New team, old fascination for women of the gridiron

Kimberly Boroyan and her Boston Militia teammates before taking the field. (Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe)

SOMERVILLE - The coach leans in toward his quarterback, rehearsing possible signals at the line of scrimmage. "How about 'Florida'? Do you want to go with 'Florida'?" he asks.

"That's good," replies the quarterback, looking well-upholstered in shoulder and knee pads.

Number 7 turns and jogs toward the practice field, a strawberry blond ponytail peeking from her helmet.

She's Allison Cahill, Princeton graduate and quarterback of the Boston Militia, and the field is Dilboy Memorial Stadium in Somerville. The Militia are the newest team in town: all-women, full-contact, coached by some former New England Patriots and owned by car czar Ernie Boch Jr.

These women throw, kick, run, pass, and tackle. After one recent game, Cahill's arms were blotched with bruises from shoulder to wrist.

"Everything happens pretty fast," she says, surveying the damage. "The ball's hiked, and people twice your size are coming at you."

But really, she says, her bruises are nothing compared to what could happen out there. "This isn't the Lingerie Bowl," she says. "It's legitimate. It's highly competitive. The girls grab each other. They push and shove. They pinch when you're on the bottom of the pile. Girls are ruthless. I've even heard of them spitting."

At 5 feet 5 inches and 130 pounds, Cahill is a size 6. But she's rock-solid, blessed with Popeye biceps from working out several times a week at the sports club where she is a personal trainer.

The women range in height from 5 feet 3 to 6 feet 2 and in weight from 116 pounds to 250. They're accountants, corrections officers, engineers, bankers, supervisors, college students; football doesn't pay. They are straight and gay, married and single. Their emblem is the skull and bones. And they recently crushed the Central Pennsylvania Vipers, 48-0.

"They work hard, and I'm really proud of them," says head coach Derrick Beasley, a former safety for the Patriots who by day is a K-9 officer with the Essex County Sheriff's Department. "They tackle and hit like everyone else. The only difference is their kicks are a little shorter."

The Militia is actually a hybrid born of two former teams: the Boston Rampage and the Massachusetts Mutiny. It's part of the Independent Women's Football League, which has 40 teams across the country and one in Montreal. Its four divisions will compete to be in the Super Bowl, held in July in Chicago.

Boch is hoping his team will make it there in its inaugural season. He bought the two former teams for about $2,500 but says he has sunk "well into the six figures" in the endeavor, including coaches' salaries, uniforms, gear, chartered buses, and hotel rooms on the road to games against teams such as the Baltimore Nighthawks and the New York Sharks.

Most of the teams in the league are player-owned, but Boch says he bought into it because, as a former sponsor of the Rampage and Mutiny, he loved watching them play. "I like them better than the NFL," says Boch, who leases a box at Gillette Stadium during the Patriots' season. "The games are more like college ball than the NFL."

So are the prices. At $10 a ticket and a couple of bucks for a hot dog - no alcohol is served at Dilboy - the sport makes for a great family outing, he adds. The next home game is May 31. The Militia's record this season is 3-2, including a heartbreaking loss to the New York Sharks in the last few seconds of the game - though the next time they met, the Militia won 28-14.

More than 300 people showed up for the first game of the season against the DC Divas, where Cahill got her inaugural bruises. She had faked a pitch, then run the ball for the first touchdown of the game. The Militia won, 27-22.

"DC is really good but really classless," says Cahill, who is 27 and single. "They like to run up the score. They came in here thinking they would walk all over us. It was just a huge confidence booster, winning against a big, bad team." Cahill, who taught special education for two years before becoming a full-time trainer, also played basketball at Princeton, where she majored in history.

"I was inconsistent at basketball," she says, though she scored 1,000 points in college. Football was her favorite, and when she graduated from college she played for the now-defunct New England Storm, then for the Mutiny.

But her foray into sports began much earlier. At age 4, she told her parents she was going to be a football player when she grew up. It is part of Cahill family lore that, when her parents had company over to watch a Patriots game, Allison donned her brother's shoulder pads and helmet over her gingham dress and stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.

"They started laughing, and I was so mad I started crying," Cahill says. "I wanted to be taken seriously as a football player."

Her father has had Patriots season tickets for 30 years, and he'd take Allison and her brothers to the old Sullivan Stadium, and to Bryant College to watch training camp.

"She would do anything that would involve a ball rather than play dress-up or any of that stuff," says her mother, Pam.

Starting in the fifth grade, Cahill played flag football in the town league - the only girl for most of the time. To the boys, it was no big deal - she'd grown up with them in Uxbridge. Besides, they won the championship three years in a row with her as quarterback.

But to the opposing teams, it was a very big deal. Especially when they got beat. Most especially when Cahill would score the winning touchdown.

"Their fathers would say, 'If she wants to be like one of the boys, go get her!' They were expressing their frustration that a team with a girl on it was beating their sons," Cahill says with a slight smile. She went on to play both basketball and softball at Uxbridge High School, where she was captain of both teams. For 10 years, she has held the scoring record for both boys and girls varsity basketball: more than 1,400 points.

Now she's co-captain of the Militia, 45 women who share a passion for playing. "One woman was back playing six weeks after birth and was breast-pumping before the game and at halftime," Cahill says. "She has three young kids, and she's tough as nails." Cahill says they're a tight group, their friendships cemented by shared goals and long roadtrips.

Many of the women played on boys' teams in their youth, which helped hone their competitive streak. "You're always the underdog," Cahill says. "It makes you tough. We make a lot of sacrifices to play." The women practice at Dilboy twice weekly, from 8 to 10 p.m. In the winter, they practice at an indoor arena in Tewksbury. Some of the women travel an hour and a half to get to practice.

Recently Cahill got a chance to throw the ball with Patriots legend Steve Grogan. "I didn't know what to expect going in," he says, "but she threw the ball much better than I've ever seen a girl throw it. She had great mechanics. She did everything right."

At Dilboy Stadium on a recent practice night, Cahill barked orders to her team. "Line it up! Read-ee? Let's go!" The women jogged silently down the field in a tight pack, to the steady clacking of their shoulder pads.