By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Stephanie Raymond-Young spent years tormenting opposing defenses on the basketball court, earning her place among the city’s greatest women’s basketball players of all time.
Now, after a Hall-of-Fame college career and time in the pros, she’s ready to prove herself in a new sport.
The 37-year-old former Rockford Lutheran basketball star is trading in the hardwood for the gridiron, and this summer she will quarterback the Chicago Blitz in the X League. The newly formed seven-on-seven women’s arena football league is backed by NFL Hall-of-Famer Mike Ditka.
The team’s only home game this season will be played at the BMO Harris Bank Center.
“Coming back to Rockford to showcase a different sport is very important to me,” said Raymond-Young, who now lives in Lake of the Hills. “I want to show them that I’m capable of doing something other than basketball.”
Related: X League’s Chicago Blitz to debut at BMO Harris Bank Center in Rockford
Raymond-Young scored 2,056 career points at Lutheran, the eighth most all-time by a local girl, according to statistics from the Rockford Register Star. She then added 1,719 points at Northern Illinois University and was inducted into NIU’s Hall of Fame in 2019. On Saturday, she’ll be inducted into the 2022 Class of the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Football is a new venture for her, having put her focus solely on basketball growing up, but she learned the ropes competing in a flag football league in Chicago for three seasons.
“Women are breaking barriers right now with all kinds of sports,” Raymond-Young said. “Little girls are starting to play flag football at an early age, which gives them more opportunities later in life to do anything they want to do.”
The former basketball star was at the Rockford IceHogs game on Sunday with some of her Blitz teammates to promote the upcoming game in Rockford this summer. Former Guilford High School athlete Emma Vanderheyden is also on the team.
‘I just take off’
Raymond-Young started as wide receiver while playing in a coed seven-on-seven Absolute Athletics flag football league in Chicago. That’s how she met Sidney Lewis, the head coach of the Blitz. He recruited her to play quarterback and she agreed “knowing I couldn’t throw the ball to save my life, but I was determined to learn a new position,” Raymond-Young said.
She honed her skills and earned the starting role. She and her coaches found her point guard skills, such as anticipation and vision, translated to the football field. Still, she said her quarterbacking is built more around her abilities as a scrambler than a pocket passer. She said her style resembles that of Lamar Jackson, who set the single-season rushing record for an NFL quarterback in 2019-21 and was voted the league’s MVP unanimously.
“Not the best thrower, but he’s smart and he can run,” Raymond-Young said. “I know if I don’t have that pass I’m a runner, too.”
That scrambling is done despite an ACL injury she sustained playing basketball in 2012.
“Even with my injury, I don’t even let that bother me,” she said. “I just take off.”
From WNBA to X League
Raymond-Young was drafted into the WNBA as a second-round pick by the Chicago Sky in 2007. She played with the team for one season before competing overseas in Turkey, Poland and Ukraine. The ACL injury happened while playing pickup ball with a group of guys back home. But she rehabbed to play one more pro season in Ukraine.
“I went back and played in Ukraine just to prove to myself I could still do it,” she said.
She made the switch to football in 2020, joining the newly incorporated X League, but the coronavirus pandemic delayed the league debut until now.
The X League differs itself from previous iterations of professional women’s football with a focus “more about women’s empowerment,” Raymond-Young said. That’s different from the “theatrical” focus of the Legends Football League, previously known as the Lingerie Football League, which shut down at the end of 2019 after a 10-year run.
“It’s very fast, uptempo,” Raymond-Young said of X League. “We want to go out there and we want to hit just like men.”
The Chicago Blitz will debut against the Seattle Thunder in the X League at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 6 at the BMO Harris Bank Center.
Tickets are on sale at Ticketmaster.com, in-person at the BMO Harris Bank Center box office and by phone at 815-968-5222.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated from its previous version to clarify that X League is a newly incorporated women’s football league. The Extreme Football League filed its article of organization in November 2019.
This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on Twitter at @KevinMHaas.