The Toledo Troopers—a women’s professional football team who dominated the sport throughout their nine-year existence, from 1971 to 1979—are considered the “Winningest Pro Football Team Ever” by the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
While the 1970’s saw the explosion of the NFL, the story of the winningest team in football history has gone untold. Until now.
The Toledo Troopers of the National Women’s Football League dominated the sport like none other. As the world debated Title IX and its implementation, a group of women and their coaches from an obscure corner of the heartland showed how the game of football was played. We Are the Troopers (Hachette) by Toledo native Stephen Guinan is the inspiring, hard-hitting story of the decade-long run of the team that showed a woman’s place was on the gridiron.
The following is an excerpt from We Are the Troopers by Stephen Guinan.
The simple notice was a rectangular blank stare: Helvetica type, 1/32 of a page, in black and white.
Players and Coaches Wanted for Professional Women’s Football Team
In June 1971, the advertisement appeared on page 34 of the Toledo Blade, in the sports section, camouflaged by ads for Firestone tires and Imperial Lanes all-you-can-bowl and the postings for the horses at Raceway Park.
Lee Hollar had just clocked out of her shift at the Libbey glass plant, a four-acre churning furnace north of downtown. After work she liked to read the Blade on her porch in the thick evening air.
When she saw the ad, she had no words. She read it over again and again, in disbelief. The ad struck Hollar not as a sign of the times but another sign, a calling whose specificity hit her like music. Her entire life she had known she was different. She never paraded around in dresses or dated boys, like her three sisters had. And while she had joined many of her classmates on the volleyball court or the softball diamond, she had always wanted something more. She had always dreamed of being a football player.
Gloria Jimenez never thought she belonged in a beauty parlor, but for the daughter of migrant farm workers, the term “career path” didn’t apply. At least cutting hair at the Northshore Salon beat picking tomatoes, which she still did on weekends to help the family make ends meet. Plus she could gab the day away with her pal Dorothy Parma, who one day showed her an advertisement for a women’s football team. Having grown up with nine brothers and sisters, it was easy to imagine hitting, tackling, bashing. Now that’s where I belong, Jimenez thought.
One of 11 children, Pam Schwartz had grown up on Toledo’s east side, where the air smelled of burning oil from the refinery and tomatoes from the Hunt’s packing plant. With four brothers and six sisters, Schwartz learned to eat fast, like a pup at feeding time. Get what you can, and get it quick. When she saw the ad in the Blade, she could hear the world shout at her like a playground dare: I’ll bet you can’t do that.
Davelyn Burrows was 34 and worked at Frank’s Nursery transplanting trees and stacking bags of mulch and feed. Her 6 foot, 2 inch frame carried 220 pounds. Finally, she thought, after reading the advertisement, a shot in a sport she was built to play.
The Skiles sisters, Diane and Debbie, grew up in Genoa, in a foundationless house their father had built with materials he’d found. Part Shawnee, he’d raised his twin daughters to ignore what people said you were supposed to do and follow the spirit that flows in your veins. They never owned a TV, never got the message that women were not supposed to play football. When the sisters heard the call for female football players, they didn’t think twice. They had spent their autumns in the prairie behind their makeshift ranch doing what every girl presumably did: playing football.
Over the next nine years, more than 80 women answered the call in Toledo. They would practice on an abandoned lot west of downtown and play games in stadiums across the country. In dank locker rooms and torn-up football fields, clad in armor of plastic and pads and athletic tape, they would forge a sisterhood that would last the rest of their lives and find meaning in transforming into football players at a time when the culture around them was also changing.
In the tumultuous decade that followed, the Toledo Troopers would not only prove that women could compete in a traditionally male-dominated sport, but also they would define what it means to be a champion.
And so before the decade of dominance, before protests and the lobbyists, before the debates and the amendments, before the marches and the mandates, there was only an obscure advertisement in an obscure corner of the heartland and the women who answered it.
It was the birth certificate of the winningest team in football history.
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