Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Mackenzie Sisler started playing football as a way to improve her soccer skills. Now, the 12-year-old has done something no other girl has: made an Oregon Bowl all-star game roster.
Girls trying out for fifth- or sixth-grade football teams back when I played at that age, more than 50 years ago, just wasn’t a thing.
But I can think of a couple of girls I grew up with who not only could have played with and against the boys, but who probably would have excelled doing it.
Such opportunities for girls back then were slim and slimmer, but these are different times.
Mackenzie Sisler is proof of that.
“She’s super-athletic, really strong, extremely physical, moves really well,” said Laif Morrison, director of the Oregon Bowl all-star game for middle-schoolers. “She’s just a super-good athlete. She’s a stud.”
She’s 12.
Mackenzie, or “Mack” as her Thurston Youth Football coaches call her, will be the first girl to play in the eight-year history of the Oregon Bowl — which raises money for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Oregon and Southwest Washington. She takes the field for the sixth-grade Blue team at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, June 28, at Corvallis High School.
Mackenzie was one of just two girls in the Thurston program, which has several teams from kindergarten through eighth grade, last fall. She played on the undefeated AAU state championship sixth-grade team during her second year in the program.
“Yeah, football is fun,” Mackenzie said earlier this month, hanging out with her parents, Jacob and Caylin Sisler, of Walterville, at McKenzie River Taphouse near Thurston High School.
“Do you completely understand the game of football?” asked her dad, a 2001 Thurston High graduate and the former president of the youth program.
“Heck, no,” said Mackenzie, slurping on a chocolate-and-caramel concoction from Dutch Bros. “I just know that it’s fun.”
She wasn’t so sure in the beginning.
“Oh, I was mad,” she said. “I didn’t want to play at all, because it was taking up my soccer season.”
Jacob Sisler, who was a standout receiver and defensive back in high school, thought tackle football would help his daughter become a more aggressive soccer player, a sport she hopes to play in college (she’s thinking UCLA).
Both of Mackenzie’s brothers play football: older brother Wade just finished his freshman year at Thurston, and younger brother Gage just finished the third grade at Walterville Elementary School and played on Thurston’s state championship fourth-grade team last fall.
At her first fifth-grade practice in pads, “she had a big grin on her face,” said Caylin Sisler, a 2004 Thurston graduate.
Wasn’t she worried the first time she did tackling drills with boys?
“Um, no,” said Mackenzie, who insists the upcoming seventh-grade season will be her last playing football, as it conflicts with soccer. “I had good form, though. That’s what my coach said.”
No fear?
“No, I have brothers,” she said.
Didn’t the boys tease you?
“Oh, no,” said Mackenzie, who’s also a straight-A student at Thurston Middle School. “They’re scared of me. They still are.”
Mackenzie is listed at 5-foot-6 and 140 pounds on her team’s Oregon Bowl roster, which includes players weighing 80 to 270 pounds. She was one of the tallest players on her team the past two seasons.
Also, one of the strongest and fastest, her coaches say.
“She’s extremely, extremely strong compared to most of the kids in that age group,” said Justin Darnell, president of Thurston Youth Football and the offensive coordinator last fall for Mackenzie’s team.
More and more girls are playing high school tackle football on boys’ teams across the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In 2018, 2,404 girls played 11-man football on boys’ teams at the high school level, a number that rose to 4,094 in 2023, according to federation numbers.
Thurston has one girl, Katiry Day, playing in the high school program, said Justin Starck, the former University of Oregon football player who serves as the Colts’ head football coach and athletic director.
Day is expected to play significant time on the offensive and defensive lines for the Colts’ junior varsity team this fall and might become the first girl to contribute on varsity as a senior in 2026, Starck said.
Mackenzie played on offensive and defensive lines in the fifth grade, but last season moved to mostly running back on offense, and middle linebacker on defense. She’ll play at linebacker and defensive end in the Oregon Bowl.
“The deal was, we told the coaches that if she’s going to play another year, she gets a shot at running back,” Jacob Sisler said.
Not only did Mackenzie get a shot, she scored more than 15 touchdowns, about as many as the team’s other top running back, Jackson Mathews, who was also selected for the Oregon Bowl.
Mackenzie and Jackson are the only two players from Lane County selected for the sixth-grade game, while there are four playing in the seventh-grade game and five in the eighth-grade game, including two from Thurston, Zenon Orlinski and Carson Wullbrandt..
Videos of Mackenzie playing last fall in the Willamette Valley Youth Football League show her scoring one touchdown after another, often running over smaller boys to get into the end zone.
On one play, opposing coaches scream, “Watch the girl! Watch the girl!” before the ball is snapped.
Mackenzie takes the handoff from the 10-yard line and runs just left of center as you hear a coach yell, “Get her!”
But there’s no stopping ‘Mack.’ She crashes into a would-be tackler, powers her way toward the goal line, spins and powers through more defenders and into the end zone.
On another play, she takes the pitch from the quarterback, runs right, makes a move and runs down the sideline, stiff-arming defenders along the way to another touchdown.
On defense, she can be seen chasing down the other team’s quarterback, hair flying in the wind from underneath her helmet as she pulls the kid down for a big loss.
Morrison, the bowl director, said he didn’t realize he was watching a girl when he first looked at the videos Mackenzie’s coaches submitted.
He was watching an athlete, he said. But then the name, Mackenzie ….
“Is that a girl?” Morrison wondered.
Yep.
And the boys on her team wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Her teammates are all so supportive,” Caylin Sisler said. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, we have a girl. You better watch out for her.”
You can help the Sisler family (or any of the Oregon Bowl participants) offset the costs of playing in the Oregon Bowl here.
