By: Aidan Loney
BENTONVILLE, Ark. (UATV) – Bentonville senior Kylee Sallee is one of the nation’s few female high school football players, having been their starting kicker this season after four years in the program.
Sallee joins a small but growing group of girls competing in high school tackle football, where about 0.4% of more than 1 million players nationwide are female.
Sallee began kicking in eighth grade after years of playing soccer, and tried out for football to take on a new challenge. She thought that she already had the natural strength to be able to kick and the technique was similar, so she decided to give football a try.
“I was always into sports, and when I found out there was an opportunity to play football, and I already kind of had a feel for kicking, I thought, why not?” Sallee said.
However, the transition to becoming the full-time starter wasn’t easy for Sallee. Sallee missed her first field goal early in the season, but she has been a reliable option for the Tigers, making 52 of 54 extra-point attempts this season.
Head coach Jody Grant said her early struggles never defined her and that she isn’t treated any differently inside the locker room or on the field.
“Nobody’s like, oh, that’s the girl or anything like that,” Grant said. “She’s just one of our teammates. The guys accept her, she accepts them, (so) it works out really good.”
Just across the halls on the girls’ wrestling team, sophomore and state champion Alexis Dubowsky is paving her path on a traditionally male-dominated sport at Bentonville High School.
Dubowsky has already had a lot of success wrestling in her two years, winning the 6A state championship at 130 pounds last spring and being a finalist the year before.
Approximately 374,000 people participate in high school wrestling, but only one-fifth of them are girls.
“It’s a really boy-dominant sport,” Dubowsky said. “But girls can do it too, and we’re pretty strong,”
As girls’ participation in these sports continues to rise, Sallee and Dubowsky hope their performances show younger girls what’s possible. Both of them say they want to serve as role models for other young girls who might follow the same path.