North Lake’s Dani Bates, a two-way starter on the school’s football team, stands in front of the North Lake School in Silver Lake Wednesday afternoon.

SILVER LAKE — When Dani Bates walked off the field, tears streaming down her face after a late October game against Elkton, she was certain her high school football career that began just three years earlier was over.

That was until March 9, when she received a text during her shop class at North Lake School. She would get not only one more game, but break through a barrier that no other girl football player in the state had accomplished, by being selected to play in Oregon’s all-star football game for six-player teams.

Playing on both the offensive and defensive lines the past three years, Bates might be the only player with flower tattoos on her arms. But don’t let that fool you.

The 18-year-old deadlifts 305 pounds, has a vise-grip handshake and takes pleasure in sending opposing players to the ground.

And now she’s Oregon’s first female football player at any level of football to play in an all-star game. Neither the Les Schwab Bowl nor the East-West Shrine Bowl have had a girl on its roster.

“I was pretty shocked when I found out,” Bates said. “I was really proud to be selected. People are going to know my name.”

Bates has done a bit of everything while at North Lake, a K-12 school of roughly 200 kids.

She has been the student body president the past two years, has played volleyball, basketball, has wrestled and is currently playing third base for the Cowboy baseball team (no softball team), and holds the school record in the shot put.

But on the football field is where she really found her preferred arena for competition.

“(Coach Anderson) says he would take her into a street fight,” said Jim Missel, the athletic director of North Lake. “She is a great leader in our school. The kids look up to her here.”

In late June, Bates will head to Eastern Oregon University in La Grande to practice and compete in the second all-star game for teams that field six players. Teams that small are still new to Oregon, starting as a pilot program in 2018 and becoming an OSAA-sanctioned sport once the pilot program ended. This past fall, it had its inaugural state champion.

Bates began making a name for herself when she joined the North Lake football team as a sophomore, when the self-proclaimed “tomboy” and “aggressive woman” found that volleyball wasn’t meeting her needs. After her freshman year, Bates quickly realized that football was the game for her.

“I like contact sports,” Bates said. “It is so different from any other sport that I’ve played. My head gets cleared whenever I step onto the field.”

Football was a game that, early on, appeared to be a great fit for Bates. North Lake coach Barry Anderson had watched how meticulous she was in drills as she tried to learn the game and perfect her technique.

“She was so natural,” Anderson said. “We wish we had gotten her playing at a younger age.”

While Anderson saw a natural football player in Bates within the first week of her first season, the first week could not have felt more different for the person in pads and going through the drills.

Although she appreciated that the boys on the team never took it easy on her because she was a girl, tackling and getting tackled was not a welcoming experience for the girl who wanted to play an aggressive sport.

“It was awful,” Bates said. “I remember getting hit for the first time and you are laying on your back and having no air in my lungs. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me.”

By the end of her junior season, she wanted to hit and wanted to get hit.

“She is a tough kid,” Anderson said. “She is not going to let anyone bully her.”

Bates was thrown into the starting lineup immediately her sophomore year, playing on the offensive line — which in the 6-player game means also being an eligible receiver, unlike teams with eight, nine or 11 players.

Those who went against her quickly learned that she could play.

“Nothing was more satisfying than when you knocked over a boy and their teammates would make fun of them,” Bates said. “It would make me feel good when I would tackle someone and they would say, ‘You can’t let a girl be outworking you.’”

“She enjoyed that,” Anderson said. “And as a coach, we did, too.”