‘Quarterback Princess’ is the best sports movie about a girl playing football (2024)

She walks onto the field for football tryouts in a pink shirt, in case you somehow missed that she is a girl. After patiently waiting for the boys to go first, she finally lines up to take a snap — and throws a tight spiral straight to the receiver.

“Hey little girl, where’d you learn to throw the ball like that?” one of the boys asks.

“My mom,” she replies.

It’s one of a few pitch-perfect lines in Quarterback Princess, the 1983 made-for-TV movie based on the true story of Tami Maida, a 14-year-old girl who made national headlines in 1981 for playing quarterback in a tiny Oregon town. The movie is the first in what’s become a somewhat fruitful subgenre: the only girl on the football team. And, nearly 30 years later, it remains the best of its kind, showing the hurdles many girls still face today when they want to suit up as evenly as it does the triumphs they experience when they do.

Quarterback Princess/20th Century Fox

The movie began as an irresistible story, one producers clamored for rights to as it happened: teenage girl goes 7-1 at QB on an otherwise all-boys team and wins homecoming princess. Maida would eventually appear on Good Morning America, NFL Today and in the pages of National Geographic, but oppressive media attention began as soon as she shared her intention to try out for the team in Philomath, Oregon. “If anybody pushes me around, I’ll drop ‘em,” she told papers at the time.

She wasn’t the first or last girl to play high school football, but her story drew disproportionate interest that was only amplified by the movie, which was released while she was still in high school. “I got a lot of mail over that year: fan mail, hate mail, scary mail,” says Tami Maida O’Meara, 53. Today, she’s a counselor at Selkirk College in British Columbia. “People viewed me as abnormal. Someone sent a picture of me saying I was an abnormal Amazon, and that there was something wrong with my head. Remember, I was 14 at the time. I was just like, ‘What the heck?’”

“What the heck?”, as it happens, is still most people’s reaction to seeing girls and women play football, if the way they’re covered — primarily as novelties — is any indication.

Yet popular culture isn’t entirely to blame for this disconnect. Gridiron-obsessed women and girls have featured prominently in some of football’s most iconic movies, notably via Little Giants’ Icebox who also embodied the only girl on the team cliché. Sports movie parodies of middling (1991’s Necessary Roughness) and terrible (2007’s The Comebacks) caliber have co-opted the soccer-player-turned-placekicker trajectory as a way to get both eye candy and, unfortunately, an easy visual gag on-screen. Representation is as representation does.

Odder, yet more compelling, examples come via kids’ TV. Bella and the Bulldogs, a sitcom that ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon in the mid-aughts, tells the story of a cheerleader who winds up as the quarterback of her middle school football team. The titular Bella faces a new, predictable battle-of-the-sexes quandary with each episode, but the show doesn’t force her to choose between playing football and being traditionally effeminate. That in itself is something of a victory for nuance, given how many sports movies and shows insist that only tomboys take the field.

Lindsay Lohan also took a crack at the girl QB role in the profoundly strange Disney TV movie Life-Size (2000). Lohan’s character, like most sports-playing girls and women of cinema, is the daughter of a single father; in this case, she wants nothing more than to bring her mom back to life. So she steals a magic book to, um, reanimate her dead mother, but accidentally brings to life a Barbie-esque doll (which of course she hates, because she likes sports) instead.

Life-Size/Walt Disney Television

Shenanigans ensue, though the preternaturally talented Lohan was still able to wring real emotion out of the movie’s patent absurdity. Similarly surprising is that though some clichés persist — the single father, the hair tumbling down from the helmet — neither sexism nor insufficient girliness is central to the movie’s plot. If anything, the doll character (played by Tyra Banks) becomes less overtly feminine over the course of the movie; Lohan’s Hail Mary, in a refreshing twist, winds up just short of the goalline.

But none of them comes closer to showing the reality of what it’s like to be a girl playing football than Quarterback Princess. Maida’s fight began when she and her family moved to Oregon from Prince George, British Columbia, so her father, a psychologist, could take a sabbatical. She had been playing in Canada with no issue, but when Maida said she wanted to try out for the Pilomath High School team, all hell broke loose.

The way her story is told in the movie is quite close, Maida O’Meara says, to how she was received in real life. From sexist comments to gratuitous late hits to inescapable press attention, the movie shows that girls trying to play football face hurdles on all sides. Nothing comes easily: parents conspire to get her off the team, other girls in school are suspicious of her — even finding a place to change and retrofitting her football pads to cover her chest are challenges that have to be overcome.

The exception, perhaps surprisingly to viewers, tends to be in the locker room itself. In Quarterback Princess the team accepts Maida (played by Helen Hunt) almost immediately, a part of the movie that was particularly true to life — all the way down to her close friendship with the team’s center, who gives her a few enormously endearing pep talks. “It didn’t matter how hard I was hit, how many times I was hit, the taunts that were tossed at me — I didn’t react to much,” Maida O’Meara says now. “I actually took pride in being able to get smashed and bashed and stand up and say, ‘Let’s go, next play.’ I think that made a big difference in terms of how I was able to connect with my teammates.”

Maida O’Meara, who was just 16 at the time, and her family served as consultants on the film. She was also Hunt’s stunt double: most of the time you see Hunt actually throwing passes or taking snaps, that’s Maida O’Meara. Her close involvement with the production helps account for its verisimilitude — some lines of dialogue even came directly from things she told the writers. But Hunt, she says, didn’t make much of an effort to get to know her, and as a result the character’s affect is somewhat more reserved than her own. “She wanted to play the role the way she wanted to play the role,” Maida O’Meara says.

Quarterback Princess/20th Century Fox

What Quarterback Princess explores considerably more thoughtfully than most of its equivalents is how wrapped up gender norms are in the decision to play football.

“Everyone acts like I’m from Mars, except the guys on the team,” Maida tells her mother at one point.

“You can have everything — the trouble is, the attitudes just haven’t kept up with the opportunities,” her mother responds, with a sentiment that’s unfortunately evergreen.

“That’s a heavy load to hand someone,” Maida responds, sighing.

Maida’s conversations with her on-screen love interest, Scott (in reality, Maida O’Meara clarifies, they did not wind up together), also show the tug-of-war that sometimes comes along with a decision that, for boys, is straightforward.

“How am I supposed to know what you’re like?” he asks her after a botched first date. “You’re so different from other girls.”

“I’m not, but I sure get treated that way by everybody,” she retorts. “The coach treats me different because I’m not a boy, you treat me different because I play football, they treat me different because they don’t know what I am. Well here’s the news: I’m a girl. Have you got that?”

In another scene with Scott, things get still murkier when he punches an opposing player who comes in with a late hit. “Look: When I’m not playing, I’m a girl, but when I’m playing ... I’m not a male exactly, but I’m not a girl either,” she pleads, insisting he let her stand up for herself.

“It’s kind of confusing, isn’t it,” is all he can muster.

Though Maida seemed to wind up having it all — on-field success and validation of her girlhood as a member of homecoming court — she’s acutely aware of what a tricky line it can still be to walk for young girls. “There’s always sort of two camps,” she says now. “One side that’s quite supportive and thinks, ‘That’s great, girls can play whatever they want,’ and then there’s the other side, which is much smaller in number, but where people don’t have a lot of nice things to say. You still have to have a certain mindset that allows you to take some flack and let it roll off your shoulders.”

Quarterback Princess/20th Century Fox

Maida O’Meara was hired as a motivational speaker for athletes of all stripes while she was still in high school, and says the lessons she learned playing football wound up shaping much of her life. “I continued to do the things that I was interested in doing, regardless of whether they sort of fit with a norm,” she says, alluding to her time as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

She also stayed involved with football, coaching with youth teams and eventually one of her three sons’ high school teams. No girl, though, ever came through her programs. “People would ask about their girls playing, and I’d always be very encouraging and say, ‘Yeah, come out and try,’” she says. “I always hoped that more girls would want to play, and I have no idea if there are more girls that wanted to but still won’t come out.”

Sometimes those parents of girls who have started to play football will come across Maida O’Meara’s story and reach out to her for advice — often, even now, facing adversity remarkably similar to what she went through. “It is still the same language, the same story, the same questions,” she says. “You think we’ve shifted in so many ways, but in some ways and places it’s still, ‘Yeah, the girl.’”

It’s that exceptionalism that stings, that proves unfortunately not enough has changed yet to make Quarterback Princess obsolete. “We hear about more girls playing,” she says. “But that’s the thing: We hear about it. There’s some sensationalism around that.”

“Seeing women commentating or coaching in men’s professional sports, I’m still like, ‘Oh yay!’ and then I’m like, ‘Man, I’m still saying yay’,” she concludes. “But everything takes time. We’re certainly further ahead than we were.”