FOOTBALL: Wolcott Tech assistant coach Jennifer Stango gets ready for her second season with the Wildcats

By Peter Wallace, Register Citizen

 TORRINGTON -- What’s good about playing football?

“The contact,” beams Jennifer Stango, immediately gaining credibility in her position as an assistant football coach at Wolcott Tech High School in Torrington.

Stango, a 2005 graduate of Post University (Waterbury), has played in a national women’s league for nine years, the past two with the Connecticut Wreckers in Danbury.

At 5-feet-3, she’s a linebacker and a running back.

Recovered from an ACL tear last year, Stango knows contact.

“I don’t want to hear that ‘He’s bigger than me,’” she says in her coaches role with some of Wolcott Tech’s smaller cornerbacks and receivers. “Get down low; the low man wins.”

Stango, a social studies teacher at Waterbury’s Kaynor Tech in her day job, played soccer, basketball and softball at Sacred Heart High School and at Post. A former coach recruited her for a women’s football team in Hartford; later, she switched to another team in Danbury before the Wreckers were formed two years ago.

“The ball is smaller, but the rules are the same as college,” she says, explaining that there are 50 league teams in North America, including one in Canada. The regular season, running from April through July, has eight games.