Elsa Nunez, center, who plays right tackle and right guard for the Las Vegas Showgirlz, and fellow players listen to their coaches during a pre-game skull session at Valley High School. The team is marking its first year of play in the Women's Professional Football League, which has 18 teams across the country. Photos by Samantha Clemens. Wide receiver and defensive back Karin Joot waits to be called in during the Aug. 5 Showgirlz home game against the Los Angeles Amazons. In their second game, the Showgirlz took the game into overtime, but lost 20-14. Dion A. Lee, Las Vegas Showgirlz owner and head coach, analyzes the team's first-half performance against the Los Angeles Amazons. Nican Tonaltzin and his children, Noelani, 5, bottom left, and Kaleo, 3, cheer on his wife and their mother, Jennifer Tonaltzin, who's a Showgirlz defensive back/wide receiver. Quarterback Shawna Kennelly (15) and her Las Vegas Showgirlz teammates begin to come to grips with what turns out to be a heartbreaking 20-14 overtime loss to the visiting Los Angeles Amazons.

The wide receiver takes the ball and scoots easily around the defender. Then it's a quick sidestep around a linebacker and, like a drop of water skittering on a hot skillet, a cut to the outside for a healthy gain.

It's a nice run by anybody's standards, but an absolutely amazing run if you're of a more sexist bent, seeing as how it was pounded out by, you know, a woman.

That's right. A woman. Playing real tackle football.

Get used to it, though, because if the second game of their entire existence -- a heart-wrenching overtime loss to the Los Angeles Amazons -- is any indication, the Las Vegas Showgirlz of the Women's Professional Football League are here to stay.

Dion A. Lee certainly hopes so. He's the owner, founder, head coach, marketing guy and pretty much everything else for the Showgirlz, the newest entry into the 18-team WPFL, which has clubs from Connecticut to California.

The women who play for the Showgirlz don't do it for the money. Really, Lee says, WPFL players make a token salary that's enough to justify the "professional" in the league's name.

But that doesn't mean they don't play like they mean it. In fact, once the helmets go on, fans can expect pretty much everything they'd expect to see at any pro football game.

There's contact, with hits loud enough to be heard on the sidelines. Chin straps unbuckle and helmets fly off in mid-play with surprising regularity. By halftime of the Amazons game, the detached "2" of the "29" on wide receiver/backup quarterback Carrie Walters' abused jersey flaps away like a freshly caught carp hanging on a stringer.

There's intensity, and not just on the field. During a timeout, linebacker Annise "Tig" White decides that water isn't making it to the players on the field as quickly as it should. So, she dives in herself, grabbing a rack of bottles and screaming, "Water! Get it out there!" to anybody who might hear.

There's determination. The players -- very nice women, really, when they're off the field -- scream, stalk and, in the end, suffer the way any player in a tight game -- a game they just know they can win -- would.

There are injuries, too. That bag of ice Angela Jackson -- the creator of that run you read about earlier, who justifiably has earned the nickname "Action" just two games into the season -- was holding to the right side of the face during halftime wasn't there for decoration.

Add it all up and you're talking real, grueling, grind-it-out football. And for Showgirlz players, it's everything they've always dreamed of but never thought they could have.

"I've wanted to play since I was 12 years old," White recalls. "My uncle was a football coach for Pop Warner and he said, 'No, you go over with the cheerleaders.' So I was a cheerleader until I was 16, and then I just kind of turned my back on it."

White played golf and ran track during her days at Rancho High School, but never thought she'd ever be able to play real football. "I watched football games," she says, "but it would hurt my heart that I never got a chance to play."

Then, earlier this year, she learned that the Showgirlz was forming.

"It took me a month to convince myself that I wasn't too old," says White, who turns 37 this month. But she tried out anyway and was thrilled to find her name on the team's inaugural roster. Now, no matter what else happens or how long any of it might last, White can call herself a football player.

"I've saved every item, every e-mail, everything," she says, smiling. "I'll make a nice big scrapbook when the season's over. I may not make big stats or whatever -- and I hope that I do -- but I can always say I played and I started first-string here."

Shawna Kennelly can't exactly say that she wanted to play football as a kid, mostly, she explains, because "you can't want something you don't have. So it's not something little girls wish they could play, because it never really was an option."

But Kennelly learned later on that playing football was, indeed, an option. Since the age of 26, she's lived a sort of gridiron gypsy's lifestyle, playing on women's pro teams in Daytona Beach, Fla., West Covina, Calif., Phoenix and Indianapolis. After returning to Las Vegas to complete work on her art degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Kennelly, now 30, heard that the Showgirlz was forming.

Now with that bachelor's degree under her belt, Kennelly is searching for a master of fine arts program. And, she says, "hopefully, I can get in at a place where there's a football team. If not, then football will be my past. I'll have many years, many stories and a lot of pictures."

What's the appeal? Tackle Leina Palenapa says it's simply "the feeling of contact and the opportunity to hit somebody" in what quickly turns into a charming, but just-this-side-of-maniacal, giggle.

It's the same for Jackson, who happens to be married to Marlion Jackson, fullback/linebacker for the Las Vegas Gladiators of the Arena Football League.

"I love sports, and I love football," Jackson says, although, until now, "I guess my closest (football) experience has been through my husband."

Sure, there are differences between women's football and men's football. For instance, acceptable terms of address for Showgirlz players include "ladies" (as in the sideline exhortations of "Come on ladies, we've got to start something!") or "girls" (as in the field announcer's "You go, girls!" after the Showgirlz thwart a two-point conversion).

But, at its core, it's all football. John Thompson thinks so, and he played high school football in Texas, where high school football is only slightly less important than that scrimmage at the Alamo a while back.

"This is good football," says Thompson, who saw his first Showgirlz game at the invitation of Palenapa, his co-worker. "I'm very impressed. They've done some homework and they execute really well. I mean, they're not the Packers or the Broncos, of course. But for what it is, they're good."

White says most people "are in awe and think it's the coolest thing" that she plays real football, even if they might not believe it at first. "That's the biggest thing. When you tell somebody, they don't think it's real."

Showing off their bruises -- which, by the way, the women will happily do -- can make the point. But that also can be tricky, Walters jokes, because "you have people who say, 'He's not worth it. You should leave him.' "