Lady Rams tween QB leads Middle School grid team
November 1, 2023 at 10:04 p.m.
Faith and begorrah, local Irish eyes are smiling and their hearts are filled with Gaelic pride over the athletic exploits of a lively, lovely pre-teen colleen who is doing what no other Lady Ram has ever done before on land, sea and air—including swimming and diving for the elite Badgers swim club, playing point guard for the New York Extreme AAU hoops travel team, excelling in lacrosse and, most importantly, quarterbacking the Port Chester Middle School football Rams while being accepted by her teammates as just one of the guys as well as one of their best football players.
The Port Chester Middle School 2023 football team. McKayla McLoughlin is in the middle row, second from left, the only female on the 38-member team. She wears #12.Courtesy of Paul Santavicca
The tween wunderkind we're talking about is McKayla McLoughlin, 12, an eighth-grader who is an offensive and defensive standout as the quarterback on O and linebacker on D for the Rams football team that lined up for its final football game of the regular season Thursday (11/2) against Peekskill at home.
Santavicca's insights
Port Chester Middle School head football coach Paul Santavicca says the Middle School Rams wouldn't be as good as they are without her. "She is our best football player and one of the leaders of our team," Santavicca said shortly before game time. "She is a tremendous athlete with a great arm, feel for the game and has vision when she runs the ball. She also starts at linebacker for us and has a nose for the ball. Her most significant attribute is her toughness and will to win. McKayla has taken some big hits this season and always pops back up knowing that she plays a key role on our team. We need her out there! Side note, McKayla is also a standout on the basketball court and is on her way to being one on the lacrosse field."
Lady Rams swim team coach Colleen Cahill, another colleen if there ever was one, is also trying to recruit McKayla for the varsity swim team as is Jeanine Maiolini for her varsity softball team. And Lady Rams basketball coach Danny Davis is counting on McKayla to be the starting point guard on his varsity hoops squad as she was last year as a 7th grade starter.
The giant footsteps
McKayla McLoughlin plays basketball for the New York Extreme AAU travel team.Courtesy of Brian McLoughlin
So McKayla is already following in the giant footsteps of such former Lady Rams Middle School greats as the Ostrowski sisters (Brooklyn and Madison who are now playing softball for Villanova on athletic scholarships) and Kayleigh Heckel, the transfer from Port Chester to nationally-ranked Lutheran High School on Long Island who is now mulling over college scholarship offers to Alabama, Tennessee, USC and Stanford, her faves in the collegiate sweepstakes. That talented trio all went on to become Lady Ram all-time varsity female greats in basketball and softball.
But none of them started at quarterback and linebacker for the Rams as McKayla does. Or swam and dove for the mighty Badgers, the elite youth swimming and diving training program that produces some of Westchester's best varsity swimmers. Or excelled in lacrosse.
What they all have in common though is strong familial thoroughbred athletic bloodlines and parents who care, truly care, about their kids and are willing to spend their time tutoring them in the athletic ABCs while ferrying them to wherever they have to go with travel teams that help hone their skills.
Brooklyn and Madison benefitted from the early training that came from their mom DeAnne, a former windmill pitching ace and basketball player at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, and their dad Jason, a former All-Navy centerfielder. Kayleigh's mom played softball for St. John's University, her dad was a Major League baseball player, and she grew up playing against both her bros who were All-League Rams in baseball and basketball.
'Doing what comes naturally'
But not to be outdone, McKayla fits into the same formative athletic mold because her dad was a five-sport varsity athlete at Iona Prep while her mom was a cheerleader at Rye High School back in her high school days when she was Kelly Somerville and the legendary coach Dino Garr made Rye the perennial king of the local football hill.
So McKayla shrugs off any kind of praise for her athleticism because playing all kinds of sports seems just like a family thing that she was born to do.
"I'm just doing what comes naturally in my family," she said. "I'm from an athletic family. I started out playing a lot of catch with my father in the backyard and everything developed from there."
That's something of an understatement. Because she grew up competing against her big brothers Aidan, 21, and Tiernan, 15, one of the upcoming players on the Port Chester lacrosse team. She also followed her bros around at their team practices, mimicking their moves from the sidelines. And she went to Rye Town Youth Football practices conducted by her father Brian, an electrician, who has been one of the prime movers behind Rye Town youth football for the past decade, exuding the kind of passion for the game that made him a standout as an Iona Prep LAX great who started for the varsity as a freshman and excelled from the get-go in the state championship game against St. Anthony's in the late 1990s.
Rah rah flag football
Kayla McLoughlin, at right hugging her mother, with her parents Brian and Kelly, brothers Tiernan and Aidan and sister Piper.Courtesy of Brian McLoughlin
McKayla even was a cheerleader at Rye Town flag football games, whirling through moves taught by her mom, the ex-Rye cheerleader-turned-White Plains Hospital nurse, who is now also teaching the cheerleading basics to Piper, the family's youngest, who is at King Street Elementary School. But McKayla soon graduated from cheerleading on the sidelines to playing flag football herself. And then one day she was watching the Middle School football team practice with her grandfather Rob and he said "McKayla, you could start at quarterback for that team next year and I thought, ‘why not?’" McKayla said, recalling that conversation.
So she did, try out, that is, and she made the team as the quarterback as well as a defensive linebacker.
"At first her friends were saying: ‘McKayla, you don't want to play tackle football with the boys because you are going to get hurt,’" her father recalled. "But she did want to see if she could play at that level, and she has proven that she could."
And what did it feel like the first time she was tackled and really hit hard in a football game against the boys from rival schools?
Plays through hurt
"It hurt," McKayla said simply. "But I knew I had to get up. So I did. And just kept on playing."
"I wasn't sure about her playing football against the boys at the start," Brian recalled. "But then I watched her play in one of the most recent games, a close loss to Rye. And I watched the way the boys accepted her, acknowledged her for the player she is, and that was important to me, to her, because they had grown up playing together in the Rye Town Youth Football League, and they knew how good she is."
There is another side to McKayla as well. It is hinted at in part of Brian's email address: the part that reads "ireland always." "There is a proud side to the first generation Irish and we don't like to be told what we can or can't do," said Brian, who spent his boyhood summers working on relatives’ farms in Ireland's County Cork. McKayla is bent on proving anything the boys can do, she can do, too. And she is doing just that.
So indeed local Irish eyes are smiling and there is Gaelic pride in their hearts because that lively, lovely tween colleen McKayla McLoughlin is the starting Rams quarterback and linebacker, quite possibly the only female athlete in Port Chester's storied athletic history to ever do that, and faith and begorrah, how wonderful is that.
And the best may be yet to come because there is no telling how far this untamed Celtic tigress is destined to go.
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