E-Mail This Article to a Friend Real girls play tackle The Mass Mutiny, JP’s full-contact women’s pro-football team, pulls no punches BY CAMILLE DODERO

LINDA CARUSO can totally kick your butt. An East Boston native with painted toenails, a pierced belly button, and a thick townie accent, Caruso is a veteran linebacker on the Mass Mutiny, a 6-1 pro women’s tackle-football team that recently relocated to Jamaica Plain from Lowell. The 30-year-old athlete ranks second on the Mutiny in defensive tackles, with 18 solo and 28 assists. At 5’3" and 150 pounds, she charges opponents with such brute force that a former teammate once likened Caruso’s hit to that of a "mini Mack truck."

A former South Bay corrections officer who exudes tough-girl charisma seemingly made for television, Caruso is exactly the sort of pretty face that professional women’s full-contact football wants to present to a wider audience. (The New Hampshire resident was picked as one of 16 contestants on The Benefactor, an ABC reality rip-off of The Apprentice that aired last summer, and made it to the final three.) She also embodies the mix of athletic roughness and overt femininity that could make the sport marketable to a wider audience. As someone who wears diamond earrings on the practice field and keeps a bunny sticker slapped on the front of her shoulder pads, and whose fiancé is a former coach’s friend, Caruso is saleable to girly-girls, social conservatives, and anyone else wary of women playing football.

And convincing people that women can play football is an integral part of attracting a wider fanbase. Mutiny owner Sheri Russell, a chiropractor and sports-medicine specialist who spent five years as the team’s athletic director before buying the franchise last November, moved the Mutiny from Lowell to Boston in hopes of increasing its visibility and acceptance. It’ll be no small feat; as football has become ever more entrenched as a national pastime, girls have always been expected to remain on the sidelines, cheering for the boys. "The biggest reason [I bought the team] is that I have a little four-year-old niece," says Russell, affectionately known to many of her players as Doc Sheri. "And the idea that she could be told ‘no’ to do something, like a sport, is just ridiculous. That’s one of the underlying things that I heard with a lot of the athletes. They were just so happy to have the opportunity to do something they couldn’t do when they were younger."

And they do play: the Mutiny’s regular season consists of eight games — four away and four at home — against five teams, from mid April to mid June. They practice twice a week, and on Sundays if they have a week off.

Naturally, Russell’s biggest challenge is proving women can play tackle football. "You have the misconception going into it that they can’t throw the football, or they can’t catch, or they’re not going to hit that hard," says Mutiny head coach Patrick McStay. "And you get there and they’re killing people. You think that when they’re going to hit, they’re going to cry or something like that. And it’s not like that. They take pain. I’ve played football and seen these guys walk off the field with less injury than these girls playing with broken hands." He pauses. "It’s just awesome."

Since they’re continually fighting to be taken seriously, some players don’t want to be portrayed as too feminine. In the locker room before their first home game, trainer and centerback Terri Pillsbury wraps a teammate’s wrist in purple tape. "I love purple," gushes the half-dressed player. "Growing up, it was my favorite color!"

"I used to love unicorns and purple," adds a captain standing nearby. Then she glares at me. "Don’t write that down. Or at least don’t use my name."

Undressed to kill

"See your favorite players in and out of uniform." That’s how the team’s Web site hypes the Mass Mutiny 2005 calendar, sold for $20 at home games. Shot by local photographer Dom Miguel, the full-color calendar features eight players, including Caruso; star wide receiver Ginger Snow, a lithe woman ranked second overall in the National Women’s Football Association (NWFA) for receiving yards (454 in seven games) who can outrun anybody on the field; corn-rowed cornerback Monique "Hollywood" Holder; and long-time nose guard Tony Farfaras. There are photos of the women suited up in their black-and-gold uniforms, carrying each other piggyback, smiling in cowboy hats. And there’s one image of several players posed half-naked, with hands and helmets concealing body parts.

That photo was Russell’s idea. "I knew that I needed to change the view, from a market standpoint, of what people thought a woman football player was," she explains. Inspired by Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of the 1998 gold-medal-winning women’s Olympic ice-hockey team — some of whom Russell has worked with in her sports-medicine practice — in various states of undress, she wanted to illustrate that female full-contact-football players weren’t lumbering brutes who ate babies for breakfast. "After people see the photos, a lot of them say, ‘Wow, these aren’t big, awful, icky, gross women,’ " Russell reports. "People need to know these are really beautiful, professional, articulate, sexy, athletic women."

Marketing the Mass Mutiny members as both alluring and tough was one of the first major decisions Russell made when she bought the team from its former coach, Mike Fay. Her other significant change was to shift the squad from UMass Lowell, where they’d played three seasons, to Jamaica Plain’s English High School field. "I needed to put the team in front of more people," she explains. "Number one, they’re so dedicated. Number two, they’re playing something most people say that women can’t play."

There are currently 37 active players on the Mutiny roster, including six captains. Their heights span from 5’3" to 6’2"; their weights range from 126 to 310 pounds, with a team average of 175.84. Since the players aren’t paid, nearly all have full-time jobs. They’re in sales, finance, production; they are teachers, attorneys, grad students, and analysts.

Nearly all the Mutiny players are lifelong athletes. More than half previously played in Jamaica Plain’s flag-football league. Many competed in other sports: Caruso played ice hockey in East Boston; rookie quarterback Allison Cahill was an All-Ivy basketball star at Princeton. Captain and free safety/kicker Kendra Cestone holds five all-time records for women’s soccer at her alma mater, Nichols College.

They hail from cities including Boston, Somerville, Arlington, Wareham, Tewksbury, Brockton, Norwood, Lowell, Uxbridge, Billerica, and Dartmouth. A handful drive in from other states: New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut.

"I love the Mutiny," says defensive end Deb DelToro, a Guilford, Connecticut, resident who commutes two and a half hours to play with the team, even though there’s a rival franchise in her home state, the Connecticut Crush. "It’s worth the trip. I love this team."

The Mutiny players do have a sisterly rapport — not to mention typical athletes’ camaraderie. They show off their bruises. They spit on the ground. They squeeze each other’s butts. They dash across the practice field and knock each other over. They do shots together after games. They talk about having kids, about how they’d better have boys, how it would be just their luck if their kids wound up nerdy tuba players. And they laugh — a lot.

"The first day of my very first practice, we’re on the line," says Caruso. "You know, I haven’t really played organized football. So they tell me to get behind the nose guard because I’m the linebacker. All of a sudden, [the nose guard] just stands up and farts. I’m not going to tell you who it is, but it’s one of our linemen. And she just turns around. I looked at her and laughed. She laughed, and she did a curtsy. That’s, like, my personality: since then, we’ve been best buddies. And we’ve been through everything together." She laughs. "It was a disgusting situation that brought us together forever."