MEDICAL BULLETIN

Mollie Manley tackles medical school and opponents on football field

Student is member of the National Women’s Football Association’s Fusion

Mollie Manley has been balancing playing professional football with the demands of medical school.
PHOTO BY JEFF BLATNIK

By Creg Jantz

One day, Case Western Reserve University’s Mollie Manley will use her hands to repair a knee or shoulder damaged in a football game. Lately, she has been using them to tackle football players as a member of the National Women’s Football Association’s (NWFA) Cleveland Fusion.

The Hinckley, Ohio, native and Walsh Jesuit High School graduate recently began her third year of medical school and is leaning toward a specialty in orthopedics. Manley also recently completed her second season as a starter on the defensive side of the ball for the Fusion; the team’s season spans April through June.

After being a successful multi-sport (soccer, volleyball, basketball and track) athlete in high school, Manley furthered her basketball and track career at California University of Pennsylvania, an NCAA Division II institution about 45 minutes from Pittsburgh.

“I never really thought I would be playing football,” she said. “My brother played football at Cornell [University], and so I was kind of into football. I knew one of the coaches for the Fusion, and he asked me to try out.”

Not only did she make the squad, she started on the defensive line and was named second team All-League (NWFA). In her second season, Manley started at defensive end for the Fusion. The team normally practice on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with games played on Saturday.

“Being a full-time med student enables me to practice with the team on a regular basis,” Manley said, adding, however, that she was able to do more during her first year of school.

That year actually was not her first time on campus. Manley had spent three months of her senior year at California doing a thesis in a lab at the medical school. She did research on sepsis, which involved surgery on mice.

“It’s basically a bacterial model for septic shock,” she said. “If you get appendicitis and it bursts, your innards get inflamed. We induced that model in mice, trying to find a cure and make things better.”

Manley, who puts in anywhere from 40 to 50 hours a week at the medical school and at local hospitals, wrote a paper on her research, and it was published in the journal Shock. Another outcome of her time on the Case campus as an undergraduate student was that it sold her on wanting to return to the University Circle area to continue her education.

“Playing football is a stress reliever for me,” she said. “You study and work hard all day in the classroom, and by the end of the day you need to do something else. This is what I do, and the contact of football adds to it.”

So what do Manley’s fellow want-to-be doctors think about her extracurricular activities?

“The guys think it’s great and like to talk football with me,” she said. “The girls just think it’s funny. And then some people just wonder why I’m always bruised. I’ve actually had a lot of people approach me about the bruises.”

Both of Manley’s forearms are covered in yellow and brown contusions during football season. Her hands and fingers are obviously important body parts for her future occupation, and injuring them is a cause for worry.

“Hurting my hands is definitely a big concern,” stated Manley. In her first year on the team, she said, “I hurt my pinky finger, and it is permanently bent. So after a hard lesson learned, I now wear linemen gloves and tape my fingers before each game.”

The Cleveland Fusion and the NFWA play by the same rules as the Cleveland Browns and the National Football League – full contact, four quarters and full pads.

“It’s funny,” Manley said. “I think people get so caught up in the game watching football. Then, once in a while, you will see a pony tail, and they will be reminded it’s women playing football.”