Before Oct. 14, 2022, Bella Rasmussen was the girl who played football. But after becoming the first girl in California to ever score two touchdowns in a game, she became the girl who plays football.
From there, the high school running back spoke with various media outlets, appeared on television, attended Chargers games as a special guest and even became the first girl to sign a name, image and likeness deal as a high school football player.
All this fame led her to be featured in a Super Bowl LVII commercial for the NFL, being one of the few shown as the faces of the future of women in football.
While her national recognition has been only a recent occurrence for Rasmussen, her football journey started way before that October night.
The 17-year-old senior from Laguna Beach High School first started playing football back when she was 6 years old. She watched her brother and cousin play, and at that age, she was unaware of any gender biases in the sport.
“I didn’t think of it as me joining a male sport, to me it was like, ‘Oh, football seems fun,’” Rasmussen says. “I just kind of fell in love with the game there. It definitely felt like home. It felt weird obviously because doing a new sport, but it felt like home. It felt like I was where I was supposed to be.”
Rasmussen admitted that when she was first starting out in youth football, the negative reactions were much more apparent. Most of these unwelcoming feelings stemmed from her coaches, which trickled down to her teammates. But as she got older, her teammates matured and she felt more comfortable overall in the sport.
This was especially true when Rasmussen joined her high school freshman team three years ago. Once her teammates saw how she played football, they were quick to realize it didn’t matter that she was a girl.
“I think after I proved myself that freshman year and I put on pads and I showed that I was actually there to play the game,” Rasmussen says. “It was never something like, ‘We have a girl on our team; we want to look out for her.’ It’s more like, ‘We have a girl on our team, but she just plays football like anybody else.’”
Rasmussen’s freshman coach, Alex Hutchison, made sure to make the then 14-year-old feel at home on the team. He didn’t want her gender to be a focus.
“She is a football player, period,” Hutchison says. “I don’t think there’s any necessity for a female football player attachment to that. I think she is a hard-nosed football player, a physical football player, period. As good as any boy that I’ve ever coached, as good as any athlete I’ve ever coached.”
Hutchison became Rasmussen’s running backs coach when she joined the varsity team a year later and made sure to create an environment that made the team solely focused on the game at hand. So, even though Rasmussen spent three seasons getting ready in an empty locker room by herself, she still saw her teammates as her home.
“I think I did help her through those times just in the fact of not allowing [gender] to be a factor at all, to not let it be a crutch, to not let it be something that she is allowed to hold on to and use as a scapegoat of any kind,” Hutchison says. “I think providing a space to where she could just be a football player was beneficial to help her get over that.”
Michael Goulding/IMAGO
When Rasmussen’s name made national headlines, it was met with some negative responses based mostly on her gender. Rasmussen admitted that was tough to navigate at first, but as time has gone on, she’s been able to avoid the negativity and focus on the positive comments she receives.
This experience with her sudden fame is partially what led her to sign a NIL deal with KeyWise, which is an app focused on tracking people’s mental health with various objective metrics. Rasmussen only wanted to attach her name to something that meant a lot to her, and mental health was a topic she says needs to be discussed more, especially in sports.
Her teammates and coaches were there to help her through the tough times, too. Hutchison admitted she was “selfless” during the whole process, especially when media crews would show up to the team’s practices. Rasmussen didn’t want to make it all about herself—she wanted her teammates’ hard work and dedication to be a talking point, too. That wasn’t difficult, either, considering the Laguna Beach team won the CIF Southern Section Division 9 championship this past season, the school’s first since 1946.
Not all of Rasmussen’s attention was limited to news outlets and social media. Some of the most supportive responses the young running back has received have come from the biggest names in the NFL. As a Chargers fan, Rasmussen was especially excited to hear from one of her fellow running backs and idols, Los Angeles’s Austin Ekeler.
“It’s really cool because I feel like I’ve made this connection with somebody that I obviously see as an incredible athlete,” Rasmussen says. “I watch him on Sundays and I think it’s awesome. But, to have that personal connection has already been really impactful even beyond what he’s said, because it’s like to have somebody that good at the game that I love be in my corner and be there to support me was huge. … It felt like somebody who’s legitimately recognizing the game is recognizing me.”
Her NFL support system expanded when she attended Super Bowl LVII and participated in the activities leading up to the Big Game. Rasmussen ran into various NFL players on Radio Row—where players and football personalities talk with various media outlets ahead of the Super Bowl—and she even met Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb at the NFL Honors awards show, talking football with him before taking a selfie.
Rasmussen was also a guest on Von Miller’s podcast, The Voncast, where the Bills linebacker praised her approach to handling the fame. “He kind of just said, ‘It’s obvious that you care about the game beyond being a female football player and having that recognition; it’s more that you want to play football,’ which was really important to me obviously to be noticed like that. … This isn’t for publicity, this wasn’t for having these opportunities, it was just to play the game,” Rasmussen says.
Her Super Bowl presence wasn’t just in Phoenix, however. The reason Rasmussen was invited to the festivities was that she starred in the NFL’s own Super Bowl LVII commercial. Titled “Run With It,” the commercial is centered on the Mexican women’s national flag football team’s star Diana Flores as she dodges various football and sports superstars from grabbing her flag, including Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews, Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams (who was sporting a parrot mascot uniform), Lions defensive end Aidan Hutchinson and Steelers tackle Cam Heyward. The commercial ends with Flores’s flags still intact as she is joined by Rasmussen and Vanita Krouch, who is the quarterback of the United States women’s national flag football team.
Rasmussen wasn’t able to tell any of her teammates or coaches about her cameo ahead of the game. So when she is shown running along Flores at the end, Hutchison couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a full-circle moment for Rasmussen’s coach, who has been alongside her for the past four seasons.
“It was actually pretty emotional, to see the whole commercial and then to see that last scene and to see a player that I know all the work she’s put into that thing and all the rewards that have come from that hard work and what she has created for herself,” Hutchison says. “I teared up.”
The commercial ran right before Rihanna’s halftime show, which eclipsed 118.7 million viewers, more than the game itself. With such a prime spot in the broadcast, there’s no question the commercial caught the eyes of little girls around the country who might consider taking up flag football or football as a sport. That’s what Rasmussen hopes, anyway, because she knows if she would’ve had a female player to look up to when she started as a 6-year-old, she says she would’ve been more confident in herself.
Unfortunately for Rasmussen, this past season was likely her last playing tackle football. The 17-year-old admitted her not continuing her football career in college has nothing to do with gender, but solely on skill. As much as she would love to continue playing tackle football, she’s decided to try a different route: flag football. Part of her decision was inspired by her time working with Flores and Krouch for the Super Bowl commercial. And the fact that flag football might be deemed an Olympic sport in the coming years lured Rasmussen to take it up.
If she’s learned anything in the last few months, it’s that her football career could unexpectedly take her anywhere. Before she became known in the national football space, Rasmussen didn’t have many chances to connect with other girls or women in football. She didn’t understand support existed for girls and women in the game.
“I feel like if I had known that earlier in my football career, that would’ve been really altering for me because I feel like I went through it…not alone—I don’t want to say alone because I had support from coaches, family and male teammates,” Rasmussen says. “But, I feel like if I had known that there were that many people that were this excited to see a girl play football, I feel like that would have been really important to me.”
