The pressure was dialled to 11 for Maya Turner’s debut with Manitoba on Sept. 23. In double overtime against Regina, it all came down to the Bisons’ self-effacing kicker, the first woman to suit up for a U Sports football game.
Ms. Turner nodded for the snap then bolted forward, reaching the ball just as her holder pinned it to the ground, walloping it from the centre of her metatarsal bone with everything she had. She knew at the moment of impact that the kick was good, grinning shyly as the pigskin floated between the posts, giving Manitoba a 27-24 lead over Regina, and Ms. Turner her second field goal of the night.
Announcer Mike Still howled with excitement as her teammates gripped her in tight hugs: “The Bisons have won this homecoming game on the strength of MAYA TURNER!”
In that moment, the 21-year-old said she felt a flood of joy unlike anything she had ever experienced. “The pressure, the adrenalin – it was such a rush.” The Canadian Football Hall of Fame later asked for the game ball and her cleats for a display on the historic event.
So began the football career of Maya Turner, whose story is unlike any other in the history of the Canadian game. And she is just getting started.
Ms. Turner started the rest of the season for the Herd, finishing the year with the second-best kicking stats in Canada West – 11 field goals over six games, executing on 80 per cent of her attempts. The 48-yarder she drilled in a rematch against Regina was the league’s second-longest field goal of the year.
After that first win against the Rams, a visibly emotional head coach Brian Dobie addressed his squad. Ms. Turner didn’t just have to go out and do her job, Mr. Dobie said; she was also squaring off against a wall of stigma and skepticism.
“You all experience pressures in your positions. But you don’t ever experience that. You never will. And I want everyone in the room to understand that.”
For the first time since arriving in the Prairies, Ms. Turner felt seen, she later told The Globe and Mail.
“No one had ever acknowledged my journey like that before,” she says. “If I make a mistake, it’s magnified. If I miss a field goal, it’s because I’m a girl – not because I’m a kicker, and kickers sometimes miss. It’s a lot of eyes on me all the time. And there’s zero tolerance for failure.”
What neither she nor Mr. Dobie managed to explain was how audacious the gambit that led her to Winnipeg’s IG Field for the Bisons home opener had been.
Ms. Turner had only started playing football two years earlier. She taught herself to kick, then pestered kicking coaches, recruitment camps and finally the Bisons until they agreed to take a flyer on the tenacious Minnesotan with the outsized dream of playing collegiate ball.
Ms. Turner, who is long and lean – 5 foot 9 and 150 pounds – has an athlete’s easy, confident gait. She hails from Maple Grove, Minn., from a family of jocks. Her dad played hockey for Michigan State, her mom was a diver and gymnast, and her older sister captained the DePaul University soccer squad before playing professionally in Portugal. For Ms. Turner, before there was football, there was soccer.
Growing up, the talented midfielder always had her team’s strongest leg, so she handled goal kicks and set pieces. She could really let fly. But by the time she was finishing high school, she was feeling burnt out by the game.
Ms. Turner had already committed to Loyola University, so she moved to Chicago; but her frustration with soccer only grew in her freshman season. She quit at the start of her second year, the fall of 2021.
“It was really hard for me to acknowledge that I needed to let soccer go,” she says. “I just didn’t like the sport any more. I felt sick of it. It was not making me happy at all.”
Before coming to play with the Bisons, Turner was a newcomer to football who had to master kicking in a relatively short time.
But Ms. Turner was still an athlete. She needed to find an outlet, a new sport. She adored football, but she never imagined she could play herself. Then one day she saw a flyer: Loyola’s club team needed a kicker. She signed up for a tryout, realizing only later that she had no idea how to kick the game’s lemon-shaped ball.
She drove home to Minnesota and got her dad to act as holder as she found a working style, studying videos online every evening.
Kicking is among the least understood and most critical elements of the game. Kickers tend to be summoned to the field with their teams trailing and a few seconds on the clock. They walk off either as heroes or scapegoats – there’s no middle ground.
After making Loyola’s club team, Ms. Turner dreamed of competing at the collegiate level. With the help of a kicking coach, she refined her style, learning where to set up, how quickly to take each step, how far back to cock her kicking leg and, crucially, how to do it consistently.
Then the graphic-design major started sending out videos. More than 50 colleges and universities received Ms. Turner’s packages. She knew that a female kicker with limited experience was a tough sell, so she zeroed in on a few schools, including Manitoba – with its storied programs in both football and fine arts – and hit up the coaching staff with repeated calls and e-mails. One early spring day in 2021, Ms. Turner picked up a call from Mr. Dobie, the Bisons’ head coach, recognizing the 204 area code. “I hadn’t heard anything at all from the Bisons – I thought they weren’t interested,” she says.
“Her film looked really good,” Mr. Dobie recalls. “The sound of the ball coming off her foot, the flight of the ball. She’s a true kicker. But we were very cautious because we weren’t getting game film.” Ms. Turner didn’t have any to provide.
Turner's teammates say she has quickly earned their respect after a short time with the Bisons.
So, Mr. Dobie brought her up for a tryout that April. Ms. Turner made the seven-hour drive with her parents. It was so cold and blustery that facilities staff urged Mr. Dobie to call it off, but Ms. Turner wouldn’t back down. A dozen curious players were on hand to watch her go toe-to-toe with the team’s graduating kicker, Cole Sabourin.
Mr. Dobie says Ms. Turner outkicked Mr. Sabourin until they reached the 45-yard line, where Mr. Sabourin gained a slight edge. Gavin Cobb, a receiver for the Edmonton Elks and a former Bison who watched it unfold, told his former coach: “She’s the real deal.”
But Mr. Dobie was already sold. “She was hitting everything,” he says. “Our decision was made.”
Mr. Dobie, who has coached at Manitoba for 28 years, didn’t bother to tell his team he was adding a woman to the roster. The guys who witnessed Ms. Turner’s workout spread the word: The new kicker’s got long, curly hair and a killer leg.
Teammates say that what distinguishes Ms. Turner, who redshirted last season, is not the extra X chromosome but a relentless drive to improve. “She’s the hardest-working person on our team, without a doubt,” says captain A.K. Gassama, who has since become a close friend of Ms. Turner’s. “She hasn’t missed one workout; and she’s the first one on the field every day, practising kicks.”
“That drive is the reason you’re going to see her put a big mark on this program and country,” adds Jordan Friesen, a defensive linebacker in his third year.
The attention can be a little much for Ms. Turner, who is as humble as they come, and still working to fit in as a starter. She was so embarrassed when a Globe photographer showed up to practice this fall that her eyes welled up with tears. She begged the paper to come back when the guys were gone. “I’m trying to be just another teammate,” she said.
Still, she recognizes her extraordinary and historic role: “I hope to see women in football become more common, more normalized. I hope some girls see this, and think this is an option for them, too. I hope this is just the start for women in the game.”
Nancy Macdonald