Sin playing for love of the game

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard much about the Las Vegas Sin, a women’s team that plays tackle football in itsy-bitsy uniforms, it’s probably because the Sin doesn’t have home games anymore.

Official reason given: No arena in town could accommodate the team’s unremitting three-game home schedule.

So the Sin is playing home games at Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, Calif.

Shades of Tiny Archibald: The Las Vegas Sin has become the Las Vegas-Ontario Sin (not officially), in the manner of the NBA’s old Kansas City-Omaha Kings, with the difference being every home game is in Omaha — er, Ontario.

It has to be a logistical nightmare, a real pain in the booty shorts, for the local women’s tackle football players. On Father’s Day, for instance, the Sin was scheduled to play a doubleheader in Ontario. Let’s see the Super Bowl-champion New England Patriots try that with a fully inflated football.

Las Vegas-Ontario lost to the Seattle team in the first game. (You can watch the replay Saturday on the Fuse channel, Cox 375.) The second game, against a team from Los Angeles, was postponed because the Sin players were too banged up to play again.

Cynthia Schmidt, No. 18 on the Sin — if you look real close, you almost can see her number on her uniform bra, and if you haven’t looked real close, you’re probably lying —was among the walking wounded, the venial Sinners as it were.

“The trainer checked me for a concussion,” she said, adding that the running backs and the quarterback were dinged up worse, and that the center injured her groin.

Although league officials make no excuses for the LFL business model — sex sells, they say, and Fox should be so forthright when it hires Holly Sonders and her short skirt to interview Phil Mickelson when Lefty is done with his round — a couple of years ago it said LFL now stood for Legends Football League.

But as George Carlin once articulated, “shoot” is the same thing as a word you can’t say on television, only with two O’s.

Feminists probably aren’t going to like lingerie football no matter how it is abbreviated or presented, and it probably won’t play in the Bible Belt, either. But a lot of men still enjoy it, in the same way a lot of men enjoy beach volleyball and Holly Sonders and her short skirt asking Phil Mickelson golf questions.

Having witnessed a couple of Lingerie Bowls, I can say without a doubt this is real tackle football. I have interviewed players who were track and volleyball standouts at schools such as Temple and California, but none who aspired to be strippers.

They play football only because they love to play — salaries are minuscule or nonexistent, and players have to provide their own insurance. A former Las Vegas player named Nikki Johnson wound up suing the league over these concerns; strangely, her picture still is up on the LFL website as the Sin’s featured player.

But most of the players just like to block and tackle. Some are moms. Many are good stories for other reasons.

Take Cynthia Schmidt. She was a commissioned officer in the Indiana National Guard, and now she’s playing tackle football in her dainty things, and how many can say they have traveled that path?

Thanks to the Guard, Schmidt also has a degree in criminal justice from IUPUI in her hometown of Indianapolis. She said she lacked focus and discipline during her freshman year, and that her college career was in jeopardy. Then she noticed the ROTC building behind her dormitory.

“Two weeks later I was signed up,” said the former multisport athlete from Southport High on Indy’s south side, the same school that produced former ABA star Louie Dampier.

Her dad laughed at the idea of Cynthia fixing a bayonet. But she remained in the Guard for 6½ years. Basic combat training lasted 10 weeks. After that, she no longer lacked focus or discipline.

“I had heard about basic training, how horrible it was,” Schmidt said, alluding to that movie where Demi Moore shaved her head and joined the military.

It might be a stretch to say she enjoyed getting up with the roosters and Sgt. Hulka. But it helped her get fit, and it helped her pay back her school loans. That’s a fact, Jack.

Schmidt never was deployed — she was training in Arizona when her unit was sent to Afghanistan. She would have loved active duty, she said.

Now she and her dad go shooting guns together. Her dad is so proud of her, said Schmidt, who took a job at Nevada Beverage after moving to Las Vegas three years ago to play tackle football in her dainty things.

On Father’s Day, before the Sin’s game with the team from Seattle, Schmidt ran into Citizens Business Bank Arena carrying her team’s flag. She was wearing eye makeup and an itsy-bitsy uniform and shoulder pads.

She looked like a football player, but nothing at all like William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski