“She inspires me.”

That was not what Sedona Red Rock High School senior Micheala Cunningham said about her assistant football coach, Cindy Hauserman. Just the opposite, as Cunningham succinctly explained.

“I’m a girl,” she said. “And I kick butt.”

Reasons enough for Hauserman, a three-year Red Rock Youth Football board member who has seen Cunningham play football since before she was a seventh-grader at Big Park Community School.

“That’s her job,” Hauserman said. “She can take it, she can spit it out. We go way back.”

Back to when Cunningham’s RRYF Minors teammates laughed at her the first day she tried out as a sixth-grader.

“Then I hit them,” she recalled. “That night, they were like, ‘OK. She’s going to play.’”

The five-foot, five-inch, 145-pound defensive end is indeed tough, agreed first-year head coach John Bradshaw.

“If anything, Micheala’s brought some hard-nosed attitude that makes the guys a little tougher,” he said.

Cunningham missed the Aug. 21 home opener with Camp Verde High School because “I messed up my hand pretty bad,” she said, pointing to a swollen right hand with a crooked pinky finger.  “Coach wanted to put me out, and I begged him to just let me practice. One other kid sat out with a bruise on his leg. You can see the difference: One little ding doesn’t stop me.”

That makes her a “fabulous teammate” to Hauserman, known as “Mama Haus” to alumni and current players. Her son, Max, a May graduate and former SRRHS starting quarterback whose games she filmed for three years, was a teammate of Cunningham’s. One of Bradshaw’s first staff moves was to ask the longtime Scorpions boys soccer coach to be one of his assistants.

“I’ll tell you what, I love coaching — being down on the field with these guys and gals,” she said. “It’s way better than up in the stands. I have never been on the field coaching football before, [but] I’ve always been an athlete, and this plays toward my passion.”

For the full story, please see the Friday, Oct. 16, issue of the Sedona Red Rock News.