away from the stadium, too.
Sharing a house with roomies La Jour, receiver Carver Trapp, O-lineman Max Fisher and U of M women’s soccer player Mya Miller, Turner is successfully balancing an athletic career with her studies — she’s working toward a fine arts degree specializing in graphic design.
“When we have workouts in the off-season – at 6 a.m. when I’m waking up and when all the other roommates are waking up, she’s also waking up with us, right?” says Le Jour. “She’s also running at 6 a.m., she’s also working out every day. So it’s not like we’re handing her this opportunity.”
Good specials team play depends on more than just the strength and accuracy of the kicker’s leg.
Turner, holder Mike O’Shea Jr. and long snapper Jake Deneka have formed into a well-drilled unit and that’s a comforting thought when multiple defenders are surging to the line.
CHERYL HNATIUK / FREE PRESS
Turner jokes around with punter Ben George (37) and long snapper Jake Deneka (39).
“She’s always either texting me or I’m texting her when we want to set up field times to go work on things,” Deneka says. “It’s not like this feeling of just because she’s a girl she either deserves less or more. She’s just like everybody else, and having a teammate like her is amazing. She’s just a great person overall and a great friend to have.”
Despite securing the No. 1 job in pre-season, Turner faces competition every day in practice from the likes of punter Ben George, the No. 2 kicker believed to have slightly longer range, and third-stringer Alex Minor. She’s the third punter on the team’s depth chart.
“I think the best part for me is she’s got 90 brothers in that locker room now that would die for her, that absolutely love her, and it’s because they see how much work she puts in and she does all the right things and it helps them,” says special team co-ordinator Sean Oleksewycz. “Whenever she goes out there, we know she’s going to make kicks.”
The uncomfortable truth is some people, despite incontrovertible evidence, will never be convinced of a woman’s right to kick in a man’s game. The vitriol on social media can be unsettling.
“I would read some of the things that were being said, and I think I was more upset than she was,” says Le Jour. “I’d be reading them and thinking, ‘How could you guys say that?’ I’d be like, ‘How does she handle it?” But she just laughs it off.
“They’re speaking from a place of ignorance. They’re not seeing the work.”
The stoic Turner prefers to see and hear the positive stuff.
“Honestly, I’ve gotten a lot of support — whether that’s coaches on other teams or even sometimes kickers on other teams,” she says. “They’ll come and talk to me after a game or before a game. I haven’t gotten any hostility at all. I mean, not to my face.”
CHERYL HNATIUK / FREE PRESS
Turner says she has received a lot of support from opposition coaches and players.
Dobie announced last month that he will retire following the season after 29 years on the job. He’s won Canada West coach of the year honours multiple times and the U Sports national football title once, in 2007. But few things will compare to Turner’s history-making exploits on that warm fall day a year ago. He made sure to acknowledge its significance in a jubilant locker room afterward.
“You guys remember this and the part that you played by not just accepting but embracing this young woman’s opportunity,” says Dobie, recalling his speech that day. “Look what she’s done. Look what she’s come through and done for us, and you guys have treated her as a teammate, nothing else… Remember this for the women in your life that you’re going come across in your work environment? Don’t forget the respect that you have shown Maya in terms of her journey. Take that respect and make it grow and extend that to women who cross your path, women that you work with, and they’re part of your lives forever. Because it could have gone the other way. It could have been arms folded, pouty.
“‘We’re letting a girl into our environment, here, into our culture?’ It could have gone the opposite way.”
Despite a growing resume, Turner quashes any speculation she would be interested in pursing a spot on a NCAA roster now.
“No, I’ve been here, established my place here and I’m happy here,” she says.
And she could have options beyond U Sports when her eligibility is up.
“If she actually wanted to pursue it at another level, she could do it,” says Husby, the kicking tutor. “And people would see that it’s not a publicity stunt… if she wanted to try the NFL or CFL or some level of professional football, she would compete.”
It was a great story - worthy of a publishing award - - - but it got even greater when Sergio Castillo inserted himself into the story.
So do they have a separate locker room just for her? And how would they accommodate her on road games?
Those are logistical elements that s/b of no concern to fans … my only question is: Can she kick?
The point is that without the locker room experience you lose a lot of the bonding with your fellow players. Pretty much any current or ex player will tell you that the locker room culture is one of the best parts of football. It was for me at Western.
If you never played then I guess you can’t relate.
Thank you for posting this, GG. Great story!
No, I understood that aspect … but placekicker is perhaps the position least impacted by that.
Also, such concerns are arguments that those opposed to the very concept would raise.
Don’t assume for me. Rather bold don’t you think.
Only people who never played would push aside the locker room culture concern.
he didn’t push it aside
I didn’t say you were against the idea … If that WAS what I thought I would have said “… those of you opposed…”.
But I have heard those arguments from people objecting to females playing on male sports teams for decades.
I didn’t know people were expected to hang their junk out to bond as a team.
My main concern is if she misses a FG and chases down the returner and gets blindside blocked by a guy 100+ pounds heavier.
Not against the idea at all, but a woman kicker could get seriously hurt because the entire sport is based around contact. Kickers do get hit sometimes.
I’d be fairly certain that she knows the risks in the game before pursuing the role. There’s probably 100 detractors for every 1 supporter telling her all the reasons why she shouldn’t do it.
So could have many “not physically imposing” male placekickers over the decades … going as far back as Garo Yepremian … and some “big” placekickers have been injured not because of size or gender but because they didn’t know how to handle contact.
