This story aired in the May 13, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Football is the most popular sport in America. This year’s Super Bowl drew in nearly 125 million viewers, while the NFL cleared 23 billion in revenue for its last season.
But, that love doesn’t necessarily extend to athletes who aren’t cisgender men.
In 2021, the Raiders head coach John Gruden resigned after emails surfaced in which he denounced the NFL’s decision to allow women as referees and made homophobic remarks about a player. His comments might have received backlash, but many in the American football community share these views.
And old, out-dated attitudes about who can (and should) play football, aren’t stopping athletes from making their mark on the sport.
At Oakland’s Laney College, there’s a storm brewing… The Golden State Storm to be exact! It’s the newest women’s tackle football team in the Women's National Football Conference.
Kris Grimes is the team's star running back. They joined the WNFC in 2024, playing initially for the Oregon Ravens and then the Seattle Majestics. And they were Rookie of the Year for the league in 2024.
Kris moved to the Bay Area- to Richmond this year for a chance to help the Storm build a competitive team.
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Story Transcript:
Sounds of a football announcer calling a play.
REPORTER: It's a Saturday night in Oakland. Just beyond the lights of the football field at Laney College, I can see the red glow of the Tribune building downtown.
Kris Grimes has just broken free of a few would-be tackles to nearly drive a touchdown for the Golden State Storm, stopping at the first yard line.
Sounds of crowd cheering and announcer calling the play.
REPORTER: It’s the second game of the season, and The Storm is up five points. Everyone's in a good mood. One moment I'm seeing a player get her injured hands taped on the sideline, and then the next, she’s dancing. The stands are filled with over 1,200 fans wearing homemade t-shirts and holding signs.
It’s like everyone here understands that something historic is going on. The Storm is Oakland's first women’s tackle football team, and only the 16th team in the WNFC — the Women’s National Football Conference.
Sounds of football announcer: Number 9 Kris Grimes for the carry for a gain of nine, tackle made by Beatrice Rico…
REPORTER: Tackle football is far and away the top sport for high school boys in the US, counting over a million participants last year. Compare that to the four thousand high school girls in the sport. Girls flag football is one of the fastest growing sports in the country, but tackle football opportunities are rare. Most girl and non-binary athletes who want to play tackle have to join their school’s boys team.
Which is why athletes on the Storm — and all WNFC teams — are up for making big sacrifices to play the sport they love, despite the fact that none of them are paid to play. Here’s Kris Grimes.
KRIS GRIMES: For the WNFC athletes, we oftentimes have a regular nine to five. Or some of us, one of my, uh, teammates actually had to work like a night shift and then come to practice. And one of my other running backs had to go to work before the game, got off at two and had to play a game.
REPORTER: While a majority of The Storm’s roster is from Northern California, the team boasts players from Mexico and even Germany. Kris moved here from Portland, Oregon.
GRIMES: I was already looking for a different career path, so I was like, you know what? Let me focus on football right now. Here it is, and who knows what's gonna happen after the season. But with that comes, like, health insurance. (laughs)
REPORTER: And we know how expensive that can be.
So, why do they do it?
Growing up in the city of Compton, Kris didn’t play football, or even watch it.
GRIMES: No, not really. (laughs) We would watch golf on the weekends when my folks were home.
REPORTER: Kris comes from a big golf family.
GRIMES: We'd watch like gymnastics, but yeah, not a lot of football. Wasn't huge on football. I was like, I don't care about football.
REPORTER: They say, they didn’t even attend high school games. But the interest was there in the background, even if they couldn’t admit it to themself at the time.
GRIMES: I think it was because I couldn't play. I guarantee that's probably why.
REPORTER: Maybe it was a form of self-preservation, but back then, they wouldn’t let themself consider a sport that wouldn’t accept them.
But their family was athletic and loved all kinds of sports. Their parents were even in a bowling league near Long Beach.
GRIMES: It all started, my folks bowl over at Cal Bowl. They were part of that league…
REPORTER: And next door to the bowling alley?
GRIMES: …and there was a rink then called Glacial Gardens.
REPORTER: An ice rink. When Kris was just three-and-a-half, their parents put them and their brother Aaron in figure skating lessons. They would continue to skate all throughout their childhood.
GRIMES: Mom and dad would either take us before we had school in the morning or, and then we also had a, a lesson at after school. So our lives were spent at the rink.
REPORTER: But ice-skating was never quite the sport for Kris.
GRIMES: I was not into the girly and frilly bits of figure skating
REPORTER: They always had their eye on the other sport happening at the rink.
GRIMES: Oh my god, yeah, I wanted to play hockey so bad. I just wanted to get out and go hit people I think, and then just be a part of something that was more than just me at the time.
REPORTER: But after skating for ten years, Kris moved into another solo sport that couldn’t be any more different from football — golf.
Kris played golf all through high school and college. In fact, they had a full ride for the golf team at Southern Illinois University.
As unlikely as these two very solo sports might seem for a future running back, Kris credits both with giving them the discipline they would need to excel at tackle football.
GRIMES: I feel the sports that I've done, like have all molded me to, especially just kind of like, the amount of accountability that I have to have for myself.
REPORTER: After graduating from college in 2015, they moved to Kansas City. And it was there, in 2019, on a fateful Saturday night in April, when their life would change.
Sound of football announcer: Good evening everyone and welcome to Truman High School Stadium in Independence, Missouri, home of the Kansas City Titans. Tonight…
GRIMES: I got an invite to go to a women's football game and I was like, heck yeah.
REPORTER: A friend had a blind date with someone on the Kansas City Titans, a women’s tackle football team, and had asked Kris to come along. Kris might have been the wingman that night, but the love story was all theirs, starting with the Titans’ wide-receiver.
GRIMES: They go out for a pass and they catch it like, jumping pass. I'm like, “Holy shit, this is women's tackle football!”
So I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, like I don't care what team you guys are playing against, I wanna watch good athletes perform.
REPORTER: And all of a sudden, this thing that had excluded them their whole life was an actual possibility.
GRIMES: I wish I could take it and put it in a bottle. The feeling of that was more like, we get to cheer for people that look like us, represent us, and are doing things that are frowned upon in normal society.
REPORTER: After the game, Kris and their friend went out with the team.
GRIMES: I get to speak to one of the athletes, and I find out that she's from some eastern European country and I'm like, “And you travel out here to play football?” Just like, flabbergasted. She's like, “Yeah.” And I'm like, “Why?” She's like, “Because I love it.”
REPORTER: And then, over drinks, tackle football went from a game Kris had never allowed themselves to think about to something that wanted them.
GRIMES: I'm like, okay, cool. I'm in love with this game now. Like, I, like I'm in love. How do I do it? What's going on? And one of the coaches at the time he came up, he was like, “You look like you could be a running back.”
REPORTER: They had a couple bumps in the road before that would happen — a worldwide pandemic, and a cross-country move to Portland — but by 2021, it was on. They joined the Oregon Ravens and instantly loved the physicality of the game.
Sounds of football tackle and referee whistles.
GRIMES: Ooh, to hit someone? It just kind of flows through my body. Usually it starts at the shoulder and then if I'm pumping my legs and I feel it through there.
REPORTER: For Kris’ family, news of their new sport wasn’t much of a surprise.
GRIMES: Yeah, they knew I was a hitter. They knew it. They're like, “All right, I guess you figured it out.”
They like to watch. They're hella supportive.
REPORTER: In 2024, their family was able to see them play with the Ravens against the LA Legends.
GRIMES: First play of the game, I get the ball and I truck through their safety.
Sounds of Kris’ brother and dad cheering with the football game in the background.
GRIMES: my brother sent me a clip of it, and you just hear my dad saying, “Go, Kris, go!” Like yelling, like “Yeah!”
At one point he called and he’s like, “Hey, I thought this was recreation.” He's like, “I understand now.” And that meant, that meant the world.
REPORTER: That acceptance is everything to Kris, because they know that not everyone feels the same way. While men’s football is the most popular sport in America, attitudes toward women and non-binary athletes in the sport are not so positive.
GRIMES: The American football culture hasn't been the most acceptant of women playing football.
You get the comments from the guys that are just like, “Ah, get a Twelve-U group, they'll take 'em down.”
REPORTER: Twelve-U is an under-12 league, typically for boys.
Adding to that, it’s a time of record-breaking anti-trans legislation in the US, and a lot of the ire is focused around sports.
PBS NEWS: Since President Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has moved to restrict rights for transgender people. From transition-related medical care for youth, to sports participation, to identity markers on passports…
REPORTER: Kris is the only non-binary athlete on the Storm, and one of the few non-binary players in the league.
In 2020, the WNFC expanded its gender policies so that trans men, women, and non-binary athletes are welcome in the league, with certain restrictions around hormone intake and reassignment surgeries.
GRIMES: Some folks are really down, some folks don't understand still.
REPORTER: But Kris and the rest of the Storm aren’t letting any negative attitudes get in the way.
GRIMES: We're making it our own, like sure it's America's sport, but the WNFC, any woman, non-binary person playing this game that is known as America's sport, we are making it our own.
We are creating a path, we are being trailblazers.
REPORTER: They want to create that same feeling of possibility for fans in Oakland that they experienced in Kansas City.
GRIMES: Yeah, the imagination is huge. Oh man. The imagination is huge, 'cause I, I think for young girls and young folks who are just trying to figure themselves out, they grow up like having to find this thing that they fit into this box, versus having an imagination and just dreaming bigger than what they are or what they could be, or what they're told they should be.
Sound of music playing at the football stadium while the crowd cheers over shouts from the field.
REPORTER: The Storm will be playing their final regular season game this Saturday against the LA Legends.
