Kicking her way into North Eugene history

It was just one point out of 21, but Mylee Johannsen’s third-quarter point-after-touchdown (PAT) kick in North Eugene’s game against Corvallis last Friday, Sept. 5, was history in the making.

The high school on Silver Lane opened in 1957, but never before had a female football player scored a point in a home game.

“It felt great,” Johannsen said when the contest, a disappointing 48-21 loss to the visiting Spartans, was over. 

“I mean, I have an amazing community here at North, and just having the chance to make history and just be able to go out here is absolutely wonderful.”

Johannsen, a 16-year-old junior playing her first year of football, also made history a week earlier, when she was three-for-three on PATs in North’s 23-6 win over Crescent Valley, Aug. 29, on the road in Corvallis, to become the first girl to score in any football game in school history.

“I was very nervous,” Johannsen said of her first PAT attempt. “My heart was racing, and I was super sweaty.”

Making her first kick a week later in front of the home crowd — “Let’s go, Mylee! Let’s go, Mylee!” — was so much sweeter.

“I love to see her on the field — it brings the team up, it really does,” said Silus Sixkiller, the team’s other kicker, who handles kickoffs. Johannsen, also North’s junior class president, handles the PATs and field goals, although she hasn’t had a shot at the latter yet. 

Maybe that will come Friday, Sept. 12, when the Highlanders visit crosstown rival South Eugene in a 7 p.m. game.

“She is really good,” said Johannsen’s father, Eric Johannsen, North’s assistant coach and head coach from 2005 to 2010. “She’s super accurate. One thing we need to work on with her is just getting a little more distance, getting used to the rush, having time with the holder.”

But Eric Johannsen, a kicker and wide receiver for the University of Oregon in the early 1990s who played on the Ducks’ 1994 Pac-10 championship team that went to the Rose Bowl after a 37-year drought, and North’s head coach, Rick Raish, have no regrets about selecting Mylee Johannsen for this role.

“I don’t even worry about it,” Raish said during a recent Highlanders’ practice. “She’s an athlete; she just happens to be a female.”

‘She’s an impact player’

Johannsen, who has a 3.96 grade-point average and plans to attend law school after college, is the third girl to play varsity football at North in Raish’s 11 seasons as head coach. 

She follows Lily Gates, a wide receiver and defensive back on last season’s team, and Maya Lindskog, also a wide receiver and defensive back, who was on the 2019 roster.

From 2013 to 2024, 619 girls in Oregon have played high school football on varsity or subvarsity teams, an average of more than 50 girls per year, according to the Oregon School Activities Association.

And girls have appeared in high school football games at least since 1939, when Luverne “Toad” Wise booted a PAT for Escambia High School in Atmore, Alabama, to become what’s believed to be the first girl to score in a game, according to a 2024 story on AL.com.

But females assuming key roles on varsity squads still are a rarity. Neither Gates nor Lindskog got much playing time at North, Raish said, while Johannsen has earned a starting kicker role and runs onto the field following any North touchdown.

“I have all the trust in the world in her,” Raish said. “She’s an impact player … has been since she was 8.”

That’s when Johannsen became North’s team manager, before the 2018 season, a job she held through last season. 

But after playing soccer every season since she was 3, including as a backup goalkeeper for North’s girls soccer team her freshman and sophomore years, Johannsen was ready for a change.

“I always considered it,” she said of playing football. “I grew up around football. I kicked footballs with my brother as a little kid, because that’s what he did.”

Older brother Cade Johannsen, a 6-foot-8 quarterback and all-state punter for North, graduated in 2022 and is now the punter for Linfield University in McMinnville.

Opportunity arises

The chance for Mylee Johannsen to become North’s starting kicker came when last season’s kicker, Jonathan Morgan, decided to transfer to Willamette High School in west Eugene for his senior season, Raish said.

Sixkiller, a soccer player for North and a distant relative of former Ashland High School and University of Washington great Sonny Sixkiller, didn’t try out until later in the summer, so Raish was searching.

“We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing, and (Mylee) came to me and said, ‘What do you think about me doing it?’” Raish recalled. 

“And I said, ‘All right, let’s try it. Let’s see what it looks like.’

“She put the ball down a couple of times and, pumpf, pumpf, got the ball up quick, got power behind it and, you know, it sounded right, and I go, ‘Looks great,’” Raish said of Johannsen’s June tryout.

While PATs are kicked from the 10-yard line (making it a 20-yard kick because the goal posts are 10 yards deep in the end zone), Johannsen has successfully kicked from as far as 40 yards out in practice, she said.

But she’s been dealing with strained quadriceps muscles in her kicking (right) leg as well as a lot of grinding on her hip flexors from the constant swinging motion that kicking involves. That’s why she’s not doing any kickoffs right now, she said.

But Johannsen is doing just fine on the PATs, 4-for-5 going into the South game after going 1-for-2 against Corvallis.

“I’m proud of her,” Highlanders senior running back Riley Whitwood said. “I think all the guys on the team are, and we can’t wait to see what she does the rest of the season.”

Do you know about a Lane County prep athlete — in any sport, at any school — who would be a good subject for a Lookout Eugene-Springfield profile story? Let us know. Send an email to mike@lookoutlocal.com with a few sentences of background about your suggestion.