Yes, Fife’s starting QB Brynna Nixon knows about attention — but she’d rather just win

Brynna Nixon knows, at least partly, what she will be. (More on that in a moment.)

She has dreams about what she might become. But importantly, she knows who and what she is, even if she does her best to deflect the attention that brings.

Brynna Nixon will be a Division I athlete come this fall. She’s accepted an offer to play goalie for the Marquette lacrosse team.

“I’m going into the military after college, or maybe the FBI,” Nixon said recently. “My dad was in the Army. I want to do that.”

Both are high accomplishments and high goals. What has brought her more attention, though, is what Nixon is currently.

Nixon is the starting quarterback for the Fife High School Trojans football team. That fact has brought all sorts of media attention and frenzy.

“She knows it,” Fife coach Kent Nevin said. “But she just wants to be a teammate. She doesn’t want to draw any attention to herself.”

A year ago, as a junior backup, Nixon threw her first varsity touchdown pass.

“We did like eight or nine TV and radio interviews,” Nevin said.

Nixon wasn’t completely comfortable with the attention, as she wondered if it were taking away from the team.

“I told her, it is a little about you,” Nevin said. “And that’s not a bad thing.”

“Her dad and I definitely knew this was going to get attention,” Nixon’s mom, Shelli, said. “It’s not ‘normal’ in football.”

While it may not be the norm in most places, in Fife Nixon is just another of the players. It’s been that way for years.

Nixon’s love for the game is deep-rooted in family and in her own determination. Her maternal grandfather had season tickets to the Seahawks for a time. Her parents watched football with theirs.

From the moment she could remember, Nixon was watching Seahawks games herself.

“At first, I wanted to be a wide receiver,” Nixon said. “I was watching a Seahawks game and remember saying, ‘I want to make those big-time catches. I just want to play that sport.’ ”

At the age of 4, her requests at Christmas began.

“She started asking Santa for gear,” Shelli Nixon said.

The gear didn’t come at age 4. Or age 5.

“After about four years of asking, Santa finally came through,” Shelli Nixon said. “She got a jersey, a helmet. She would go out in the backyard just for hours by herself or with her dad and play. That’s when we realized, this ‘phase’ is not going away.”

In the third grade, the Nixons signed their daughter up for flag football. She excelled.

The next year, they signed her up for junior tackle.

“I started at wide receiver, then I shifted to running back,” Brynna Nixon said. “Then, I shifted to quarterback. I’m not 100% sure as to why. But I loved everything about that position from the second I played it. You have to know what everyone is doing all the time. It’s fun to analyze defenses and see what you, as an offense, can run.”

By the sixth grade, Nixon was a fixture at quarterback in the Fife junior program. And Nevin started to get questions.

“People would ask me, would you play a girl?” Nevin said. “I always said, ‘Definitely, if she earns the spot.’ ”

Nixon has earned the spot, and more.

“For me, she’s earned my respect,” Nevin said.

And that of her teammates.

“It’s just normal,” Fife running back Jay Harper-Brooks said. “I’ve been playing with her since the sixth grade.”

Nixon isn’t just about football, though she is mostly about sports.

“I played like seven different sports growing up,” Nixon said. “It’s always been home, school, sports practice, then home again.”

Even in high school, she has always played three sports — at two schools. Plus, there have been club lacrosse seasons, at least until the COVID-19 pandemic stripped that away last year.

The pandemic also has changed the seasons for Nixon’s senior year, which will make things more complicated after football is done.

“Basketball and lacrosse are in the same season this year,” Nixon said. “I’m talking to my coaches.”

Fife doesn’t have a lacrosse program. So Nixon has always played basketball in the winter, then played lacrosse for nearby Bonney Lake in the spring.

Nixon said she isn’t sure how she’ll manage both in the coming months. But determination never has been an issue for her.

“I think what has made her do that, she’s always been so driven,” Nevin said.

Driven enough to become one of the first girls ever to start at quarterback for a football team in Washington.

“In the beginning, it was just that I totally loved the sport,” Nixon said. “By middle school, then there was some of other people telling me that you can’t play it in high school, or you’ll quit before high school. Then it was, ‘I’m going to prove them wrong.’ That goes for pretty much anything in my life.”

From within, Nixon always has had the support of family and the Fife community.

“The Fife football program was so awesome,” mom Shelli said. “Sometimes I wonder if she’d have had the same opportunities in other programs.”

Of course, Nixon’s parents had concerns that their daughter might get hurt playing with the boys. Her size helped early on.

“I was always the biggest person out there,” Nixon said. “Until I hit high school. Then they started to catch up, and it was like, crap, I’m no longer the tallest.”

She still was tall enough and athletic enough that as a freshman and sophomore, Nixon played outside linebacker for the high school junior varsity. She has focused solely on being a quarterback the past two years, and she has not suffered any big injuries.

“From the start, I wasn’t going to be the one that told her the only reason you can’t play is because you’re a girl,” Shelli Nixon said. “Her dad agrees. We were not going to do that. She is an important representative of females in that sport. Maybe there is some little girl out there that sees her. And that little girl says, ‘Maybe I can do that.’”

Nixon, for her part, gets that she is a pioneer and a role model. Mostly.

“I feel like it’s never going to set in completely,” Nixon said. “It feels crazy to me that people think what I do is weird.”

But Nixon came face to face with her potential legacy this spring, while she was refereeing junior football games for the Fife program.

One of the girls playing in the program came up to Nixon, excited to meet her. The girl told Nixon she wanted to keep playing football, like Nixon.

“I told her to keep working at it,” Nixon said. “I never had a girl in the same position hyping me up. I’m so glad I was able to do that for her.”

This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.