Interview: Frankie de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo, authors of Hail Mary

Note: this interview was recorded in 2021 before Frankie de la Cretaz changed their name, however our text and transcriptions have been amended.

In this episode Amira Rose Davis talks with Frankie de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo, authors of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. They discuss what it took to write this book and find former players, the beautiful history they uncover in women's professional football and what the NWFL can tell us about sports leagues today.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Amira: Hey flamethrowers, welcome to Burn It All Down – the sports podcasts that you absolutely need. I am so pleased to be joined today by not one but two friends of the show, Frankie de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D’Arcangelo, to celebrate the release of their book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. Cop this now, it's out already. So, first and foremost, welcome to Burn It All Down.

Lyndsey: Thanks for having us.

Frankie: Yeah, thank you.

Amira: For sure. I am so excited to talk with y'all about this for a million different reasons, but I just want to start because, football, yes! Touchdown was my first word, and I resonated a lot with the part…You have a piece of prose in the book where you talk about football as religion, and it's really fitting. We just finished, if you're listening to this, the episode that just dropped was about superstition in sports. We talked about sports and religion, and we talked about what it feels like to be outside, to be sidelined for something that society has deemed so important, so much as the fabric of your life, and football is like that for so many people. So I just wanted to start by asking y'all what was your relationship to football, to this sport? And what led you to this work?

Lyndsey: Well, I actually grew up playing football with my brothers. I have a twin brother and an older brother. And I mean, that was what we did in the neighborhood. I grew up in a neighborhood that was primarily just filled with a bunch of boys. And I sort of just immersed myself in that, and I fell in love with it right away. And also my father – I'm from Buffalo, New York – and he's a diehard Bills fan and had season tickets for a long time and took me to games. We also developed a bond over football between us, and it's just always been just a part of my life. And on the flip side of that, you know, it became a sport that I wish I could have played, but couldn't because I was a girl. My twin brother played youth football and I wasn't allowed because my parents thought I'd get hurt. And then that stuck with me, you know? At eight years old was the first time I was really told I couldn't play a sport because of my gender. And man, that hurt, because you want to be able to play a sport that's just fun, and you see your friends doing it.

My friends were boys, but still, they were my friends. And just the fact that I was told I couldn't do it because I was a girl was just really, really hard to swallow. And then, you know, growing up, you get to an age where you just get physically different than the boys in the neighborhood. It just doesn't work anymore. And there were really no opportunities for me to play back then, until about five or six years ago, I got involved in a co-ed touch league with a group of friends, and it was so much fun to be able to revisit that. But yeah, football is definitely…Was glad to be able to work on a project with this sport being the focal point. 

Amira: I resonate a lot with that, but I imagine especially having a twin, right? Because sometimes when you have barriers put in front of you because gender, with siblings, they're a little older or younger, so it's more subtle. But I imagine having a twin is like, whoa! That is right here, hello? Frankie, what is your relationship with this sport? 

Frankie: Yeah, growing up, sports were on in my house a lot. My dad ran a tennis academy and played baseball at a fairly high level and everyone was always watching, but my mom was actually the football nut in my house. Huge Dolphins fan. Watched them lose a lot. Also, Florida Gators. I will shout out, I come from UF family, Gator fans – except for my brother, Florida State. So we've got an in-house rivalry. So like, this is what I grew up around. And my mom's telling me this story over and over again about wanting pads for like her birthday or Hanukkah as a kid, and her parents wouldn't let her. Her dad said no. So she put, you know, pillows in her jersey and would walk around with them. And then in high school, actually, I was a competitive cheerleader. That was the sport that I did. And when I got to high school, the only way you were allowed to be on the competition team is if you also cheered for the football team.

So I learned game day culture that way, being on the sidelines as a cheerleader, with the band, the whole thing. But it's also a way that, you know, I learned the game a little bit differently as well, because you have to know what cheer to call and understand what's going on on the field. And I think that that's something that people actually don't realize. Cheerleaders are often really dismissed, but we have to be very in tune with what's happening on the field in order to do our job well. And so I was very familiar with game day culture from that aspect.

Amira: Absolutely. I don't know if I've ever told you this story before, you know, legendary Rutgers women's basketball coach C Vivian Stringer sued her high school to integrate their cheer squad, but she was like, I never wanted to be the cheerleader, just put me closest to the court, and so I could coach from there – because there was no pathways to coaching at the time. So, cheer is absolutely…And it’s part of this culture, right? Part of this entire space that y'all excavate and examine too in the book.

Frankie: Yeah. Actually, one of the players on one of the teams, the Columbus Pacesetters, she played flute in the marching band because it got her closest to the field. That was as close as she could get. And there was a player on the Oklahoma City Dolls who was a cheerleader at University of Oklahoma and then played football for the Dolls. So, also did both. And so you see these women trying to get as close to the game as they can.

Amira: Absolutely. And so in the book, of course, y'all are looking at the story of the National Women's Football League, which is a story that far too many people are unaware of. And it's a wonderful recovery project. It brings so much texture and personality to light in these pages. What I like about one of the things you say from the jump is that this is not about like the financials or the men who are involved in doing it. And like I write about Black women who played in the Negro Leagues, of course, and y'all have done tremendous reporting on professional women’s baseball opportunities and football opportunities. And so much of the focus is often on, you know, the lingerie league, who's marketing it, who's sponsoring it. And y'all have a line where you're like, this is about the women who played. It's about their glory and their pain and the meaning of the league and their time in it to them. And I love that centering. So I wanted to ask you if you had a favorite team or athlete that, when you think about this book, you're like, oh, y'all need to read this story or know about this team. Somebody who's really stuck out to you.

Frankie: Well, so, Lyndsey and I will definitely have different answers because our writing process involved separating the teams. And so we each got to know different teams well. I think for me, I really was excited to tell the story of the Oklahoma City Dolls, because if anyone knows about this league, it's often because they know about the Toledo Troopers who were the winningest team in pro football history – men's or women’s, and they still are. They went like 64 and 5 over nine seasons or something. And they'd had a star half back named Linda Jefferson, who I hope y’all will read about, because she's incredible. But the team that handed them their first loss at the start of their sixth season was the Oklahoma City Dolls, and that team only played for about four seasons. And I think that if they had the same amount of time on the field that the Troopers did, they would've rivaled them, you know, in terms of accomplishments and how good they were.

They had a season where they allowed like eight points all season, something like that, like, just ridiculous stuff. And the leader of that team was quarterback Jan Hines, and a lot of people that played the Dolls attribute that team's success in part to Hines. And she was part of the first collegiate softball team under Title IX at University of Oklahoma as well. That team had a lot of other great athletes too. I won’t name them all, but you can read about them in the book. But I think that's one of the teams that I would love to see celebrated a little bit more too, because they were just as good and you don't hear about them as much as the Troopers. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. So, like Frankie mentioned, I had a different set of teams. I don't know, I kind of feel an attachment to a lot of them, and then also to a lot of the different players, just because they're all so different and special and have their own personal story to share. But I really enjoyed talking with the Houston Herricanes. That was probably the team I talked to the most players from one team. Just also, they were player owned. They didn't have an owner like some of the other teams. They just started because Marty Bryant, one of the players, was sitting in a dentist office and saw the womenSports magazine with Linda Jefferson on the cover, and read the article and said, you know what? I want to do that. And she wrote to the league and got permission to start a team and put it all together.

© womensSport magazine 1975

And even the way it was kind of like this grassroots operation where it spread word of mouth, how they got players around the Houston area. And then people just would hear about it and show up because either they wanted to make some new friends or they just wanted to play football, or they wanted to try something new. It was just a really close knit group. They started in 1976 and they became really close and really relied on each other to fund the team, to pay for the games and the travel and just to keep it going for as long as possible. And there's also like this underdog aspect where they were bumping up against the Oklahoma City Dolls a lot and could never just get that win for four years. And I won't say if they ever did or not, because you gotta read the book find out. But it's a great side story as well. So that’s just a really wonderful team, just one of the teams that we talk about.

Amira: Yeah. So, you talk about grassroots stuff, and y'all really did grassroots research here. I would love to hear a little bit about your methods and the process of uncovering this, you know, as somebody who does similar kind of historical work, when there's not like an arrow shining and pointing and saying “This history is here,” right? You have to go connect with people and find former players and find clippings and press and stuff like that. What has it been like to uncover this story, and to do it collaboratively? And to bring this to light?

Frankie: I'm glad there were two of us. [laughter] Like, to give people listening an idea of the scope of what we were looking at, we estimate that there were 19 teams. We also estimate that we're probably wrong and there are probably more that we did not hear about. But that equals thousands of women who would have taken the field, at least at some point on one of these teams. And we were very clear from the start of this project that we knew that this could not be a comprehensive history because there was just too much to cover. And so I think, for me, I am a really big nerd about archival research and I want to find everything.

So having that bucket at the beginning, that container around the story actually was really helpful. We didn't know where the research would stop from the beginning, but we kind of knew there was going to be a point that we were going to have to call it and say this is a starting point and we hope that more builds on this work. But yeah, we started with newspaper articles, which is where you get the names of the players. And from there, I think some of our first breaks were actually on Facebook. All the boomers are on Facebook [laughter] – whether or not they know how to check their message requests folder is another question altogether. [laughs] But usually when you got one person, they might be in touch with maybe one more, and the dominoes would fall that way. But there were definitely also a lot of shots in the dark.

The story I'll tell about the moment that was like the “oh my god” moment is, I spent two years trying to get in touch with Linda Jefferson, because I didn't feel like we could write this book without talking to her. She's the player that every time you interview another player, no matter what team they were on, like the third question is like, have you talked to Linda Jefferson? Right? So, I really felt like we needed to get in touch with her. And she’s active on Facebook. I'm like, oh, this'll be easy. She's promoting a documentary about the team. Not easy. Her teammates are like, here's her number. No, apparently that's not her number. [Amira laughs] I just could not get in touch with Linda. So, I found her niece on Facebook and posted a comment on a public photo, like a profile photo, just like hoping.

Weeks later I got a phone call from an unknown number from Toledo, Ohio. I was like, no way. And I pick it up, and she's just like, hi, this is Linda Jefferson. I heard you've been looking for me. [Amira laughs] And it was my one shot. I talked to her for two hours and we never connected again. I was not able to get followup stuff from her. But stories like that, like the moment where the research all comes together…And there's also always one player on every team who is like the informal archivist, who's got all the programs and the playbooks and the jerseys and all of it, like, in a closet somewhere. And so that's the player. Once you find that player, so much opens up. 

Lyndsey: We were lucky too, because we were able to find that kind of player almost on every team we talked to. So, it worked out. And I mean, there's no way…Like Frankie mentioned, having two people to attack this, you know, to split the teams, and then to go at it from different angles…It was just a blessing to have Frankie be my partner in this. I look at what we've done and I'm just like, I don't know how I would've been able to do this by myself, or anyone really, could have pulled it all together 

Amira: And kudos to y’all, because y’all did a lot of this over a pandemic. [laughs] I was like, how are they still writing a book?!

Frankie: We did do a lot of it over the pandemic. And I will say that is for me one of the things I'm saddest about, is that if the archives were not digitized, we couldn't access them. I had planned to go to Dallas and Toledo to access some archives and meet some players. Like, most of the players…The only ones we met in person were the ones that we met at the Houston Herricanes reunion, which you'll read about in the book, and I attended that. That was happening because the daughter of one of the players is making a documentary called Brick House about the team, and we were invited to participate. And that was right before the pandemic. So we also didn't meet most of these players face to face. Like, I wanted to go see, are these stadiums they played in still standing? What do they look like? That kind of texturey stuff was largely missing. And so that is the reality of writing a book in a pandemic.

Amira: Well, I loved it. I really did. And not to get all historian nerd, but I will. It's also just such a textured history of a particular moment, right? Of the 70s, of this moment both in sports and in society, where there's a lot of change and re-establishment happening. This is a moment in time, right? We have Title IX, we have civil rights, and gay liberation, and women's lib, obviously kind of all pushing and pulling and tearing and replacing society in all these different ways. And it feels, to many people that I study in this time, as like a kind of moment of possibility – even as many doors are being closed in faces, but it seems like windows are opening or people are discovering a back door or something like that, to new possibilities about how they show up in the world.

And one of the things about the women that you write about in this book is that they're coming from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, they're coming with different sexual orientations, and they're coming together on these teams. And in certain places they are intersecting with the community. I love the way that you write about the Bluebonnets and the lesbian community in Dallas. And I just want to ask, the way that these kinds of upheavals also set the stage for the history that you're telling. Whether you want to talk a little bit more about the lesbian community in Dallas, or, you know, what some of the players were kind of thinking or feeling in terms of a possibility opening up with them through this league that you've documented.

Frankie: Sure. [laughs] So…

Amira: [laughs] Yes.

Frankie: So, there's two parts to this. I can talk specifically about the Dallas lesbian community. I was so excited that this was a rabbit hole that opened up. Lyndsey and I suspected some of the players were queer – queer people are everywhere. They're often in women's sports, right? Whether or not they were gonna want to talk about that and whether or not they saw it as connected to the league was a question that we didn't know, going into it. And so pretty quickly…The Bluebonnets were the first team I began talking to, and pretty quickly on in those interviews they said we formed in a lesbian bar, we all hung out together there. There were softball leagues organized out of those bars, and we all played softball together. We all knew how to throw and catch, so we all went out for the football team together. You know, for many of them, this was another way to hang out with their friends.

But also, one of the things I write about is the football teams as community spaces that were similar to the gay bars at the time, where it's not okay in most places to be openly gay, except in a lesbian bar or, you know, a gay bar. And the teams are another one of those places. You know, I think marginalized folks are experts at creating safe spaces for themselves, for ourselves, in a world that's hostile to their existence. And this is like a very good example of that. And I think something that was really interesting to me is that when you think broadly of like the queer liberation movement, post-Stonewall, right? We're talking…These teams started anywhere from like two to five years after the Stonewall uprising that happened.

These women are really far removed from that. Many of them didn't even know Stonewall existed or happened. Like, they are in middle America. They’re in the south or in the rust belt. They're in smaller towns. Resistance might be kind of like trickling in. The first gay pride parade was held in Dallas the same year the Bluebonnets were formed. So, there's something happening, but they're not necessarily connecting it with what's happening on the coasts and in these more liberal and elite cities. And that was really interesting to me, to hear them talk about that. And I think also when we talk about this as a time of possibility, that the media often wanted to frame them as feminist activists, right? So we were really interested in how the women felt about this narrative.

It's one thing to say to a newspaper, “Oh, I'm not a women's libber,” because you think that's the right thing to say at the time. But I'm like, okay, well, did it resonate? For most of them, they're like, what the hell is women's lib? What does this have to do with me? And so many of them still to this day reject that framing. And that was really important to us to be like, we can recognize that it existed in this time in history, and that movements and change happens outside of organizing meetings. And just because a normal person, an everyday person, decides to buck the system and say, like, I'm going to do what I want and break norms – which is what these women did. But to paint them as feminist activists when they didn't see themselves that way felt really irresponsible.

Amira: I think that this is such a good point. Sometimes it's really hard to balance these scales. And we know that there is this kind of trickling in and trickling out, but we also know that people are living their daily lives. I think about…I grew up in western Mass, and around this time of course they started the Mary Vazquez Softball League, which was radical in its upending space where lesbians in western Mass played softball together, you know? I grew up going to games that the Hot Flashes had, for instance, and things like that.

And I like pointing to it because it demonstrates how sports, which can oftentimes be like an arbiter of these gender norms, also was a space excavated and created for folks with marginalized identities, that wasn't necessarily tied to these bigger kind of huge changes. Of course they were impacted by them, but it was also like, hey, this is something we feel good doing. And we feel safe doing it. And we're doing and we're laughing together, and it's not necessarily tied to an activist circle or a march or something happening in the urban areas. So, I love that point, and I want to come back to region because it's a huge part of this story, but definitely throw it to you, Lyndsey, to talk a little bit about Title IX and how it factors into this history.

Lyndsey: Yeah, it was kind of the perfect time, after Title IX, for the NWFL, the forum, because a lot of these women weren't allowed to play organized sports at different institutions. One of the players for the LA Dandelions, Rose Low, was a big athlete growing up. But she talked about how in gym class or physical education class in school, the boys would run the mile and the girls would have to walk, you know? There were all these restrictions. And it seems so silly now when you look back on it, but the fact that the women back then who were athletic and wanted to participate were just waiting for this opportunity. And after Title IX, it's like their entire sports worlds opened up. And Rose jumped in feet first. She did everything from archery to field hockey, rowing, anything that she could just get that outlet for. And when football, when this rolled around, it was like, are you kidding me? Of course I'm going to try out for this team!

So there were a lot of women who experienced that. But also some women in different teams in different parts of the country didn't even know what Title IX was at the time, you know? Hadn't heard about it, or really didn't know what was happening. But, you know, ultimately it was life-changing for a lot of women in sports, and it set the jumping off point to where we are today. We've seen this continued growth of women’s sports since that point. And the NWFL is a definite part of that. It is the first women's pro league to really go from that point on to really just carve out its own lane during that time period. So, it was definitely a big part of this story.

Amira: It's also telling another history, right? It's talking about regions often overlooked. It's middle America, it's Toledo. And one of the things that's also happening when you're talking about some of the collapses here are collapses in these de-industrialized cities, right? It's the story of Pittsburgh, but the Steelers obviously have durability. It's the story of Toledo. It's the story of port towns. It's a story of these smaller spaces that doesn't have an infrastructure of Houston around it. And I thought about that, especially in your discussion of kind of blue collar identity, working class identities. And it's interesting, we have a very AFC East representation here. But Buffalo is absolutely, you know, that story. [laughs] A lot of what you're doing is also just doing a brilliant working class history of the 1970s. Did you learn anything new about region? I mean, did you think about Toledo more before you thought of this project? [laughs] Or did you discover places or pockets of America that you hadn't really considered before?

Frankie: Yeah. I hadn't thought a lot about the economic decline of the rust belt before I wrote this book. I'm not from the rust belt. But one of the questions we had to ask when we look at where the teams popped up, which were predominantly in the rust belt, and then we had the outliers out in California and a few in the south in Texas and Oklahoma. But really largely in the rust belt, in Ohio, in particular. And there's questions about why did these teams start here? Why did they stay here, and what was happening in that place, at that time? And in order to do that, you have to tell a history of place. And that's also how we ended up with the Dallas lesbian bar history, right? It was by asking those same questions. But Ohio is really central to this book, because not only were the roots of the game of football…Football started in Ohio, like, not women's football – football started in Ohio. The NFL pro football hall of fame is in Canton. And this is the culture that these girls are growing up in. And there is also then a fan base that exists there.

The roots of the NWFL, which were started by a Cleveland-based promoter named Sid Friedman, again, come back to Ohio. And so that became a question – why? There's gotta be a reason. And that's how you end up talking about what football as a sport means to this state. Not just men's football, but women's football and everybody who grows up in it. But then also, it's really interesting to think about the fact that, as you said, these are manufacturing cities. They’re on, you know, Lake Erie. And their economies were really crumbling at this time, and a lot of the women who are playing on these teams are working in trades. They're working in factories, they are working class people. And so how are their lives being impacted by that economic reality, and what are they able to achieve on the field? And how does that create meaning when maybe so many other things in their life might be not going as well, or just changing really rapidly?

Amira: Absolutely. Lyndsey, do you have anything to add about region?

Lyndsey: No, actually Frankie did all the analysis on that part. [Amira laughs] I mean, I got to give them kudos because having grown up in the rust belt area, I see it right from the jump. I talk about my relationship with football and how it just was part of the fabric of my growing up. And I think you could say that about everyone who grows up in this area. It just makes perfect sense how it all fits together from a regional point of view.

Amira: Right. And there you have like these moments too…Barbara Patton, who's my favorite, her son plays for the Bills during the time where Buffalo has its most almost success. And you know, thinking about the connected nature of…I love the moment where teams actually play each other, right? Where you have these regions actually connecting, and you have these histories all bearing down into one place, no matter your path there. I love it. I just have a quick fun question. One of the things I love most about doing history is the names of teams and nicknames. So, the Rainbows, the Mustangs, the Pacesetters, the Bluebonnets, the Detroit Demons – which is very Detroit! You know, Queen Bees, you have the Dolls, of course, the Dandelions. Do you have a favorite name? And side note: if you had to name a football team now, what was your name be? It’s like mad libs.

Lyndsey: [laughs] It’s like mad libs. I don't really have a favorite team name. I think the Herricanes were trying to be clever because they spelled hurricanes H-E-R, you know? And they came up with their own team name. And then other teams that had owners, like the LA Dandelions, their owner, Robert Matthews, his wife came up with a team name because she said, “They're pretty spring flowers that you just can't kill.” There's another California team, the San Diego Lobos. So, it's interesting. But if I had...Gosh, if I had to name a team, I might have to put out like a Twitter poll or something. I don't know.

Amira: Now we have to do a Twitter poll! But I like when you say the Herricanes, because they're naming themselves, you know? And sometimes that's the other thing, is like, no, not a lady-something, you're going to put a bow on a mascot. But like, we're going to assert our own identity within our team name.

Lyndsey: Right. And so if it was a Buffalo-based team, I think I'd go with something “Buffalo Blizzard” or something nondescript that captured like the weather, what our city is known for. Something like that, I guess.

Amira: Cold.

Lyndsey: Cold. [laughs]

Frankie: Yeah. I mean, the teams naming themselves…You said the Demons, and let's talk about that for a second, because they started under that promoter named Sid Friedman that I mentioned, and they were one of the teams that broke away because Sid Friedman saw this as more of like a sideshow and gimmick, and he was okay with exploiting the women if it was going to get press. And they were the Detroit Petticoats, and then the Detroit Fillies, and then they renamed themselves the Demons.

And I will tell you – this is kind of off-topic, but I think it's funny – so, the Detroit Lions gave the Demons their uniforms, their hand-me-downs, which are kind of hilarious if you see pictures, because the women are like swimming in these jerseys. [Amira laughs] But in my head…I'd seen the logo, which is this little devil with a pointy tail. And in my head they were black and red because they were the Demons. I'd never seen a color photo. And then I recently was sent a color photo of the team, and they're wearing blue and silver. Like, of course they're wearing blue and silver! [laughs]

Amira: Right. [laughs]

Frankie: And like, oh, yes, of course! And those uniforms, there was such a lack of funds that they went to three different Detroit-based NWFL teams and lasted a decade because that's what people could afford. 

Amira: Wow. They should've been like the Ice Demons or something blue and silver. But that's tremendous. It tells you so much about the infrastructure, about these hand-me-downs. And of course, it's impossible to read this without thinking about contemporary things. You know, Frankie, you've done tremendous reporting on thinking about like concussions. And like, we celebrate access wins and things like that, but it’s like, do I want people playing in the national football league? Whether it's women or more Black kids or anything. Like, no, it's terrible. It's terrible! We all know is terrible. We report about how it's terrible all the time. But you say this is not prescriptive, right? It's not solving these questions. But of course they're there. And so like, what does a feminist football culture look like? What does a league look like, right? Like, actually rethinking ideas, foundational ideas about sport culture itself.

Frankie: I think these are questions that women's football is literally asking themselves right now. And it's part of the reason there's not a centralized, like, one league. There’s several semi-pro leagues. And one of the conversations they're talking about and having is do we even want something like what the WNBA has? Do we want the NFL to step in and help us create a women's league when the NFL is so problematic for so many reasons? And it upholds so many harmful, broken systems. And do we want to just replicate that and go, “But for women!” And is that really a win?

And I think a really concrete example of this is looking at the NWSL and the abuse scandals that are rocking that league right now. They have this league for women that is run by men, that was designed by men, and basically replicates a men's league. And we can see the harms that are happening when you take something that was created for men and you just try to like, put it for women, copy and paste. It doesn't work. And I think these are questions that the women's game is really grappling with right now. And I don't know how seriously the conversations about brain injury and things are really happening at that level. We tried to ask…I asked every player I interviewed, and I know Lyndsey asked as well. Just, did you have any injuries or ongoing stuff? Have you noticed any neurological issues? And they all said no.

But you would talk to Mitchi Collette who played for the Troopers and has owned a women's football team or played on one in Toledo for like 50 years straight. And that's a question I asked her – what do you tell your players? How do you address this? And she said, well, that's what our helmets are for. But we also know that research shows that helmets are actually likelier to increase brain injury because people think they're safe and they go in with their heads, and that actually goes against what we know. And so, I don't know. I think these are really ongoing conversations that are being had, and I think that a lot of people come down on a lot of different sides. As somebody who, like, I'm not a football fan. I have a lot of questions about the ethics of even playing full contact football. I don't know, Lyndsey, if you have any thoughts about this?

Lyndsey: Yeah. I mean, that's always concerning. There were plenty of injuries in this league. And we talk about them with different players. You know, it's a violent game. My nephew plays and he has played since he was like five, and I have often asked my brother, like, are you sure you want him playing? Like, it's okay to wait and have him…But, you know, there are definitely risks involved. I think one answer, maybe alternate route, is what the NFL is launching with the flag football at the high school level for women, and then also possibly implementing it at the college level. The ability to play the game for all the fundamental reasons that you love without the hard hitting involved.

And then also just to answer your question about just a general question about the women's sports leagues, I think Athletes Unlimited is a good model right now to see what could be done differently with the athletes in charge themselves, and sort of creating their own rules and how they would like their own different mini leagues to function. I'm really curious to see how this works with the WNBA players who are not going overseas and staying here to participate this winter. I think that that will give us some good insight. And I think that we're going to see more of those kinds of creative ways to come up with different answers to that question.

Amira: For sure. Because there's no shortage of questions. I think about this, to talk about the copy and paste, but in many ways, you know, we're also just reproducing gender dichotomies in a way that is sometimes hard when you're reporting on these leagues, or even telling these histories, because there's a way that even like….You know, when we frame the work, when we're like, okay, we're telling the story of now women playing football, and you could just find the people slipping through the cracks, right? Who are not fitting into these dichotomous spaces. But I think that your work fills so many kind of historical gaps we have, and does that perfect kind of setting up.

But the other thing…You talked about the archivists before, and I think a beautiful moment was other players getting to see what those archivists still had, right? And to do that. And Frankie, I think you had drawn a juxtaposition between like professional women's baseball and the way that Cooperstown has done gestures and things like that. Is there desires that you have from what might happen to preserve and continue to facilitate the recovery of this league and the history of the league and the folks who played in it? Are you hoping for a similar move in Canton? Or, you know, more reunions on the horizon? 

Frankie: If there was like a dedicated exhibit in Canton to this league, like there is to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in Cooperstown, I think that would be incredible. One of the women said that she contacted the hall in the 80s and they were just not interested in talking to her. And I hope this might open up new conversations. There's a documentary about the Houston Herricanes called Brick House that should be coming out. There is a book called We Are the Troopers specifically about the Troopers that will be coming out next summer, written by Stephen Guinan, who is a Troopers historian who's been working on this project for over a decade. And there may be reunions.

What happened often in the course of the reporting is you’d talk to a player and they'd be like, do you know if this person…Did you talk to them? Are they still alive? And if you say yes, they're like, can I have her number? And I know the Bluebonnets were talking about getting together. As a result of talking to me, they got back in touch with each other, and then the pandemic happened. And so I don't know where that's at, but I think that the women are all really excited for that possibility. And one of the things they have said that they really hope is that this book will help put a spotlight on what they accomplished. They're like, I'm really glad that women are playing today, and I want to be recognized because we did it first, [laughs] you know? 

Amira: Right. [laughs] Well, it's a sport that also…I mean, sports, everybody's obsessed with records and precedent and this. So, absolutely. We did at first, it’s a huge thing. [laughs]

Lyndsey: Especially during the time period that they did it in. You mentioned Barbara Patton before as one of the players that you enjoyed learning about; she is one of the biggest advocates about having the NWFL recognized in the hall of fame. And I just always think about how cool it would be for her son and her to experience that, you know, knowing that they both…I mean, that's an accomplishment, that they both played professional football in their lives, and to celebrate that in Canton would be pretty cool. 

Amira: Yeah. It would be really cool.

Frankie: I mean, you don't have the women that the NFL is boasting – there are, what, 12 or 13 women coaching in this season? You don't have those women without the women of the NWFL. We are fairly certain that the first women to ever coach pro football coached in that league. And it was because they played first and they learned the fundamentals and were given the opportunity. And most of the women coaching in the NFL today have played in the semi-pro leagues that exist because the NWFL existed first. 

Amira: Exactly.

Frankie: And so these women are integral to the sport itself. You can't separate them from the ongoing history.

Amira: Absolutely. And you talk about pipelines, right? How people learn how to play, when you get coaching opportunities. Frankie, right – you talked about being a cheerleader, and learning the game that way. And I think that this is absolutely a history that is necessary for understanding even the kind of way the league looks like today and the inroads people are celebrating or making, whether it's a ref or a coach, et cetera. And that's why, Lyndsey, the stuff you point to with the kind of youth programs are really interesting, because they're creating an earlier pipeline than many of the folks that you documented in the book had as a way into the sport. What is your preferred retailer for folks who want to check out your book?

Lyndsey: Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. We've been pushing that one.

Frankie: Or your favorite local indie, whichever. 

Amira: Awesome. Well, bookshop.org, your favorite local bookstore. Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. Please check it out. It is well worth your time. And it's a history that is not even passed. It is living and breathing around us. And we're so glad that y'all have documented and captured it in this wonderful book. Congratulations again, and thank you so much for stopping by Burn It All Down.

Lyndsey: Thank you.

Frankie: Thanks!