Hail Mary writers discuss NWFL history - NFL News (2023)

Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo, writers on the NWFL story Hail Mary, took the time to talk to FanSided about their new book.

Ave Maria, by Britni of the Cretaceous and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo, wasone of my favorite sports books of 2021. Together, they told the story of the Women's National Soccer League, a league that had largely been lost to history by the time the book was written. It's an engaging read filled with fascinating characters, untold stories, and insights into the history and current state of women's soccer. I recently spoke with the authors about the book and we had an informative chat about the writing process and final design.

Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo discuss Ave Maria: The Rise and Fall of a National Women's Soccer League

Micah Wimmer: How did you first find out about the NWFL?

Britons with Cretaz:In fact, I stumbled upon the NWFL when Lyndsey and I were researching an ultimately unsold version of this book that dealt more broadly with women's soccer and the history of the game. I ran into the Toledo Troopers as the winningest team in pro football history and Linda Jefferson [star of The Troopers] and delved into what happens when a winning team loses their first game and finds out they lost to the Oklahoma City Dolls in 1976. As we investigated, we realized that there is a whole league out there and very little information about it is publicly available.

Micah: How did you come to work together and what was the process of writing this book together?

Britney:Lyndsey and I met in a Facebook group for gender-disenfranchised sportswriters and became friends, and Lyndsey knows more about soccer than I do. She was working on a column on the current state of women's soccer for Bitch Media when she was a sports columnist there. He was talking to Lyndsey as he was writing this and he was very frustrated that he couldn't find a book that told the story of the women's game in the way that he hoped to find it. Lyndsey joked that she should write a book and I told her only if she wrote it with me, and somehow we managed to commit to the idea and ended up writing a book together.

In terms of how the work was divided, we split the teams down the middle and went from there. Each of us studied different equipment and then combined our work. Lynsdey comes from fictional literature, and a lot of really beautiful scenes and character development come from Lyndsey. And I do a lot of cultural criticism, so a lot of analysis is what I include.

Micah: What was the process of finding this book like?

Lyndsey:As Britni mentioned, we split the teams down the middle and each of us did our own research on those specific teams. We started looking at old newspaper articles, searching the internet, but when we managed to read some articles, we collected the names of some players and tried to track them down. Part of it was online spying, part of it was Facebook tracking, just trying to connect in any way possible. Once we got one or two players open to talking about it, they would tell other players they knew about us and things went according to plan. Originally, it involved a lot of looking at old newspaper articles and a lot of players providing us with research material. Really rich material like old programs, lots of different photographs and documents from that period that they collected and kept. Much of the information came from the players themselves. We could probably do a lot more if we could go in person, that was early on in the pandemic and all, but that's how it was.

Micah: Since this is the first book to bring all these things together and there are so many different sources, what was the process of building the narrative and trying to make sense of it all?

Britney:We were working on a big Google doc and we wrote what we had and the team wrote it and that was our first draft. We organized it chronologically, and once we did, this was our first draft. This is the history of women's soccer, this is Sid Fiedman, and these are the teams, the decline, and the current state of the game, and that narrative was largely carried over into the final version of the book.

But when we worked with our publisher, we ended up opening the book to 1976, which is kind of in the middle of the league with the Oklahoma City Dolls and the first Troopers loss that I mentioned earlier. This was the time when the balance of power in the league is changing, so this is the time to attract readers. But really what we did and the reason we started there is that we wanted to open up to women as soccer players and we didn't want the reader to doubt for a moment that women could play soccer. So when you meet them in-game, you set them up as athletes from day one and their abilities are never in question.

Micah: Yeah, start with the women instead of focusing on the male organizer.

Britney:Yes, and keep them on the court to see them succeed and play well.

Micah: Speaking of this shift in narrative, could you talk about this transition from an owner-run league to a player-run league and what that process entailed, what it meant, and what it could mean today?

Britney:I think what we saw with Sid Friedman, he had a vision of women's soccer teams and then a women's soccer league, but he was more concerned with getting press at all costs and making money by any means, so he was less worried about the women they saw. like a serious product. And he didn't hesitate to send a test photographer, Hustler, to send a camera down the middle to take a picture if he thought he'd get them some good press. Some women were not comfortable with that. They went out to play soccer because they wanted to. And it can be seen throughout the history of football. Often the men put together teams like gimmicks and the women come out and say something like, "You said soccer, right? I'm here to have fun." And they take themselves very seriously, and that's what happened. And it started with some teams.

The soldiers were first separated when asked to throw matches; they did so under the guidance of their trainer Bill Stout, who supported them. You see a team like the Columbus Pacesetters also decide they want to get away from Sid Friedman to be more serious, and those teams were able to come together and create the WNFL themselves. They had men who believed in them and helped them. Bob Matthews of the LA Dandelions was a big part of that, and when that happened and women took power back, there were more teams like the Pacesetters that formed a corporation and bought themselves out. They felt that they could lead the team better than the men. And many of them believe that football has given them self-confidence.

I think we see something similar today where the women who play soccer are the ones who believe in the leagues themselves, in the sport and the game, and these are the people who have dedicated themselves to owning teams and running these leagues with very little funding. . and financing. They're the ones that continue to do this today, and they're doing it in a pretty decentralized way, so I think it's a very similar thread.

Lyndsey:Yes, they finance the teams themselves, paying $1,000 per player or more in fees. They finance all the equipment, the expenses, that's all. And they get nothing for the game. They take equally hard hits and nurse all those injuries just to play this game.

Micah: You're talking about women's sports, especially under the Friedman regime, acting as a prop or gimmick. What steps do you think could make this kind of thinking and outreach go away today?

Lyndsey:I don't think that lateral mentality still exists in the WNBA. You've got Joe Schmo's guys who will always have a problem with that. Especially in the last five years there has been a real move towards legal coverage, publicity and promotion of the WNBA, which I think has taken it to another level. I'm not sure the sideshow mentality still exists. It's more about investing in women's sports until there's support and long-term goals and really wanting to help grow these leagues. I think we're past that point in the Sid Freidman era. I'm not sure Britney doesn't agree with that.

Britney:All I will say is that the change has happened because more and more women are in the process of being counseled, being in offices, providing protection. So I think the way the change is happening is actually changing the balance of power of who controls the leagues, and I think we've started to see that. And I think similarly we saw a flood in the NWFL where there were no female coaches when they started because women had no skills because they were never taught. By the end of the league, most of the managers were former players who had switched to managerial positions. So now you see that with women's college basketball in the WNBA, to some extent, the NWSL felt that they were way behind. But even in the NFL, you see women who have played the game move into coaching roles, into front office roles and scouting roles, and I think that's when the sport starts to be taken more seriously: when the people who play it they take seriously they are paid for it

Micah: Going back to the book itself, what was the most difficult part of writing or researching it?

Lyndsey:I would say I follow the players. There was a point where I started to get a little nervous, am I going to get enough people who want to participate to dig into their stories and get more in-depth information about the league? But when the first dominoes fell, everything fell apart and everything worked out. But that was probably the hardest part for me, tracking the players.

Britney:I'd say yes because the stats weren't what you'd expect, filling in some of the narrative gaps, comparing player memories that are also glitched against incomplete documents and missing records, and trying to get as complete a picture as possible. and being as precise as possible, knowing that you were going to be wrong no matter what you came up with, was hard.

Lyndsey:The other difficult aspect was that there was a lot of stuff that we could find in the news articles in the early part of the league because it was something new and people were curious and sportswriters actually wrote about it. However, in the later years of the league, it was hard to find anything, so it took a lot of extra research and looking for things and trying to get more information from some people. Since the publication of the book, we have received more information that we hope to add to the paperback version. it was also a bit difficult

Micah: What surprised you the most during your research?

Lyndsey:I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but the way they've been treated in the media. From editorial cartoons to satirical articles to columns, some of them were downright brutal. And it shouldn't surprise me, but reading it with my own eyes drove me crazy every time.

Britney:I think what surprised me the most was that we knew there was a lot, but the more we got into it, the more no one was writing about it yet. What the hell? There were so many and there were so many women playing and the teams existed for 14 years. These women tried to do something with it.

And the NFL playoffs, I thought for a moment, the Bluebonnets played at Texas Stadium, are you serious? They did pep rallies with the Cowboys. The things he would say were, “Oh my gosh,” because in some ways we can call it a fledgling league, but in other ways it was really a very legal professional league.

Micah: These connections also surprised me because they made me wonder, how could I not have heard of this? How did it slip through the cracks?

Britney:That's right, they're not even on the Texas Stadium Wikipedia page. Maybe they are now. The NWFL finally has a Wikipedia page. After the publication of our book, some have succeeded. But it didn't even have a Wikipedia page. You’d go to Texas Stadium and the Bluebonnets, who are a professional team, don’t even figure as players there.

Micah: Well, the frustrating thing about the story is that it almost perpetuates itself. You're telling the same stories that already exist because the research already exists, so it's more available and persists while other stories are buried.

Another thing that intrigued me while reading this book was the association of these athletes with feminism and the women's liberation movement of the time: the way they make a political and cultural statement when they play, whereas, in general, quite a few of them don't. I don't really identify with the feminist movement. Could you talk about the relationship between the fighters and these movements?

Britney:I think it's really easy to look back and flatten the story. And we can say, "Oh, women's liberation happened around that time, and these women were breaking barriers, so those two things must be related." And I think they are related because the newspapers have tried to link them. They were constantly asked if they were women's liberators. I think they're related to some degree because when you experience it, whether you're aware of it or not, if social attitudes change, maybe it creates an environment or an opportunity to start that league. So these things, I think they're related in this way, but for a lot of people who play games, when you think about life on the move, not everyone who lives on the move is going to be an activist.

And when you think about the women's liberation movement, specifically second wave feminism, and what that movement was about, which is housewives and the coming and going of these women in the workforce, you think of The Feminine Mystique and Gloria Steinem, and that doesn't really apply to many of these women. They were mostly working class, many of them were already working because they had to. They were queer, lesbian, there was no oppressive man in their house. They already got rid of that, most of them, a lot of them didn't have children, a lot of them were women of color, so you look and this movement doesn't necessarily speak to the day-to-day reality of their lives. So I think just assuming that the two things are definitely going to be related flattens things out, but I also think that, whether they knew it or not, just being who they were and breaking the rules that society set for women simply because if they did, they were, as we call them in the book, "involuntary activists," whether they wanted to be named or not. Changes are happening everywhere, not just on the picket lines

Micah: In the world of sports publishing, I get books all the time that are about 90 percent male, so I was wondering if there are any books in the world of sports written by women or non-binary authors who think they don't get enough. love.

Britney:i would like to recommendLove sports when they don't love youby Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson. The co-author is a woman.Inappropriate behavior in the game.Evan Moore and Jashvina Shah just dated, which is pretty cool, too. Another one that I really liked that came out recently wasreturn pointby Chloe Angyal, which is about ballet.

Micah: Finally, is there a question you haven't asked that you wish someone would ask you?

Lyndsey:I don't think they ask me enough about history, but I only say that because I wrote historical parts! I think it could add more to the conversation if there were more questions about the history of women's football and that period, its evolution, etc.

Britney:Lyndsey led the history section and everything before the NWFL and the current state of women's soccer.

Lyndsey:I did the bookends, and then we had our own teams to discuss, with Britni obviously doing the analysis. We complement each other very well. It worked perfectly.

Micah: Have you all edited your work?

Lyndsey:Here and there. We left comments or added things, asked questions. It was very common.

Britney:We wrote our own roles, and of course we would read other people's work and comment if we had any. Or sometimes I had a section and I just tucked it into that article you wrote. But because we had an editor who edited the entire manuscript, there was a set of eyes that saw everything and was able to put our work together.

Micah: I'm asking because maybe I'm a careless reader, but I couldn't say, "Oh, this section is the work of one author, and this section is the work of another."

Britney:It's great. In fact, he had friends who took it as a personal challenge to see if they could figure out which sections I wrote and which I didn't.

Lyndsey:Only my closest friends would say, "I want to ask who wrote it." And when my wife would read it, each chapter would say "Who wrote it?" before starting.

Micah: I was nervous that it would be taken as an insult, like "Oh, my style didn't show!"

Lyndsey:I think that's a compliment! I think that shows that we worked very well together and brought together what came out of the two parts into a cohesive book that is a good read, so I take that as a compliment.

[This interview has been edited and abridged for clarity]