NWFL shirts!! 'HAIL MARY' partners with HOMAGE for the league's 50th anniversary
proceeds benefit the grrridiron girls organization
Today I have some exciting news that I have been sitting on for way! too! long! But first, I am so grateful to every person who thinks my work is worth paying for. If you’d like to become a paying subscriber of this newsletter, you can do so below:
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When Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League was first published, people scoured the internet and sites like eBay for NWFL merch. But unless you happened to play in the league or be around at the time, there was none to be found. Today, on International Women’s Day and 50 years after the NWFL’s inaugural season, that’s changing. HOMAGE, the apparel company that has produced several successful lines of vintage league tees, just launched their NWFL Collection.
“We didn’t break the glass ceiling 50 years ago, we just cracked it,” legendary Toledo Troopers halfback Linda Jefferson said. “All I did was get the young girls of today closer to that ceiling. I tell girls, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Do what you want. If you want to be a football player, be a football player.’”
In her first season with the NWFL, Jefferson ran more than 1,300 yards and scored 32 touchdowns. She emerged as one of the league’s top, most well-respected players and had five undefeated seasons to her name. She retired with more touchdowns than Walter Payton, Jim Brown, and OJ Simpson, and the Troopers are considered to be the winningest team in pro football history—men’s or women’s.1
The collection features 13 different teams, using original logos from an original 1977 league yearbook (provided to me by Linda Stamps, a founding member of the Columbus Pacesetters). Those teams include the Pacesetters, the Dallas Fort Worth Shamrocks, the Detroit Demons, the Houston Herricanes, the Lawton Tornadoes, the Los Angeles Dandelions, the Middletown Mavericks, the Oklahoma City Dolls, the Philadelphia Queen Bees, the San Antonio Flames, the San Diego Lobos, the Toledo Troopers, and the Tulsa Babes.
The team at HOMAGE had former Pacesetters players and current players from the WFA’s Columbus Chaos model the shirts and the photographs are stunning.
The Columbus Pacesetters were the only team in the NWFL to run for the league’s entirety, from 1974-1988. In 1977, the players formed a corporation to purchase the team from their male ownership group. It’s a story that we only got the details about after the book was completed and we had hoped to include in a paperback version if we had gotten one. If you’d like to know more about the Pacesetters, their story ran as a Sports Illustrated Daily Cover.
“I think for me [football is] empowering,” Stamps told
during a Hail Mary bookclub last year. “If you [were] a woman at that time, you had softball, you had some basketball, tennis, golf, that kind of thing, but to me, football is the ultimate team sport… I began to understand the power that my body was capable of.”Lyndsey and I always hoped that the women of the NWFL would get the recognition they truly deserve and our ultimate goal is to see them recognized by the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The sport of football as we know it today wouldn’t exist without the NWFL. Not only was it the first—and so far only—pro women’s football league in U.S. history, but it also boasted the first Black and the first female coaches in pro football. I hope this collocation can be yet another step towards ensuring its legacy is remembered and celebrated.
A portion of the proceeds from the collection will benefit Grrridiron Girls, an organization founded by Dr. Jen Welter, the first female coach in NFL’s history2. Grrridiron Girls aims to shift the culture of what girls can do and runs a series of football camps for girls.
“Football is often hailed as the final frontier for women in sports,” says Welter. “Each woman who steps onto the field sees it as a challenge — a chance not just to change the game, but to shift culture itself… We are not just participants, we are pioneers shaping the future.”
“It's crucial for girls to realize that they're not entering this arena alone,” says Welter. “They're being uplifted by the enduring legacy of trailblazers like Linda Jefferson and the remarkable women of the NWFL. This is a game where every play is a step on the path laid by the formidable women who preceded them.”
As always, if you want to know more about the NWFL, you should grab a copy of Hail Mary. It remains work that I am so incredibly proud of. You can also listen to me on the Unladylike podcast earlier this week talking about the book and the league.
“I’ve got my memories of playing in the NWFL and nobody can take those away from me,” Jefferson said. “I’m glad HOMAGE is putting the story of women’s football back in the spotlight with this collection so people realize that not only did women play football 50 years ago, but we were the best of the best.”
And if you aren’t sure which team to rep, I would just like to point out this very transfemme coded shirt. Shoutout to the Oklahoma City Dolls.
You can shop the entire collection here.
For more on the Troopers, I highly recommend Steve Guinan’s book, We Are The Troopers: The Women of the Winningest Team in Pro Football History.
Welter and I both appear in the incredible documentary about the Houston NWFL team, The Herricanes, which debuted at SXSW last year and was made by Olivia Kuan, the daughter of one of the players.
This is so cool! Off to get my Detroit Demons shirt 😈🏈
This is so fucking cool! (And thank you for highlighting the very transfemme coded shirt, because that is 100% the one I want to purchase.)