NOVI — When a girl gets socked in the schnozz a day before homecoming, what is she to do?
If you’re Ava Janusch, you go to the dance and sport that welt like a champ.
Janusch, a senior at Warren Regina, applied an ice pack to her face throughout the waning minutes of her team’s 14-0 powderpuff flag football victory over Bloomfield Hills Marian.
“After a play, a girl turned around and elbowed me in the nose. Hopefully it was accident,” she said. “Everyone goes all out every single play, and it’s full-contact when everyone’s going for the ball.”
“I think everyone needs to ice tonight and get some rest for homecoming tomorrow,” said Janusch’s classmate, MaKenzie Ryska.
The annual spectacle was played Sept. 14 at Detroit Catholic Central. Needless to say, the action is pretty intense.
“It’s nuts. It’s full-contact football,” said Ken Fenton, Marian’s head coach, who has also coached the Detroit Pride and the Detroit Demolition women's football teams.
It would not be stretching the truth to say that the game is much bigger than the homecoming dance. There’s too much school pride on both campuses, who have waged the battle every year since 1965. Regina — which has won the past nine in a row — holds a 27-17 lead in the series.
“(The best part is) getting to keep a tradition going, and keeping the history alive, and hopefully get this year’s juniors ready for the 10th win,” Janusch said. “We definitely felt some pressure in the locker room, but we all knew if we played together, we would pull it out. We worked so hard the past eight weeks, but we knew we would pull through together.”
“I think there is a little bit of pressure, but once you get into the season, once it gets closer to game time, you really start to believe we’re playing as a team,” Ryska said. “We were playing together, and our nerves kind of calmed down after that first play on the field. Once you start working together, all is well.”
Ryska, the quarterback, felt confident after her team rolled up the two-touchdown lead in the first quarter. Regina scored on its first possession on Ryska’s tush-push 1-yard run.
On the ensuing possession, Regina’s defense and penalties put Marian in a fourth-and-35 situation from their own 2-yard line, and Claire Dauer’s punt was returned to the 9. Nia Guess ran the ball to the 2, and Nina Shaw rushed for a touchdown on the next play. Maddy Steffani made both extra point attempts.
Although Marian’s defense got stronger over the last three quarters, the Mustang offense could not find the end zone. Marian intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter and returned the ball to Regina’s 14-yard line, but could not punch it in.
The game is played between the seniors at each school. Both athletic directors — Regina’s Emily Frikken and Marian’s Molly Campbell — say just about everyone in each senior class goes all-in with custom jerseys, braided hair in school colors, and game-day faces.
“I’d call it the 'Super Bowl' of female athletics between Marian and Regina,” Campbell said. “It’s a wonderful tradition; it’s a great camaraderie that brings our whole school community out here. It’s a fun, very, very competitive environment that these kids can just come out here and enjoy their senior year.”
Both teams started practicing in late July, four days a week, for an hour and a half, on average. Ryska said the football newbies showed up early or stayed late just to learn the basics of the game.
Normally, volunteer parents coach the girls, but Marian wanted to raise the stakes by bringing in Fenton, who is concurrently the varsity coach at Detroit University Prep Academy.
“We just wanted to shake it up a little bit and not put as much pressure on the parent community,” Campbell said. “We wanted to give the girls the best opportunity to succeed, and we felt if we went outside our community, we might have a great chance of breaking the streak.”
Instead, chalk up nine victories for Frikken in her nine years as athletic director at her alma mater. But she admitted the game means much more than wins and losses.
“With the event at the very beginning of the year, our freshman class is immediately introduced to our sisterhood,” she said. “All of the speeches that you hear at our powderpuff rally on Friday, every single person says they really learned the true meaning of sisterhood throughout these eight weeks of practicing.”
Frikken said the effort put into the game dictates the entire school year.
“It’s just the amount of support we see from the Regina community, from alumnae and all of our family and friends who come out for this one day a year. Honestly, I don’t think they realize the true tradition until they’ve experienced it themselves, but again, it’s all about the sisterhood.”
And that’s something that Janusch now nose … er, knows.
“(The most rewarding thing is) the unity between me and my teammates,” she said. “I’m friends with people now who I never was friends with before. It really brought our class together. I will remember this forever.”
