WPFL PARTICIPANTS ARE TACKLING A DREAM

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Terry Sullivan, clad in a black leather jacket to keep the biting 40-mph winds from his body, is strapping on his wireless headset with a slightly worried look on his face. It is an hour before the opening kickoff of the football game he is overseeing, and there is nobody -- not one soul -- in the stands.

He needn't have worried; the fieldhouse nearby the Mitchell Athletic Complex in Uniondale, N.Y. is abuzz with activity. Tickets are being briskly sold, and the football fans are keeping warm, not going out into the stands until absolutely necessary, as the wind chill is somewhere near the average December temperature of Green Bay.

Inside the dressing rooms were two contrasting teams. One had football experience, having played four games in the past two months. The other, however, was about to participate in its first-ever tackle football game.

The football teams jog out onto the field in cleats, big pads, and helmets. Only after you spend a few minutes up close do you notice that every single player on the field is a woman.

Terry Sullivan, president of the Women's Professional Football League (WPFL) recalls a conversation he had with his daughter Kiersten several years ago.

"My daughter asked me the question, when I started the minor-league organization (the Mid-American Football League), 'When are you going to have women playing football?' " Sullivan says. "That's how this whole thing started."

The culture of football amongst American males is such that it is a distinct -- and closed -- society. Men in groups discuss football at work to exclude female colleagues. Males play the game in such vast numbers at federally-funded institutions that not even a non-discriminatory clause written into civil rights law is able to be strictly enforced where the sport is concerned.

For the world of women in sports, football is at once an 800-pound gorilla and a last bastion. This is why the WPFL has attracted women all the way from New York to Alaska who are willing to give up their jobs and buy one-way tickets to Minneapolis for a chance to play football.

There, the league created two barnstorming teams in 1999, the Lake Michigan Minx and the Minnesota Vixens. The two teams played games in Chicago, Green Bay, and the Twin Cities in a dry run at future league play. Like the Blaze and the Storm of Women's Professional Fastpitch, the teams trained together, ate together, and traveled together, all the while preaching the gospel of football to anyone willing to buy a ticket.

"One of the things that I have noticed is that females are more interested as they leave the event," Sullivan says. "They stay a lot longer and watch. For most men's sports, if their boyfriends or husbands take them, by the end of the third quarter it's like, 'Let's go home.' They don't want to watch another men's tackle football game again. But they want to watch the women again."

At least three major dailies, two Internet journalists, a camera crew taping a documentary on the league, and a radio reporter from Sweden are high above the sideline to see the action. There is a little skepticism on press row, but when reminded that women have been deprived of the chance to play football for some 125 years, the lightbulb goes on in the heads of many a seasoned writer.

Still, some news reports have painted an unfavorable portrait of the league. Sports Illustrated, which published a women's edition once only every two or three months at the time the WPFL was born, panned the game of women's football because of the lack of execution in some parts of the game.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which regularly prints six or seven game-day stories on the Vikings, sent an investigative reporter to a WPFL game instead of a sportswriter. Details of the resulting story, reprinted in the magazine RealSports, were picked up in the Associated Press.

The AP dispatch played up the Star-Tribune story's negative details, including the criminal record of one of the WPFL's co-founders. The AP's lead paragraph cast serious doubt on the professionalism of the league, while missing the point of participation in a game from which women have been systematically excluded for more than a century.

In 1999, the Women's Professional Football League was half-right in its naming. While the game is football, played by women, the "professional" and "league" aspects had yet to come into fruition. The WPFL's 1999 season was only five games long, with games amongst three teams: the Lake Michigan Minx, the Minnesota Vixens, and the Long Island Sharks.

The play-for-pay aspect was also dubious: while there was a promise of a certain percentage of the gate, they might not have gotten much money at all on a freezing day that keeps down the walkup count.

But the players hardly cared whether or not they get paid: they just wanted to play.

"It's all about the opportunity of playing football," Sullivan says. "It's all about getting them started so that people can come out and watch them play NFL-style tackle football, and teach them to play, and get them to a level where people will want to come back."

The league, despite some skepticism, was given a measure of legitimacy by the world's leader in the game of football: the National Football League. The NFL has allowed the WPFL to have display space at the NFL Experience, the theme park/exposition the week before the Super Bowl which serves as a networking opportunity for football people and sponsors.

"We haven't even started getting into a relationship with the NFL yet," Sullivan says. "We want to be able to have the women come down there and bring some of the people that are involved with our organization to see what it is like on a big-time level."

The Long Island Sharks, founded in the 1980s by several women in the greater Queens and Nassau areas, had been playing championship level football -- flag football -- for years. Wearing some 30 pounds of equipment changed things a little bit.

"To be honest," says Sharks co-founder Jacqueline Colon, "we just added padding and three more players."

Colon, standing a shade under five feet tall, is a fine flag footballer in a game where speed -- not strength -- is the supreme quality. In this game, she did not wind up playing that many downs.

Instead, it is time for her teammates to step up and become heroines.

The players on the teams are from kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Some are proven athletes from other fields: Wendy Brown is an Olympic hopeful in the triple jump, and plays wide receiver for the Minnesota Vixens.

Many of the players on the team are not of Brown's caliber, however. There is the occasional rugby club player or softball player. Some are from major colleges like Tennessee or Southern Cal, but most attended small colleges like Gustavus, Becker, Nassau Community College, or Mankato State.

There is one college, however, that stands out amongst the crowd. Daphne Barnes, the left tackle and punter for the Vixens, was an ice hockey goalie at Princeton University.

"I only attended one year and never finished," says Barnes, a Minnesota native. "I couldn't handle the academic competition, came back home, and I work for a communications company back home. It pays more than being a student."

Long Island found itself down 6-0 at the half. That's before the team settled on Val Halesworth as its quarterback. Halesworth, a field hockey coach for a Nassau County high school, made an impact early on defense. After stopping a slant play in the first half, she shouts to the opposing red jerseys, "Don't even come in this direction!"

The Sharks' defense is stout on this frigid afternoon, which sees players huddling with each other for warmth. One large momentum swing came late in the game, when Minnesota went for a third-and-short with a running play.

The play was stopped dead. The Sharks' Melissa Marmorale closed the hole with a thud that could be heard all the way in the top row of the stands.

"I have the grip of death," she deadpanned to a group of journalists after the game.

There are some common-sense practicalities the league has hit upon which make the game a bit more practical for women to play. Though the league markets itself as offering "American NFL-style smash-mouth football," cut-blocking is illegal anywhere on the field, which makes it easier on the average woman's knees.

The ball is smaller in circumference, compensating for the women's smaller hands. The heavy equipment -- pads, helmets -- were either borrowed or refurbished; the jerseys and pants were new.

The league embarked on a slow development plan in 1999, looking to add teams in subsequent seasons. The WPFL was mindful of where it expanded, however. Sullivan and the rest of the WPFL brass were aware that travel can be one of the greatest expenses that these shoe-string budget teams can incur. There was, therefore, the "12-hour rule," which said that divisional rivals cannot be more than 12 hours away from one another in terms of ground travel.

There are groups in several American metropolitan areas which were interested in fielding teams, and many seemed to realize that the profit margins will not be nearly as much as there is in other women's sporting endeavors.

Sullivan, however, did not appear to be in it for the money alone. Instead, he saw an interest amongst women in playing flag football and is willing to take the risk to open an opportunity for women to play.

"The number of participants is going up, especially in Florida," Sullivan says. "We had a tryout down there, and afterwards we heard that there was a 20 percent increase in participation in (local leagues). We don't know if it was us, unless someone is doing something special down there. Every place in the country, people have been interested, and people are calling us and talking about it."

Sullivan and the WPFL staff did their homework; an excellent research digest appearing in the league media guide traces the history of women's football stateside and in other countries.

The league's mantra, and its challenge, was to maintain the interest past the novelty stage.

"We need to keep building the league, and keeping the prices low, so that people can be owners and get started at a point where it's not too expensive for them to build a team: that's how we keep the interest," Sullivan says.

What also helps keep the interest is a winner in New York. Halesworth helped direct a fourth-quarter comeback as the Sharks beat the Vixens 12-6.

In amongst the cold and wind, Halesworth was surrounded by the assembled media.

"Whew! It's just crazy out there," were her first words. "You have to keep focused out there, because you can get so emotionally involved."

Halesworth, nursing a throbbing finger and a gashed leg, was able to get her players to recapture the magic that the Sharks did in winning numerous titles in flag football ... only with different rules this time.

Given the fact that women have rarely played football in the 130 years since men from Princeton and Rutgers played a game which looked suspiciously like soccer, and since Harvard and McGill University played a modified game of rugby, one must not expect the women's skills to approach Joe Montana and Jerry Rice.

The football, to be sure, is not artful. High-percentage passes -- "long handoffs" in modern parlance -- are the norm in WPFL play, with the slant being the "big play" in most situations. Sweeps and belly plays are common; complicated reads and options are not yet in the curriculum.

The kicking game almost never comes into play, given the fact that most of the women have never kicked a football while wearing cumbersome knee and thigh pads. Punts are an adventure: one Minnesota punt attempt was blocked by the posterior of one of the Vixen linemen -- er, linewomen.

Despite these kinks, the competitiveness shown by these pioneer athletes is front and center. The emotions and sweat coursing through the bodies of the players are real. So are the injuries, which are minor compared to the average NFL triage lists.

The league faces an uncertain future, given the history of the last American women's football league, the National Women's Football League. Financial hardships in the late 70s and early 80s spelled the demise of this league and the offshoot Western States Women's Professional Football League.

But the WPFL's common-sense marketing and financial strategies, including broadcasting games over the Internet, set this effort apart from all others before. With a little luck, the sky could be the limit.

Since the first New York Sharks win, the WPFL played for a couple of full seasons with various changes of ownership and little sponsorship, leading to the demise of the league by late 2001.

However, a number of women's football leagues with an alphabet soup of identites -- PWFL, AWFL, IWFL, WAFL, NWFL -- have cropped up from Boston to Hawaii, encompassing some 50 teams as of early 2002.