Profile on Autumn Dillaman

I wrote this for my Nonfiction class on a woman who plays Gaelic football in Pittsburgh and also attended Pitt.

Dillaman heard her coach instructing her teammate to try to score one point between the two upright poles, but Dillaman and her teammate both wanted three points, a goal in the net below. They made eye contact and her teammate booted the ball into play. Dillaman punched it past the goalie into the net, scoring three points that tied the game and led to the Banshees second victory at Chicago Nationals.

            Autumn Dillaman, who remembers this moment as the highlight of her Gaelic football career, lives a dual life as a half-forward on Pittsburgh’s women’s Gaelic football team, The Banshees, and as a fourth and fifth grade teacher at the University of Pittsburgh’s Falk Laboratory School. Dillaman began playing Gaelic football in the Summer of 2006 after meeting one of her teammates, Bridgette Kennedy, at a coed basketball league. She’s played every season since, except last year when she tore the Medial Collateral and Anterior Cruciate ligaments in her knee and was unable to compete.

            Gaelic football, the national sport of Ireland, combines aspects of rugby, American football, and volleyball on a rectangular field with a leather ball that’s slightly smaller than a soccer ball, but stitched like a volleyball. Players can score one point by kicking the ball over a bar through uprights, similar to a field goal in American football, or score three points by kicking or punching the ball into the soccer-like goal below the bar. Players cannot throw the ball or pick it up directly off of the ground. They must kick or punch the ball between teammates, and they can only take four paces without either dribbling the ball or performing a solo. When a player solos, he or she drops the ball and kicks it back into to his or her own hands while maintaining movement down the field.

            These complicated rules are one way to define Gaelic football, but Dillaman said she sometimes just refers to the sport as “a game that someone who was drunk and Irish probably just made up one day.” With her long red hair and blue eyes, Dillaman’s appearance screams Irish, but in actuality her family is German. She admitted that she sometimes secretly wishes she were of Irish heritage.    

             “I’m a German redhead, but if you looked at our team, most people would pick me out as a total Irish… Sometimes I pretend when we’re out and about,” Dillaman said.   

            Through the Banshees, Dillaman met a few other women who played for The Pittsburgh Passion, and she began playing American football in addition to Gaelic. Autumn and her teammates who also play for The Passion have a playing style that is a little rougher than some Gaelic referees prefer. The rules of Gaelic football allow only shoulder-to-shoulder contact, but the degree of violence in the game varies across different regions. Marie Young, an Irish language professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a former Banshee, said that Gaelic football is more dangerous in America than in Ireland where she was born.  

            “When we’ve gone to nationals before, we’ve had Irish referees and the girls, like the likes of Autumn who are used to the Passion, are shocked at how much they get pulled for,” Young said.

            “The Banshees tend to be rougher than other teams that we play… When we go to Nationals, we get all kinds of penalties…They think it’s funny that we all play [American] football, but they don’t let us play that rough…I sneak my smacks in here and there… I don’t get caught too often ” Dillaman said.

            Though she enjoys playing rough on the field, Dillaman loves her teaching job at Falk. Joanne Ridge, Dillaman’s coworker, said that Dillaman is caring in her role as a teacher, but that’s not necessarily contradictory to her actions on the Banshees.

            “It’s kind of like the football players who also take ballet… It seems there’s a dichotomy there, but there’s not. On your team, even though you might be tackling… you’re very close knit and caring for each other,” Ridge said.

            Jaqueline Metcalfe, a teacher who mentored Dillaman when she began at Falk, added that Dillaman was very committed to her job and her sports teams and that she relates well to the children she teaches due to her wide variety of interests.

            “She’s a good teammate on her sports teams and her team here,” Metcalfe said.

            Even without her bright yellow uniform, Dillaman looks athletic. Her hair is fashioned in a high, tight ponytail and she wears jeans and a hooded sweatshirt bearing the name of her alma mater, Pitt. It’s no surprise that Dillaman said teaching felt like the most natural career path for her because she is visibly comfortable in her classroom, even huddled in the desk of a fourth grader. She lights up when she speaks about the moment she can see a light bulb go off in her students’ heads.

            Dillaman, now 30, has lived in Pittsburgh since she was one and currently lives on the North Side only a mile away from her parents’ home. She has two older siblings, one sister and one brother, who she described as “homebodies” like herself. A self proclaimed “daddy’s girl”, Dillaman named her parents as her biggest role models.

            “I’m the youngest so they still check in on me. My mom makes us family lunch every Sunday… They’re just good parents,” Dillaman said.

            She went to Pitt to stay close to her parents and enjoyed her time there. After quickly realizing that the Business school was not for her in her freshmen year, she became a Psychology major to prepare for the Education track. She took classes in the morning and worked at after school programs in the afternoon.

            “I got to shape my teaching style while I was doing the undergrad program,” she said.

            When she isn’t teaching at Falk or playing for the Banshees, Dillaman spends her time playing bass guitar, watching cooking shows, working out, participating in the worship team at her church, and playing with her cats Iceberg and Steve.