Chicago News Cooperative: Polishing Her Star on Gridiron in Chicago

Springer was a 5-foot-9, 220-pound running back and linebacker for the Dallas Diamonds. Bache, playing safety for the Chicago Force, tried to tackle her and got a concussion that, combined with another hit later in the game, ended her playing career.

Springer rampaged through the defense that day, scoring 33 points in the Diamonds’ 35-29 victory.

“She plays like a man,” said Bache, who owns the Chicago Force.

Springer, who is widely considered the best player in the short history of women’s football, is now a member of the Force, recruited in one of the team’s off-season moves to push the Force, a perennial playoff contender, toward a championship.

The Force left the league it had played in since the team’s inception in 2003 and joined the 60-team Women’s Football Alliance, regarded as the premier league in this fast-growing sport. It also shed some of last year’s players. Its rebuilding effort is led by the acquisition of Springer.

Force Coach John Konecki, a longtime assistant coach at prep powerhouse Crete-Monee High School in Crete, Ill., calls Springer “the most dominant player I’ve ever coached.” He said the pleasure of watching her play might compare to watching the great female athletes of all time, including Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

Springer, 30, who played basketball at Texas Woman’s University, played football with Dallas for eight years, and is one of the strongest and fastest players in women’s football. She can bench press 315 pounds and has run the 40-yard dash in 4.88 seconds.

Three years ago, Force players, upset after losing in their only appearance in a championship game, questioned whether Springer was taking steroids. Springer was not surprised to hear the rumors.

“I’ve also been asked if I’m really a woman,” she said, adding that such accusations do not bother her. “I am what I am, and I do what I do well.”

But women’s football does not pay the players to do well. In fact, the women pay $600 a year for the privilege to play — and it is not clear how Springer will make a living when she moves to Chicago. (For the first few games of the eight-game season, she has been commuting from Dallas and bunking with a teammate, Angela Bandstra, a Chicago firefighter.)

Springer is a special-education teacher, and she has applied to teach at a private school in Chicago. She has also taken the police exam.

Now that she is with the Force, there is a new problem: keeping her from injuring her teammates in practice.

Jennifer Benson, who was once a linebacker with the Force, smiled with rueful pride as she recalled a play in which she helped gang-tackle Springer. “There were four of us, I think,” Benson said. “I got a leg.”

In practice, Force coaches are instructed to blow their whistles early “when she’s bearing down on a DB and it looks like it’s going to end badly,” Bache said before the season opener last month against the Minnesota Machine at Jorndt Field in the Ravenswood neighborhood.

Springer carried the ball 13 times for 176 yards and scored four touchdowns in a 69-0 rout of the Machine before 650 fans. The Force also won its second game, 58-0, over the Wisconsin Wolves. The next home game is May 7 against the Kansas City Tribe.

Perhaps because of all of Springer’s football success — she helped win four championships with the Diamonds, and last summer played on a victorious United States team in an international tournament in Stockholm — she maintains a demeanor that, contrasted with her ebullient young teammates, is almost comically stoic.

The only feeling she acknowledged after the Minnesota game came from wearing a uniform other than the Diamonds’. “Today was rough,” she said in a monotone drawl, “emotionally.”

She said she came to the Force because she wanted to play for Konecki, who coached the United States team in Sweden and is teaching her how to become an even more fearsome running back by squaring her shoulders and aiming her body upfield.

“I want to be the best running back that I can be,” Springer said.

Bache takes pains not to make the Force too Springer-centric. She did not name her the offensive M.V.P. of the first game, bestowing the honor on the tailback Brandy Hatcher, who ran for 85 yards.

“I’m sure based on stats we could give Springer the M.V.P. every game this season if we wanted,” Bache said later in an e-mail. “We prefer to spread it around and acknowledge the various and often less obvious contributions that players make.”

Bache said she had not talked to her new star about the hit that knocked her out of football three years ago and that still leaves her with postconcussion aftereffects.

“It’s still a little fresh,” Bache said.