BRANDY HATCHER: WORLD CHAMPION RUNNING BACK

          In four years as an undergraduate at MSU, she never played any sports, other than a flag football game with some friends.  But after moving to Chicago in 2009, Brandy Hatcher, ’08, a telemetry and med/surg nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Oak Park, IL, has emerged as one of the nation’s top running backs in professional women’s tackle football.  “I wanted to meet people and I saw there was a tryout for the Chicago Force,” Hatcher recalls.  “Honestly I didn’t think I’d make the team.”  But she did make the cut, and by her second year, “I got the hang of it.”  Brandy credits good coaching with her ability to run and catch the football.  “I’m not that fast, or that big so I can break tackles,” says Brandy, who is 5-5, 140 and boasts 5.1 speed in the 40-yard dash.  “But I have good field vision.  When you know where to go, it helps.”  This past season she had 72 carries for 490 yards and five touchdowns.  Her 51 receptions—for 627 yards and five touchdowns—were second-most in the Women’s Football Alliance league.  “I really worked hard to improve my receiving skills,” she notes.  “You have to really watch the ball and catch it with you hands and not your body.”  A native of Holt, she threw the discus and bowled in high school.  “The closest thing to football was wrestling with my brother, usually for the TV remote,” she says with a chuckle.  Brandy chose MSU to stay closer to home.  She is “a huge fan” of Spartan football.  This past year, Brandy made the national U.S. team and went on to win the International Federation of American Football Women’s World Championship in Finland, beating Canada 64-0 in the finals.  In August, the Chicago Force, which plays in Evanston, IL, won the national WFA championship in San Diego, CA.  Brandy has succeeded in her quest to meet people.  “My best friends are teammates,” she notes.  “I have great friends all over the U.S., and also in Finland and Spain.”  And the majority owner of the Chicago Force is a fellow Spartan, Linda Bache, who played softball at MSU and was a tackle football MVP for Chicago in 2005, 2006 and 2008.

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