Taylor Hay is on the field Sunday, though she's left her pads and helmet at home. The team's 4'10", 140-pound running back has strep throat, but instead of bed rest and chicken soup, she's out here in the 40-degree weather, wrapped in a jacket and shouting at her teammates through a white surgical mask.
The practice's first contact drill involves two players, and is designed to test both tackling form and, subsequently, the ability to withstand the force of someone leaping through the air and smashing a shoulder into your guts. The veterans advise the rookies, "Trust the pads."
One player stands motionless in front of a landing area made of padded blue cylinders. The other, the tackler, takes a few steps to gain speed, plants one foot and then drives her corresponding shoulder into the first player's chest, aiming her blow just beneath her opponent's chest-pads — and sending both women flying backwards on the padding.
Or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work. A few minutes into the drill, a pair of players collide listlessly, more face-to-face than shoulder-to-chest. Hay, who is entering her eighth season with the Slam, takes note of the sloppy hit. Vocally.
"Y'all rubbing titties together, c'mon!" she shouts. Hay kicks the jostled pads straight as the next players take their positions. When she's satisfied, she barks the two-word signal to begin from behind her surgical mask: "Set; hit!"
The team's bespectacled head coach and co-owner, Quincy Davis, observes the action and offers critiques after each run. A former cornerback who played Division III football at Washington University, Davis joined the team in 2006 as an assistant coach. A decade later, with two championships under his belt, Davis pretty much runs the show, though he relies on assistance from the team's former head coach, Rodney Lacy, and a rotating staff of position-specific instructors. As with the players, none of the coaches draws a salary.
Davis takes Hay's place behind the row of blue pads and checks the camcorder trained on the scene before him. He gives the signal. "Set; hit!"
Chelsea Clay, one of the lighter, more agile team members (she plays both wide receiver on offense and several positions on defense), crashes a teammate into the pads and winds up in a tangled heap. "Good, good," Davis says.
The coach then gestures for the group's attention. "Rookies, raise your hands," he says. "Let's make sure we are stomping that foot before contact. Other thing, don't aim for her chest, alright? We want to hit her spinal cord, we want to run through her."
Davis calls for a player to act as a prop, and he pantomimes in slow-motion, demonstrating proper hand placement, the angle of the shoulder, the position of the head at the moment of impact.
"Our initial touching her is not what's going to get her down," he continues. "We hit her, we stop her momentum, and then we send her back to where she came from."
He motions the next pair of players to the pads. "Set; hit!"
It takes time and repetition — so many repetitions — to get things right. "Way too tall, baby, way too tall," Davis tells one player as she's helped off the padding. "You're going to miss a bunch of tackles trying to hit her in the face, alright?"
As jolting as this drill is, it's only a prelude to a true one-on-one matchup, what the coaches and players call "battle." Two players meet each other face to face, close enough that they can almost knock helmets. Both settle into a crouch called a "three-point stance." Each raises her hips, anchors one hand to the ground and holds the other close to her body, elbow tight to the ribs and a hand up, ready to strike. On the mark of "set; hit," the two players rocket at each other with violent intent. The goal of battle is simple: Push your opponent backwards. Don't get pushed.
Davis isn't the sort of coach who makes every statement a shout, but he puts some steel into his voice as he introduces the drill to the group. His audience has now swelled to include the two-dozen players who have just returned from their stint in the weight room.
"This is me against you, this is how good am I with my hands, how good am I with my first step, just coming right at you. Veterans," the coach deadpans at the older players, "raise your hand if you ever got your ass handed to you in this drill." Amid laughter, all but the rookies raise their hands.
Set in their stances, the players take turns hurling themselves into the calamitous embrace of their fellow teammates. It's not difficult to figure out which players have done this before and which are still getting comfortable moving with fifteen pounds of pads and viewing the world through the narrow window of their helmet's face mask.
Hay cheers from a distance. In place of brute strength, the dimunitive former Missouri Baptist University soccer player relies on her quickness to elude tacklers on the field.
"In that drill, I literally lose every single time," she says.
As for the rookies, Hay liked what she saw. "Overall, I'm proud of them," she says. "It's hard. Tomorrow they'll be sore. But they didn't give up."
At the conclusion of the day's practice, Davis sends the whole team on a series of sprints to simulate first, second, third and fourth down. It leaves most of the players doubled over and groaning. They trudge on burning muscles into a ragged circle around their head coach for the practice's final announcements.
"I say this often, but football is a game of shit not being ideal," Davis begins. "For some of you, this was your first time hitting. But now that you've done it, did anybody die? I keep asking y'all, go fast, go hard, make some mistakes — the faster you make mistakes, the faster we can fix them, and you can get on to being a better player. Fair enough?"
Through their exhaustion, the players respond, "Yes, coach."
