This homecoming queen wore football pads and a crown

Alicia Woollcott became her high school’s homecoming queen Friday night.

She got a crown. But first, No. 35 had to take off her football helmet.

The 17-year-old is a linebacker for the Grand Blanc Bobcats in Michigan, the school’s only female varsity football player.

“It was amazing,” she told MLive.com. “It was awesome to see all my friends vote for me. I hoped for it, but I didn’t know.”

Woollcott is a standout athlete — captain of the powerlifting team (she can dead-lift 335 pounds), competitive cheerleader and water polo player, according to the Flint Journal.

“She’s very intelligent, she’s an outstanding leader and I was so impressed that the boys voted her onto the leadership committee,” Clint Alexander, in his first year of coaching football at the high school, told the Journal in August.

He said in 23 years of coaching he’s never met a female student like Woollcott.

“So, when I asked ‘What would she like from the program and what would she like to change,’ she said, ‘Don’t feel sorry for me and don’t help me up when I get knocked down, I know what I’m doing and I know why I’m here,’” Alexander said.

News of her becoming homecoming queen prompted much jubilation on social media, with many sentiments echoing one sports reporter: It’s cool to see the homecoming queen in a football jersey.

Woollcott is not the first female player to become homecoming queen as more girls sign up for high school football. From Mississippi to New Mexico, others have gone before her in recent years, and she’s the second in Michigan to wear that crown in the last two years.

Grand Blanc, unfortunately, lost its first game of the season that night, which Woollcott called “bittersweet.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2017 at 12:54 PM with the headline "This homecoming queen wore football pads and a crown."