Coronado’s Caitlin Shannon dices up defenses on football field

Mike Shannon laughs when he looks back at photos of his daughter, Caitlin, in her Philadelphia Eagles cheerleading uniform.

Turns out she was a lot more interested in becoming a football player than she was in cheering for one.

The younger Shannon, a three-sport athlete who competes in cross county and track, is also a junior quarterback for Coronado’s flag football team and has become one of the most unstoppable players in the valley.

She threw for 3,073 yards and 49 touchdowns last season — her first on varsity — while rushing for 1,277 yards and 17 scores in leading the Cougars to the Class 4A state championship game.

“The second half of the season (last year) was unreal, the numbers she put up,” Coronado coach Rusty Andersen said. “She can really do a lot of different things.”

Shannon picked up right where she left off in her debut this season against Mojave on Tuesday, throwing for 190 yards and five touchdowns in a 48-8 victory.

The Cougars are expecting another successful season, and she’s a major reason.

Shannon grew up playing soccer, but always made time to throw the football around with her father, a lifelong Eagles fan.

She was fond of the Pittsburgh Steelers, though, and rooted specifically for Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu, who inspired her to play flag football for an all-boys team when she was 9.

“She was real skittish out there, and they finally put her at wide receiver, and they realized she was running by kids and they’d throw her the ball,” Mike said. “She had a blast … She got to go out there and just be herself.”

Caitlin switched back to soccer when playing football with the boys became too physical.

But the prospects of joining the high school flag football team were enticing, and she decided to play for the Cougars after her ninth-grade soccer season.

“I didn’t think it would be as competitive as it was,” Shannon said. “My freshman year we got out there, we were throwing the ball around, girls could catch and run and stuff. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is actually a sport.’ From there, we just got into the depths of it because it’s interesting.”

She played on the Cougars’ freshman team in 2015-16, and Anderson, keen to her athletic ability and throwing arm, elevated Shannon to the varsity in 2016-17.

She struggled at the beginning of the season, completing 11 percent of her passes in Coronado’s first game, but quickly developed a rapport with her receivers while figuring out how to dice up defenses.

By the middle of the season, Shannon routinely completed more than 60 percent of her passes and used her speed to buy time in the pocket and create running opportunities.

“Flag football is like my mental break,” she said. “It’s fun, too.”

Contact reporter Sam Gordon at sgordon@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BySamGordon on Twitter.