Shaylee Foord - Emotionality, Shit Talking and Hot Takes

So before you experienced football through all these different

roles, you first found the game as a player.

Take me back to that beginning.

How did football enter your life? What made you brave enough to step onto the field? And what did you find that made you want to stay?

Okay, wild to even think back on.

It's 2019.

I have just left kind of within the last year, a career in nonprofit work that I was kind of burnt out of.

I was going back to my roots and just working in a restaurant for a minute.

I always like turn back to hospitality when I need to rethink.

And I was working in this kitchen that had just opened.

And there was a line cook there, Erica Crumpets, shout out Erica, who was just like yapping one day and was like, oh, I play for this women's tackle football team.

And I'd like grown up in rural Saskatchewan.

Obviously like football was a part of my life.

My high school hadn't had a team, had like just relaunched their team after 60 years when I was in high school.

So it hadn't been like super present in my life, kind of a passing interest.

But I was like on this project of trying to just like say yes to more things and take more risks and try different things.

And I was like, oh, that sounds cool.

I'll come out.

Thinking that if like beer league tackle football is a thing that that's what I was signing up for I don't know what I thought that would look like but she was like okay come out to this practice at foot field and I was like yeah absolutely let's do it get to the day of practice and now I'm like oh my god I said yes to this but also I kind of want to pee my pants I'm so nervous And so I just sat in the car in the parking lot for probably 15 solid minutes trying to give myself a pep talk to just walk in the doors.

And then I don't know what it was

about the environment, the staff, the teammates, the competition.

Just immediately, I knew that I wanted to stay and I wanted to come back.

We had a coach at the time, Steph Liu, who I remember just being so unbelievably welcoming to me.

And I was like, okay, this is a space.

And it was just a different side of women's sports than I'd seen before.