If you want to know something about Tonya Evinger, you should start with the photo where she’s 14 and skinny, lost inside a pair of giant shoulder pads.

This was picture day for the football team at Odessa High School and the poses are all standard issue. Take a knee in the grass, one elbow perched on a thigh, football tucked away in the other arm. Everybody trying to look fearsome even though they know their moms wish they’d smile.

The first thing you notice is the look in her eyes, a hint of satisfaction mixed with defiance. Like she knows what you think about the girl who insisted on joining the football team and she doesn’t particularly care. Not as long as she gets to hit somebody.

The second thing you notice is her red hair, cut short in accordance with a coach’s demand. He didn’t want her on the team in the first place. Maybe he thought that would deter her. Maybe he thought that no girl could care more about playing football than she did about her hair. Obviously, he didn’t know her well enough.

Even back then, according to her mother: “Once she decided she wanted to do something, you couldn’t tell her no.”

She’s always been that way. When the boys were into rodeoing, Evinger just had to do it too. She even got someone to put her on a bull, though no one would let her enter the events. Then it was wrestling, a sport she took up after she didn’t make the junior high school volleyball team. At the end of tryouts, the coach made a joke that wound up shaping the next decade of her life.

“He said something like, ‘If you don’t make the team, you can just go out for wrestling instead.’ I had never really heard much about wrestling before that,’ Evinger (18-5) said. “I didn’t know anything about it. But he said that and I thought, ‘That sounds like more fun anyway.’”

Looking back on it now, she can see that what she needed was an outlet. She was angry and isolated, a middle child caught in a family that didn’t always understand her, living in a small town that ultimately wouldn’t accept her. She had an older sister she didn’t get along with. She had twin younger brothers who only wanted to play with each other.

“It was always everybody against Tonya,” said her mother, Debbie Evinger. “But she was always tough.”

Sometimes it went too far. Her brothers would pick on her until she snapped and beat them up.

“Then I’d get my ass beat as soon as my dad got home because my brothers had black eyes,” Evinger said.

Wrestling gave her something to do with that aggression. Something besides beat up her brothers or, on days when home got to be too much, riding her bike until she spotted some group of boys playing tackle football in a field somewhere.

Eventually, wrestling also gave her a way out of Odessa, Mo., in the form of a scholarship to Missouri Valley State. There, Evinger said, she was finally able to be herself.

“I grew up in a small, racist, homophobic town,” Evinger said. “People ask me, ‘Did you know you were gay back then?’ And I did, but I didn’t. It was weird. So when I decided to go to college, I just wanted to get out. That’s when I realized, you know what, none of these people know me. I can be anybody I want to be. I can be me.”

And by then, Evinger said, she’d already learned that it wasn’t worth trying to be anyone else.

She learned it in part on those wrestling mats, from coaches who tried to make her quit and boys who didn’t respect her until she showed she could work as hard as they did. She learned it on the football team, with all those freshmen boys running full speed at her in helmets and pads, trying to knock her right out of their world.

They didn’t realize how impossible that was, maybe because they had no idea how stubborn Evinger could be.

In a lot of ways, it’s that stubbornness that’s most responsible for her blossoming career and her current success. The question is, will it also be the thing that ultimately holds her back?

The current numbers are hard to ignore. Evinger’s got a winning streak that’s nine fights long and counting. She hasn’t lost in a little over five years. Even her coaches say they can’t personally remember the last time she clearly lost a round.

The other thing they can’t understand: Why isn’t she in the UFC?

“Nothing against Invicta, which is a great company,” said longtime friend and cornerman Jerod Phillips, “but I think we’re kind of at the point where we’re running out of people to fight. I just don’t know what else you have to do if you’re Tonya Evinger to at least get the call.”

Evinger hasn’t always been her own best advocate in that regard. On numerous occasions she’s insisted to reporters that she’s not interested in signing with the UFC. She’s questioned the company’s commitment to women’s MMA. She’s denigrated its female stars.

In comments to this website in 2015 she even appeared to pick a fight with UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby, who Evinger said had once called her “unimpressive.”

“The dude’s scrawny himself,” Evinger said of Shelby then. “If I ever run into him at a jiu-jitsu gym, I’m going to wad him up.”

(Though Shelby is generally prohibited by his employers from speaking on the record, he has often disputed Evinger’s version of events in private conversations.)

But there’s no denying that, based on pure physical ability, Evinger belongs in the UFC. The women’s bantamweight class there has featured women with far less experience and far fewer wins.

And if you’re worried about creating and promoting new stars with big personalities, why wouldn’t you take a closer look at the woman who makes headlines by vomiting and then stealing kisses from her interviewers? She walks in looking like she drove to the cage in an 18-wheeler, then she fights like someone told her that the woman across from her tried to steal her naked lady mudflaps.

With just a little tweaking she could be a pro wrestling character, a lesbian Rick Rude crossed with Stone Cold Steve Austin, with a dash of Diamond Dallas Page thrown for good measure. In MMA terms, she’s practically an honorary Diaz brother. She even knows the secret handshake.

Best of all, it’s completely genuine. You get the sense she couldn’t change if she wanted to. Which, by the way, she doesn’t.

But see, that’s where she gets herself in trouble sometimes. Both within her inner circle and in the power centers of MMA, there’s the sense that she could nab a UFC contract tomorrow if only she’d say the right words. She wouldn’t have to grovel or beg, or even apologize for all the stuff she’s already said. If she’d just speak out loud some desire to fight for the UFC, that might be enough.

As Invicta FC President Shannon Knapp explained: “That opportunity is hers if she wants it. I just don’t know if she wants it.”

It’s hard to say if even Evinger knows. One minute she’ll tell you that she doesn’t get what the big deal is about the UFC. It’s like people just want to say they fought there.

“But I don’t give a (expletive) about that,” Evinger said. “If I step back and look at where I am in my career, this is what I always wanted. I’m fighting, I’m a champion, I’m in a promotion that appreciates and respects me. I’m happy. It’s what I always dreamed of. I can’t really be disappointed in where I’m at.”

At the same time, does she think she deserves to be there? Sure, if you want to put it that way. And after a career that’s spanned 10 years and multiple organizations, a little validation from the sport’s 800-pound gorilla wouldn’t hurt.

“It’d be nice,” Evinger said. “But I’m not going to beg for it. I’m not going to hold my breath for it.”

Still, time is a finite resource, especially for a fighter in her mid-thirties. She’s beating contenders faster than Invicta FC can build them up. Her next title defense, against Yana Kunitskaya (9-2) on November 18, sees her taking on an Invicta FC newcomer, someone almost wholly unknown to most fight fans.

She can say she doesn’t care if she ever fights under the UFC banner, but what about the chance to fight the bantamweight elite? Especially now, when she finally seems to have this sport – and maybe even herself – figured out.

That’s the part that bugs Phillips, who’s been in Evinger’s corner for some of her biggest fights and has seen the progression over time.

“She has some losses, but I always felt like it had more to do with her and where she was at mentally than it did with anything her opponents were doing,” Phillips said. “No disrespect to them, but a lot of those losses, it was because of mental errors she was making. She’s never been beat up. She’s always been a great athlete.”

Knapp saw that potential before Evinger signed with Invicta FC, she said. She just wondered if it would ever be fulfilled.

“I always thought that if she were extremely focused, she could be great,” Knapp said. “Because she’s a phenomenal athlete. Honestly, the day I signed her I told her, ‘I really think this is your chance.’ She just had to pull it together. And now you look at her, she’s finally got it dialed in. She’s matured. I think it’s important to her now.”

To hear Evinger tell it, everything changed in one moment. In a fight just like any other, she got a takedown just like any other. Outwardly, you’d never know anything was special was happening.

“But in my head I realized, ‘This girl can’t beat me. She just can’t,’” Evinger said. “Now I feel different in the cage. I used to feel small when I was in the fight. The center of the cage was like this hill that I was always trying to climb. Now I feel big and I feel dominant. When I fight, I’m able to use all that energy that used to make me feel nervous and make me lose fights. I can ball it all up and use it to help me win fights now.”

Winning is all she’s been doing for more than five years now. If she does it again at Invicta FC 20 later this month, she’ll have 10 in a row. How many more until there’s nowhere else to go but up? How long until she makes it so obvious where she belongs that she doesn’t even have to say it?

For more on Invicta FC 20, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.