Get in the Game

Dallas women's football team tackles new strategy on and off the field

The Dallas Elite took on the Houston Power on May 6.

Photo courtesy of Dallas Elite

Growing up in a strict military household in San Diego, Devon Goldsmith’s father didn’t let her watch football on television. Now at age 34, she's on the gridiron several times a week as a linebacker and running back for the Dallas Texas Elite women’s football team.

Dallas Elite, formed in 2014, is part of the nine-year-old national Women’s Football Alliance. It's one of 65 teams competing around the country this season, from April through the championship game in July in Atlanta.

Dallas Elite took home that championship trophy in 2017, beating Boston Renegades, 31-21. But then, faced with ownership struggles last fall, the team split up.

In February, new leadership got the team on the field again. Now owner Maria Spencer, along with new co-owners LynMarie Liberty-Ellington and Mike Ellington, are rebuilding the organization and spreading the word that Dallas women's football is alive and well.

They’ve recruited new players, formed partnerships with community organizations, have plans to add a dance team to help cheer on the games, and are using the hashtag #beElite to shine a spotlight on a sport that has struggled for attention.

Home games are played at the massive Prestonwood Christian Academy campus in Plano, and tickets are just $10 per person ($12 at the door). The team would like to get more than its usual 250 to 350 people in the stands.

“To me, women's football encompasses female empowerment at its fullest," says Liberty-Ellington. "Women get to play a sport they were always told was only for boys, and women's football is probably the only sport that embraces women of all shapes and sizes.”

The Ellingtons have successful track record as previous owners of the Lonestar Mustangs, the Tulsa Eagles, and Little Rock Wildcats. As a former WFA champion herself, Spencer says she wants “to see women’s football reach the masses."

To help reach the masses in Dallas, the team is expanding its community outreach efforts. For instance, it has partnered on a raffle with Lancer Legacy Ranch, a support organization for veterans. Raffle ticket sales will help the ranch secure needed tools for its workshop, while the Elite will get money to help defray travel costs.

Players on Dallas Elite don't earn salaries. In fact, they each paid $500 to be on the team this season, and owners cover many expenses and travel costs. Most players are professionals with day jobs, from a barber and a bodybuilder, to teachers and business women.

Games and the practices are a family affair, with players and coaches often bringing their little ones to practices, which take place two to three times a week.

Goldsmith works as an IT business analyst. She has played football for 15 years, two of them with the Elite, and loves it. The game, she says, isn’t just about running around and taking down the opponent.

“It’s really more than that,” she says. “It’s like protecting your family. It’s a really big deal.”

Lauren Chesley, 33, a disability liaison by day who joined the team last year, says she thinks more awareness of women's football would encourage girls to play the game in middle school and high school.

“Especially with contact sport, a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their minds around women doing it,” she says. “It’s hard for people to understand that you can be beautiful and strong and nice, and be aggressive at the same time.”

But that's what the players on Dallas Elite do when they take the field.

“It’s a lot of fun,” says Chesley. “We play the sport how it’s meant to be played, not modified or anything. It’s straight-up football.”

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The next Dallas Elite game, against the Kansas City Titans, takes place at 7 pm May 19 at Prestonwood Christian Academy.

sports

Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

movies film