Alissa Wykes (born ) is a former

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

running back A running back (RB) is a member of the offensive backfield in gridiron football. The primary roles of a running back are to receive American football plays#Offensive terminology, handoffs from the quarterback to Rush (American football)#Offen ...

who played for the

Philadelphia Liberty Belles The Philadelphia Liberty Belles are a team of the Women's Football Alliance which began play for its inaugural 2009 season. Home games are played on the campus of Wissahickon High School in Ambler, Pennsylvania. The Liberty Belles are named in ...

of the

National Women's Football Association The National Women's Football Association (NWFA) was a full-contact American football league for women headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The league was founded by Catherine Masters in 2000, as the two benchmark teams, the Alabama Renegades ...

. When she was playing, she was 5'6" tall, weighed 209 pounds, and was nicknamed "A-Train" by her teammates. She played

softball Softball is a game similar to baseball played with a larger ball on a smaller field. Softball is played competitively at club levels, the college level, and the professional level. The game was first created in 1887 in Chicago by George Hanc ...

Upper Moreland High School Upper Moreland High School is a comprehensive public high school, serving grades 9–12, located in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, about fifteen miles outside of Philadelphia. It is the only high school in the Upper Moreland School District, which inc ...

Willow Grove, Pennsylvania Willow Grove is a census-designated place (CDP) in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States. A community in Philadelphia's northern suburbs, the population was 15,726 at the 2010 census. It is located in Upper Dublin Township, Abington To ...

. Wykes was one of the first active American athletes to publicly

come out Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBT people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity. Framed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of ...

as gay when she announced that she was

lesbian A lesbian is a Homosexuality, homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate n ...

in an article in the December 2001/January 2002 edition of '' Sports Illustrated for Women''. Catherine Masters, owner of the league, condemned Wykes for pursuing her own "personal agenda", claiming that the league had received "hundreds of phone calls. Gay people were saying it was horrible. Straight people were saying it was great." In 2003, Wykes participated as a panel member at the first National Gay/Lesbian Athletics Conference at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wykes joked that she felt "great empathy for the women on my team who are straight. I mean—a straight female football player?"

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American football running backs American sportswomen Lesbian sportswomen LGBT players of American football American LGBT sportspeople Players of American football from Philadelphia Female players of American football Place of birth missing (living people) 21st-century LGBT people 21st-century American women {{LGBT-bio-stub

See also

References