Coming into unknown territory is always risky and terrifying. Change is inevitable in our lives, but it is always so scary. Making the leap into a foreign concept is tough for any individual to tackle, quite literally in this sense.
Mo Oetjen, 38, plays quarterback for the Nevada Storm, which is Nevada’s only women’s tackle football team. Nevada Storm moved up from D3 to D2 over the course of the past couple of years and are the reigning champions of D2 of the Women’s Football Alliance.
“I didn’t know it was a thing until somebody told me,” Oetjen said. “I was at a restaurant and someone came up and said ‘you should try out for the women’s tackle football team’ and I was like, what?”
Oetjen grew up here in Reno and graduated from Reno High School. She went to go play softball at Feather River college before going to play in Michigan for Concordia University for her last two years in college where she also got her bachelor’s in psychology.
She has worked at a Coral elementary school as a student mentor since February and before that, she worked for a foster care agency and a day treatment center for at-risk teens for 15 years called Koinonia.
She lived with a single mother growing up while her mom also raised her sister and brother. Dad was still in the picture, but she only got to see him every other weekend. They had moved around a lot in the Reno area growing up. Oetjen didn’t get to see a lot of her mother growing up as she worked multiple jobs to keep her and her siblings afloat.
However, Oetjen has no plans of leaving the 775 anytime soon. She has even started her own clothing company called “Ease the Soul”.
“I like Reno and my family’s here so that’s probably a big motivator for me to stay,” Oetjen said.
Oetjen had never played football before as the only sports she has known how to play were softball and basketball.
“I just threw the ball around with the boys,” Oetjen said.
As of now, the league doesn’t have enough funding and the women have to pay to play. It’s been slowly growing over the years with fan outreach. She tried out when she was 33 and made the team and has since found a love/hate relationship where she sees the brighter pastures of playing such a difficult sport.
“Football is amazing, sports can teach you so much about life,” Oetjen said. “It helps you become a better person. There are so many rules that move over to your actual life. Playing football, the difficulty of football really helps grow a human being. I’ve never played in a sport that’s so difficult, maybe because I didn’t get to start when I was a little kid. Softball I started when I was 5 and I played it until I was 22 at the serious level, so like I could play that with my eyes closed. Then coming out to football, I’ve never played it, I didn’t know all the rules. I mean I watch it, but I don’t know the game and it’s a lot more work and intense than I would’ve thought.”
In her first year with Nevada Storm, she was very confused by the culture shock. She used to be scared to go to practice because she felt like she didn’t know a lot of the hardships that come with football. She started off as a wide receiver and cornerback before she moved into the quarterback position which brought on a whole new set of challenges with learning the playbook, reading the defenses, moving up in the pocket, recognizing blitzes, etc.
“It’s pushed me through a lot, but there’s a lot of times you don’t want to keep playing because you’re like this is so much, but I also think that’s the positive because it pushes you past your limits, it pushes your body, it helps me want to stay in shape because I’m not younger. It’s kept me in amazing shape the last 3 or 4 years,” Oetjen said.
At the time of writing this, Nevada Storm is 2-0 and hopes to win another championship this year.
“We have a really good team of women, we are like a family,” Oetjen said. “It’s given me that and people being so supportive in our community, the support from our community has been huge. A lot of people that find out we have a football team get really supportive about it. I want the little girls to know that they can play those sports, for me it’s just fun. But I want to open it up so that they can make money hopefully one day like NFL players do. So it’s about me finding ways to open it up for the next generation.”
As if football isn’t enough to satisfy her, Oetjen is also a rapper. She wrote poetry a lot as a kid. In 9th grade, she and one of her friends started rapping back and forth with one another and decided that they wanted to record it. They recorded all their raps onto cassette tapes. Once she went off to college to play softball, music took to the sidelines, but once she was over that she decided to get back into it.
“I would say my favorite part of it is writing, and performing,” Oetjen said.
She has performed a bunch of shows, and she recently opened up at the Knitting Factory for E-40. She also opened up for other hip-hop legends such as Kurupt and Dogg Pound. She’s done a bunch of shows around the west coast in places such as Las Vegas and Oregon.
Oetjen hasn’t released any official music in seven years due to the fact that her football schedule consumes her entire life. She has still been recording and making music herself and with other artists. She has enough material to where she wants to put out an album soon. Music has been on and off, but when the pandemic hit she got really back into it. She has been attending a few open mics at Virginia Street Brewhouse.
“2Pac is my favorite rapper, he’s just inspirational for anyone,” Oetjen said. “He can speak to anyone and his music has lived on for years and I think he’ll continue. He was such a strong speaker and just wanted things to change. People like that are just inspirations to me, just anyone that can go through really hard situations and come out on top and still live in the positive. It’s so easy to get knocked down and become a part of the negative.”
While Tupac Shakur might be her biggest musical influence, her mom is the one who lights the fire in her to take life by the horns and accomplish the amazing heights she has reached.
“My biggest inspiration is my mom, she’s been through a ton and has always stayed strong and pushed through,” Oetjen said. “She’s always been super empathetic towards people even though she’s been through a crazy amount of trauma and difficulties in life and just never losing that care or love for humanity.”
When Oetjen was six years old she faced an untimely tragedy when her grandfather was murdered.
“That was probably one of the hardest things to deal with and as a kid, you don’t really understand what’s going on and you have all these fears and anxieties that you can’t rationalize with,” Oetjen said. “It affected my entire family and my mom started an outreach program for victims of violent crimes. I did a lot of speaking as a kid on that. I think it was amazing I’m so glad that I did those things, and I don’t think I realized how big of an impact it did have on me. But I think it made me stronger and I was able to share my story with people who were able to help me in those times.”
She didn’t fully understand it at the time when her mom pulled them all into the room. It’s hard for a kid to grapple with something as tragic as that. Now Oetjen has been making to sure to invest back into the community in helping troubled youth and trying to give them the right tools so they can succeed.
“It’s really hard, but it’s very rewarding,” Oetjen said. “I love that I can build a relationship with the kids that’s probably my favorite part because if you don’t have a relationship then their probably not going to want to listen to you or take anything that you have to say seriously. When I worked at Koinonia a lot of the kids were troubled youth and had been through a lot of trauma so they’re not going to trust you, I mean it would take a year sometimes for them to believe that you care about them.”
Koinonia is a family service foster care system, where their main goal is to put kids through therapy, help with school, social skills, and dinner. Kids get referred there by therapists, court, or parents. It’s all about the rehabilitation of kids. She still keeps in contact with over 75% of the kids. She has no desire to have children of her own as she doesn’t feel the need since she works with kids and has been almost everyday for the past 15 years.
She even fostered a high school student for a year and half. The girl didn’t have anywhere to go so Oetjen decided to take her in and help her finish out high school.
For her future plans, Oetjen is thinking about getting her masters in counseling so she can further spread her wings in that field.
“I want to find exactly what I want to do in life like I love working with kids and at-risk kids who need extra help or people in general that need help,” Oetjen said. “I just want to make things easier for those I can help. I care about the community so I’m just trying to find where I can fit in with that.”