Always on Defense

It’s Friday night and the Chapel Hill High School varsity football team is gearing up for its game against Orange High School. The door to the weight room is open, the boy’s locker room door is open across from it. 

The players are finishing up their meal, Chipotle, courtesy of the parents, and singing a Drake song. The boys pass around the non-official team mascot, a hammer covered in black and yellow duct tape, as they take turns using it as a microphone. 

The sounds of the music are muffled in the weight room, and the boys’ jeers are accentuated by an occasional squeal of laughter. One player, though, sits on a bench alone back in the weight room, waiting for the pregame meeting.

Brooklyn Harker, a 17-year-old senior, plays free safety and is the only girl on the team. 

“I've gotten used to the fact that people are just going to automatically assume that I’m the kicker,” Harker said. Free safety is the last line of defense.

Harker joined her first flag football team in third grade, tackle in seventh. Even when she didn’t think anything of being the only girl on the team, looking back she said she was treated differently. 

Coaches would play her, but always seemed to expect more of her than other boys on the team, Harker said. She recalls one play in seventh grade when she was playing tight end, but she missed the signal when the coaches changed the play. She was benched for the rest of the game. 

Her experience on the Chapel Hill High School team was a refreshing change from her middle school coaches, but she was still targeted. This time is wasn’t by coaches, it was internet comments. 

Harker went viral last fall after her mother, Jennifer Harker, posted a photo of her daughter to Twitter.

“I just thought my nerdy academia friends would appreciate it,” she said.  

Bleacher Report reposted that picture of Harker on Sept. 12, 2021 on Instagram. Despite the account’s neutral caption and over 300,000 likes, men and a few women attacked Harker in the comments. 

“I would have gave her the stiff arm of her life,” commented big_bot_baller.

Swayz_supreme said “This need to stop females shouldn’t play sports with men. They don’t hit the showers together they can’t smack her butt as sportsmanship. Like nahhhh fam cut this out in 2022 we tired of it.” 

Harker has no interest in sharing a locker room with her teammates. Sure, there are some moments she misses out on, but she also appreciates her space. 

On away games, the head coach Isaac Marsh makes sure she is sitting at the front of the bus, likely to avoid any inappropriate behavior from the boys, Harker speculates, not that she thinks that would happen. The team has her back.

Harker sits at the front of the bus as the team travels to South Alamance High School for a game.

The targeting isn’t limited to the internet. Becket Yates, a center for the Chapel Hill Tigers, said that opposing team players have posted on their social media “about wanting to lay out or target Brooklyn in the days prior to games.”

Kickers will intentionally kick the ball toward her on kickoff so their players can tackle her, Yates said.

Some of the online comments have rattled her, which is not surprising given the platforms she has been featured on, like Bleacher Report, have millions of followers. Mostly, though, she finds it funny.

Harker and her mom sit at a coffee table in their house on a slower Sunday, discussing some of Harker’s toughest plays. Harker plays with the rings on her fingers. The milky rocks sit below the colorful wristbands that inch up her forearm.

She springs up from her seat to demonstrate the play, which ended with her on the turf in a headlock. In the living room, Brooklyn’s head is bent over with her arm wrapped around her neck and her mother is shaking her head at Brooklyn’s nonchalant attitude. 

Jennifer Harker said “she has never not been a handful.”

In addition to stressing her parents out each Friday night, Harker developed chronic neutropenia at four months old, a rare autoimmune disease where the body targets its own white blood cells. 

The Harker family spent the first three years of her life worrying that a new formula or ear infection could send Harker to the hospital. Harker’s preschool provided a bus system, but her dad, David Harker, followed the bus to school, just in case. 

The condition faded with time, but Harker has not become any less of a handful. 

When she was 6 she decided she wanted to go on a mission trip to Houston, Texas. She had never been to Houston, there was no official trip that inspired the thought, but she would not let it go until her parents figured out how to get creative with their vacation time. 

Then, Harker had to convince her mom to sign her up for high school football, and despite what people on the internet comment, her team is glad she did. 

“In terms of physicality and toughness,” receiver coach Justin Kenyon said, “she belongs.” On the first day of practice with pads, Kenyon said, Harker hit a running back and took him down, hard.

She loads up on carbohydrates the night before games with her friends and teammates, Yates and Holden Zimmerman. The three once split a lasagna, worried it wouldn’t be enough for them all. On important offensive plays, she is at the front of pack of players clustered behind the sideline, and is the first to pump her fist at a touchdown.

Harker poses with her teammates Becket Yates, Holden Zimmerman, and John O’Donnell after the game on senior night.

But that doesn’t mean the transition from summer into the season hasn’t been difficult. At the beginning of this season, Harker was not playing like she has in the past.

“I had the mindset that I was going to come into this and work and not get any attention,” she said. 

Coach Kenyon helped snap her out of it. 

“I just assured her that she belonged out here,” Kenyon said. “And I asked her a tough question: Do you want it given to you because you are a female, or do you want it because it is yours?”

Kenyon ordered her a footwork ladder and she has used it every day. Her work has paid off, and her teammates are behind her. 

This time it's Monday night. The team is playing East Chapel Hill High School, their historic rival. Harker is lined up on defense at the 10-yard line, fourth down. If the team can stop this play, the Tigers will get the ball heading into the final quarter. 

On the far end of the field, East tries to throw the ball to a player in the end zone, but Harker deflects the ball and her opponent falls before he can catch it. 

The sideline erupts and Kenyon leaps out of a crouch, fist in the air. Harker jogs back over to the Tiger’s sideline, pulling off her helmet. She throws her head back to get the hair from her face, and teammate Dylan Evans slams his hands into her shoulders in celebration. 

Assistant coach Dock Ragland pulls her aside to go over the play, but the celebration is short-lived. The ball is turned over and the head coach’s voice cuts through the sideline buzz, interrupting Ragland’s analysis. 

He pushes her toward the field instead. 

“Go play defense, Brooklyn.”