Brick’s road leads to end zone
Women’s football star Cassey Brick has worked hard to be able to commute through tacklers. Now, if she could only be similarly efficient from the passenger seat.
Brick, the 2004 Girls’ Athlete of the Year at Costa Mesa High, has logged countless hours and miles driving to practices and games during a four-year football career that culminated in a World Football Alliance championship Aug. 4 in Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field.
But the slow roll of the odometer has somehow mirrored her emergence from high school track and field standout, to unheralded college basketball player, to a versatile All-American running back whose most consistent destination is the end zone.
Brick exploded into the spotlight in the San Diego Surge’s 40-36, come-from-behind victory over the Chicago Force in the WFA title showdown in front of more than 2,000 spectators and a national television audience on ESPN3.
The Redondo Beach resident scored two touchdowns in the final three minutes to help the Surge overcome a nine-point deficit in the first WFA title game to be played in an NFL stadium.
After scoring on a short slant-pass reception, Brick returned a subsequent Force punt 66 yards for the winning score. The Force drove 80 yards on three completed passes with the ensuing kickoff, but a Surge interception with 18 seconds left clinched the franchise’s first WFA title and capped a dominant 12-0 season.
Brick, who scored four touchdowns in the final, was named MVP for San Diego. She finished with three receptions for 120 yards and two TDs, four rushing attempts for 29 yards and one score, and the aforementioned punt return.
“Cassey carried the whole load,” said Surge head coach and running backs coach Mike Suggett.
“It was an awesome feeling,” Brick said of her first title in her first title game. “This was definitely by far my biggest achievement. I feel like I was part of women’s sports history.
“It’s kind of weird and definitely something I’m not used to,” Brick said of her big day. “I still don’t think it has sunk in yet, honestly, that we won a championship and I was selected MVP. I kind of still don’t believe it.”
Some might consider Brick’s football travel agenda somewhat hard to believe. After two seasons with Los Angeles-based teams, Brick joined the Central Cal War Angels, based in Fresno, in 2011.
“I drove five hours to practice [and five hours home] twice a week, and then did it again for games on the weekends,” Brick said of her one season with Central Cal.
She earned a spot in the league’s All-American game in 2011, but a broken foot kept her on the sideline during the game, which was held in Dallas the same weekend as the league title game. The Surge was in the championship game that year, as well, and Brick, anxious to help, served as the team’s ball girl.
Impressed by what she saw, she began the four-month 2012 season as one of nearly a dozen Surge players who live in Los Angeles.
“An assistant coach picks up all the LA players in a team passenger van and drives us to San Diego for practices and games,” said Brick, who was a three-sport standout at Costa Mesa.
Though she played basketball at Irvine Valley Community College and Cal Poly Pomona and was team Co-MVP as a senior guard at Costa Mesa, it was perhaps track and field in which she best displayed her athleticism.
She won individual league titles in the long jump and the 300-meter hurdles and was also league runner-up in the 100.
Brick also contributed to a league championship cross-country team at Mesa.
Focusing on basketball, she played sparingly at IVC, then averaged 2.8 points per game while playing in 50 games and making six starts in two seasons at Cal Poly Pomona, where she was elected co-captain her final year and collected 32 of her 48 career field goals from three-point range.
After Brick earned a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, it was then-Cal Poly assistant coach Tamara McDonald who suggested Brick give football a try.
“I had watched a few games, here and there, but when I first started playing football, I really didn’t know too many of the rules,” Brick said. “But I liked the whole idea of going out and being able to hit somebody.”
At 5 feet 4, 135 pounds, Brick relies more on finesse than force. And her early conversion from receiver to running back actually had its genesis on defense.
“I was playing safety and I intercepted a pass in a game,” Brick said. “The coach saw me run it back for a touchdown and told me I was in the wrong position and that I needed to play running back.”
She began 2012 as part of a three-back rotation, Suggett said. But injuries to the other two ballcarriers left Brick as the leading weapon the second half of the season.
She finished with 656 rushing yards and 13 touchdowns on 68 attempts, 393 yards and seven touchdowns on 23 receptions and averaged nearly 30 yards per punt return while producing three more TDs. Her 23 touchdowns for the season ranked fifth in a 62-team league.
“She came to us as an incredible athlete,” Suggett said. “We try to get her outside, where she can use her speed.”
Surge player-owner Christina Carrillo said Brick is determined to get the most out of her ample ability.
“She works harder in the offseason than anyone I’ve ever seen and I’ve been playing this game for 10 years,” Carrillo said.
Brick works as a junior varsity girls’ basketball coach at Bishop Montgomery High in Torrance, but she said she eventually wants to become a personal trainer.
“I’ve always been interested in fitness and stuff,” Brick said.
Brick said she is eager to play again for San Diego next season. But not before another football adventure.
She is among 12 players representing the United States in an 10-team international five-on-five flag football tournament in Sweden that ends Sunday.
When it comes to improving as a football player, Brick clearly remains intent on going the extra mile(s).
Twitter: @BarryFaulkner5