In the biting wind, fingers fumbled as girls pinned numbers onto their soccer hoodies, volleyball T-shirts and softball sweatshirts representing St. Louis Park High School. Freshman Lauryn Pohlman, luckily, had already bought bright pink football gloves — yet to be broken in, but providing relief from the April cold.
When St. Louis Park athletic director Andy Ewald told 26-year-old P.E. and health teacher Kayla Ross the Minnesota Vikings were sponsoring an expanded high school flag football league and the Orioles would have one of the league’s eventual 51 teams, Ross, who also plays receiver and quarterback for the Minnesota Vixen professional women’s tackle football team, stepped up as its quarterback — the metaphorical kind, in this case.
As Ross began to spread the word to interested girls — ones she taught at the school in the first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, others she coached and their friends — she asked what they wanted from the season.
“[The girls] requested to have other female coaches,” Ross said. “I promised them I would find some ones that I think would be a good fit.”
Ross did that with her Vixen teammates — Emily Sampson, Chloe Anderson and Nicki Hiber — along with other staff members from around her school.
Ross had coached JV basketball and soccer at St. Louis Park but had never run her own program. Her signature backward baseball cap was easy to spot as she wove between stations at tryouts, where players were tasked to run a 40-yard dash, practice catching or cut around cones.
“We’re not here to judge — well, we kind of are,“ Ross told the girls gathered around her ahead of tryouts. “You’re going to drop balls today, and that’s OK.”



Getting started
As a cold drizzle started just after the team’s first practice on April 14, Ross and other coaches gathered gear. Extra flags and uniforms still had to be ordered. The Vikings supplied sets of 25 each, but between the varsity team and two JV squads — around 60 girls total, no players cut — the Orioles needed even more.