Toni Harris: planning to be first female in the NFL
Sydney Taylor, Staff Writer
photo courtesy of unsplash
Toyota released their Super Bowl commercial for their new RAV4 model with the selling point of “proving people wrong.” This phrase was backed up with the story of Toni Harris and her journey as a female football player trying to prove the world wrong.
The commercial had a voice-over that played throughout that said, “They’ve said a lot of things about Toni Harris. They said she was too small. They said she was too slow, too weak. They said she’d never get to the next level, never inspire a new generation. Never get a football scholarship. Yeah, people have made a lot of assumptions about Toni,” Toni cuts in and says, “But I’ve never been a big fan of assumptions.”
Harris has had the same dream since she started playing the game of football around five years old: Being the first woman to play in the NFL. She was kicked off a team when she was younger just because she was a girl. Harris started playing again in high school. She also won homecoming queen in high school and explained that she loves dresses more than pants. This just goes along with her commercial and how assumptions are usually wrong.
Harris now plays defensive back for the East Los Angeles College Huskies, and is deciding which of the four-year college scholarship offers she is ready to accept. “Playing football at the college level makes me feel very proud of what I am doing. It’s 80 percent mental and 20 percent physical so you have to have a different mentality to play football,” Harris tells CBS. Bethany College has offered a full athletic scholarship to Harris.
Although, Harris is not the first female to play college football her goal is to be the first female to play in the NFL. “A message that I would like to send to younger girls is to keep your dream alive, nothing is impossible. You can ask God for something but you have to meet God half way, ” Harris told CBS.
