‘Girls can’t play football!’ KC Glory invites viral TikTok girl to watch women play game
Elena Easley, an 8-year-old spitfire of a second-grader in Minnesota, had a very bad day last week. She loves football. Loves to watch the Kansas City Chiefs on TV. Loves to play.
She plays football at recess with the boys at her grade school. Her mom, not a big sports fan herself, even went to Walmart and bought Elena a pair of sticky-grip receiver gloves, kid-sized.
Elena can heave a football straight to her dad when they play catch in their front yard, about an hour’s drive north of Minneapolis.
Yet one day last week one of the boys at school sneered: “You can’t play football. Girls can’t play football. Do you ever see girls that play football?”
Actually, Elena never has.
“This was the first time her little eyes were opened to, ‘You’re right, I’ve never seen girls play football,’” her mother, Stephanie Easley, told The Star.
Well, Elena is about to see it now.
A member of the Kansas City Glory, the city’s semi-professional women’s full-contact tackle football team, saw a now-viral TikTok Easley made about what that little boy said.
Elena wanted to find other girls who play sports that are supposedly just for boys.
And now the Easley family will be special guests at the Glory’s season opener Saturday at Pembroke Hill School where the team plays its home games.
Elena will do the coin toss. The team has something special planned for her mom at halftime.
“So many little girls have been reaching out to me, 13, 14, 16-year-olds, girls just like Elena, and they want to support Elena and show her what they’re doing,” Stephanie Easley said.
The TikTok grabbed more than 2 million views in a week. The Easley women have been swamped with positive responses and interview requests from around the world.
Given the buzz, Glory owner and co-head coach Keke Blackmon has no idea how big of a crowd to expect Saturday. The game begins at 6 p.m. against the Texas Elite Spartans from Dallas.
“I haven’t had anything go viral, but this has been absolutely nuts,” Blackmon said.
This is a moment for the Glory, too. There are still some — apparently many — Kansas Citians who don’t know there’s a women’s tackle football team in town.
“We believe in family here,” said Blackmon. “We’re loving on Elena and that is going to bring so much more awareness to the game and for this game and for Elena. We want everyone to know, and every little girl to know, it’s here, this game is here.”
The video struck a strong chord with 24-year-old KC Glory linebacker Nana Olavuo who reached out to Easley after watching it.
She told Elena’s mom how there were no female role models in her native Finland when she began playing football with boys at age 6.
And some days, she still feels like she’s playing in the shadows.
“I want people to know that girls do play football,” Olavuo told The Star. “I think the bigger issue is that people haven’t seen it yet and just because they haven’t seen it they don’t know it exists. I think it’s important for us to get out there and normalize women’s sports.
“I think my part and my mission in it is to be able to show girls they have a future in the sport and help them not go through what I went through. I never had anyone to look up to.”
Look what you made me do
Football has never been big in the Easley family. Elena’s two older brothers play basketball, soccer and video games. Neither her stay-at-home mom or dad, a mechanic for an asphalt company, are interested in sports.
“We are not your stereotypical sports family,” Easley said. “We started watching it because we are Swifties.”
Shocker?
Not really, given Swift’s well-documented impact on the NFL’s popularity among women.
Mom and daughter began watching Chiefs games after Swift began dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and attending games.
“So there’s my daughter and I sitting on the couch every week,” Easley said. “My poor husband is sitting there trying to change the channel. None of my boys wanted to watch. We started learning the game, learning the players.”
Easley had no idea that her daughter had started playing football with the boys at school, and hadn’t realized how much of an impact an old Nickelodeon show called “Bella and the Bulldogs” was having on her daughter.
The kids sitcom follows Texas cheerleader Bella Dawson who becomes quarterback for her middle school’s football team, but not without being teased about being a girl. It still streams on Netflix.
“The next thing I know she’s using my whiteboard and writing football plays all over it,” Stephanie Easley laughed.
After her classmate’s comment last week, Elena wanted to find other little girls who like playing football and asked her mom to make a TikTok.
“I’ve gone viral on TikTok before with my foster dogs, so my children think I can go viral easily,” Easley said. “When we were making it she got choked up. She’s very, very shy. I asked her, ‘Do you want to post it? Do we need to make it again?’ She said go ahead and post it. So I posted it not expecting it to go anywhere.”
The first responses came overnight from the United Kingdom — where “football” is soccer — and fans there who wanted to send Elena gifts. Responses have been pouring in and have been overwhelmingly supportive.
Except for one man who wished Elena harm on Facebook.
The man, whose profile photo showed him with a little girl, wrote that he hoped Elena would get tackled so hard that she quits football.
Easley is hiding nasty comments from her daughter.
All the Glory in KC
Kansas City Glory, founded in 2019, is one of 17 teams in the semi-pro full-contact Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC). They will play six regular season games through June.
Elena’s experience, rather ironically, happened just a couple of days after the WNFC announced what it called a “landmark moment for women’s professional football.”
ESPN2 will broadcast live the league’s championship game on June 21 for the first time in league history. The game will be played at The Star in Frisco, the world headquarters and training facility of the Dallas Cowboys.
The move reflects the booming interest in women’s sports and a growing demand for women’s football on mainstream platforms, the league said in its announcement last week.
Coming soon: a marketing campaign built around the theme, “Football Looks Like This.”
New fans might not realize that these athletes don’t get paid to play. Sponsors are vital to keeping the Glory running. Blackmon is still raising money for the $50,000 franchise fee, which she is confident she can do in a city that loves sports so much.
“Women’s football is still pay to play. Players pay a player’s fee,” said Olavuo, in her second season here. “It costs a lot for women’s football teams to run ... we are fully running off sponsorships.
“Everybody works. They have a normal job they pay their bills with. In season we have to practice later in the evening so people can come after work. That’s something we talk about a lot. Women do this for the love of the game.”
Olavuo said her mom wanted to play football, too, when she was younger, so she raised her daughter to believe that she could.
“I know not all girls have moms like me and Elena have,” said Olavuo, who has played on several teams across Europe and the United States in her young career.
Typical attendance at Kansas City Glory games runs anywhere from 300 to 600 fans, said Blackmon, a former player herself who began as Glory’s head coach, then became owner in 2022. She was an all-pro coach in the league the last four years.
Olavuo can feel interest growing in Kansas City, especially among people who seem surprised, but excited, to hear that she plays football here.
“I feel like it’s having its boom right now,” Olavuo said. “I think back home in Europe ... it’s easier to promote women’s football because in the States people have always known it as man’s sport, so its harder to change the narrative.”
And now Elena’s story becomes part of the narrative.
The Easleys launched a GoFundMe to help pay for their drive to Kansas City.
“Please know that I completely understand that this is a recreational choice and that there are several much more important causes out there to donate to, but if this specifically touches your heart and you’d like to help, it would be appreciated,” Easley wrote on GoFundMe.
“I firmly believe it would make a difference in this little girl’s outlook in the future.”
Since then, however, the family has shuffled around its budget and Easley plans to give all the donations to the Kansas City Glory.
She raised the goal. And as of Thursday, nearly $8,000 of the $9,000 target had been met.
“I truly thought this moment of this boy saying what he did would be a poor memory for her in a negative way, instead it has become the most positive experience between all the comments, all the athletes, teams and organizations reaching out and all the normal average people!!!” Easley wrote, thanking supporters.
“We are excitedly counting down the days until Friday when we leave for Kansas City! Elena is practicing her throw and I am making a bunch of friendship bracelets so that she can share them with other fans!”
As for the little boy who started all of this?
Elena reports that, wisely, he has run back his comment.
This story was originally published March 28, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
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