I'm not a big sports ball person. My fandom came with marriage and three decades of play-by-play tutorials while watching games.

But this book was fascinating to read because I had no idea women were playing football. I knew about women in baseball because, well, Madonna and the movie, but football was not on the radar. I hope this gets made into a movie with all the heart and more honesty than that baseball movie because this book addresses the intersectionality of sexuality and gender in what remains a male sport.

A stunning trip through the history of an often overlooked part of sporting history, de la Cretaz and D'Arcangelo do an amazing job of narrating the trials and tribulations of these amazing women and their league, and tying it together neatly into something that illuminates the advancements--and lack of them--that have happened in the years since.

The below review appeared in the Christian Science Monitor (https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2022/0106/Two-football-books-celebrate-unity-on-and-off-the-field):

Sports can empower female athletes and subvert popular expectations around what women can do. For example, the notion that women aren’t tough enough to play football. In “Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League,” sportswriters Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D’Arcangelo delve into the history of the largely forgotten women’s football league.

The story of women in football started long before the NWFL’s official founding in September 1974. It dates back to the invention of the sport in the late 19th century, when women took up football with gusto equal to that of men. But by the time the league came about, sexist ideas about women were deeply entrenched in American society. Women playing football were ridiculed and told it was too rough a sport for their delicate bodies, and besides, their game would never be as entertaining to watch as the men’s.

But the women of the league proved the naysayers wrong. They were ferocious athletes, as competitive and hard-hitting as their male counterparts. They played the game because they loved it, because it helped them celebrate the power of their bodies and accept themselves and their teammates for who they were. The players in the NWFL didn’t aim to become poster children for the women’s liberation movement or to make a political statement, but that didn’t change the fact that they were carving out a space for women in a male-dominated field.

Sadly, the women’s efforts were undermined by the league’s lack of organization, popular support, and crucially, money. Convincing sponsors that women’s sports were worth backing was a nearly unsurmountable obstacle. Not many of the approximately 19 teams lasted into the 1980s.

Though the league’s lifespan was short, the impressive women of the NWFL took on a so-called man’s sport and excelled, and in “Hail Mary,” readers come to know the players and the teams they called family. The authors strike a good balance between on-the-field and off-the-field action, making the reading as riveting as it is informative. “Hail Mary” is a necessary and comprehensive history of a league far ahead of its time.

The National Women's Football League was born into the early years of Title IX, when women playing sports at all was considered a novelty, and often a burden. The players had all grown up in an era where women were afforded very few job opportunities and very little independence of any kind. The desire to go out and play the sport they loved, just for the love of the game, ran deep. They suffered through endless barrages of media attempts to discredit and make a farce of their league, and interview upon interview where reporters felt compelled to ask the ultimate question that showed just how incomprehensible much of the country still found women's sports -- Why would you even want to do this? If not to prove you're "as good as" men or to make money, why even bother? While early reports decried the gameplay as "bloody bad" and a measly showing of 4,000 fans dwindled steadily to under 1,500, these women persisted to seize every opportunity they had to play the game they loved.

Eventually comprising 19 teams (though no more than 11 at a time) all over the country, the NWFL saw its most active years between 1975 and 1978. With as much diversity in skill as in race and sexual orientation, the NWFL was as much a social club as a professional sports team. As remains true for many women's professional football clubs today, no experience with the game at all was required to tryout, and even when teams rostered 30 players, they rarely felt confident in fielding more than half for an actual game. Regardless, these women remained truly committed to learning their sport and putting forth their best effort in every game. In many cities today, you are still more likely to find fledgling professional women's tackle football teams than recreational opportunities for women. Just one of many things that makes it hard to give these leagues the credibility they deserve (and one aspect completely neglected in this book).

Overall, I found this book extremely informative and a quick and enjoyable read. That said, by the middle, some of the teams, players, and other people associated with the teams were hard to keep straight and could have used some more biographical definition to give them their own spotlight. I found the focus on the Toledo Troopers to be far and away the easiest to follow, and I wonder if this book would have done better to center on them with the league as a broader context in the background. Although I did enjoy reading about all the teams and players, I was surprised to see in the appendix just how many teams were around for much longer that were not profiled in the book at all (particularly the Columbus Pacesetters). I was also disappointed that for all of the discussion of feminism and the women's liberation movement in the background, there were only brief statements regarding the different ways in which queer players experienced that context and no mention at all of the experience of players of color in that regard. Especially with the strong insistence of many players to refuse to be associated with women's lib, that lack of context felt to me to be a disservice. I think it would be hard to talk about this league without discussing the context of Title IX and women's lib, but if you're going to go there, you need to do it in a way that's respectful to the experiences of all players, especially if you are going to repeatedly tout the diversity of the league.

Again, I really did like this book and highly recommend it to sports fans of all kinds. Much thanks to Bold Type and Netgalley for the review copy.

Gail Dearie. Rose Low. Linda Jefferson. The Toledo Troopers. These all should be household names, alongside names such as Johnny Unitas, Roger Staubach, Mean Joe Greene and the 1970s-era Pittsburgh Steelers. So why aren't the members of the National Womens' Football League (NWFL) remembered by more people today?
Maybe it's because there's never been a movie about it to do what "A League of Their Own" did for the AAGPBL. Mainstream media refused to cover the teams or the players, except for those few times when articles were published that did little more than poke fun at women playing a "man's game". Did homophobia contribute to its downfall? A backwards, uninformed population often considered any women participating in a man's game to be a lesbian, and it seemed that US society wasn't ready to accept that in the 70s and early 80s.
Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo do an excellent job of introducing us to the movers and shakers, including players, coaches, team owners and others who stood on a limb and tried to make women's football a success. This book is a great history lesson for all of us as we see female athletes struggling for equality in an arena geared toward men's sports. Will there ever be true gender parity in the sports world? One would like to think so, and if it does come about, the women who blazed the football trail need to be recognized.

Women love sports just as much as men, but we don’t see enough women in organized sports leagues. Thanks to a little movie called A League of Their Own, we learned that there was a Women’s Baseball League. The WNBA is the well-loved Women’s National Basketball Association, though they don’t receive enough recognition. We have the Women’s Soccer League whose USA team constantly dominates in the Olympics. However, has anyone ever heard of the National Women’s Football League?

In Hail Mary The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, Britni de la Cretaz and Lindsey D’Arcangelo take a look at an idea, started in 1967 as a gimmick by a businessman that took off into something he never could have imagined. It turned out that Sid Friedman never realized that women might truly want to play the real game. Title IX had just been passed but women really didn’t have much choice as to the types of sports they could play in…until that businessman took a chance on his gimmick that turned into something real.

In this book, the authors seek to tell their readers about the beginnings of the league, its attraction to women and its eventual downfall. It wouldn’t be easy as there isn’t much written about the National Women’s Football League. Thus, the authors conducted interviews with the players and coaches, providing readers insight into what it was like to be part of a hard-hitting game thought to be beyond the capabilities of that “frail” species known as woman. They offered the readers quotes from news articles that both praised the league and mocked it. And in the end, they offered us a well-rounded look into what it was like to play on the team and why it would eventually fold thanks to lack of financial support.

What I found most interesting was the dedication of the women that played. These women would play with numerous injuries, often traveling long distances by bus to arrive at their games and get paid next to, if not nothing, for their troubles. All for the love of the game. I also loved learning that these women came from all walks of life. Too often, women who play tough sports are thought to be lesbians looking for a rough and tumble good time, but the women of the National Women’s Football League were housewives, working women, college kids, married, single, gay, straight, you name it – all they wanted was to play in a sport that had been denied them so long.

I wonder what could have been had the National Women’s Football League received the funding it needed. If it had the backing of the National Football League, would it have gone as far as the WNBA thanks to backing from the NBA? The WNBA, though successful, still doesn’t get as much advertising play or promotion as the NBA, but they have survived and very few teams have folded due to financial pressures. I was happy to learn that some of the former players are trying to get a new league going again. Maybe this book will help gain them some momentum.

Hail Mary is an awesome analysis of the rise and fall of the NWFL, but it also serves as a dedicated place for the former players and coaches to tell their stories, so they won’t be forgotten. It was a fast, easy and informative read that I would recommend to all young women interested in sports. It just goes to show that a woman can do anything if she sets her mind to it!

Hail Mary welcomes readers to 1970s-80s women's football in the NWFL. We find ourselves in an era fresh with Title IX when many women hadn't experienced organized, athletic opportunities in school, and if they did, it certainly wasn't football, that hypermasculine ideal of tackling, getting down in the dirt, and sometimes bleeding for the game. The book tells the story of fiercely passionate athletes who loved their game despite the many pitfalls and structural disadvantages facing their teams and league at large.

The reporting here features commentary on society: gender roles, race, queerness, and class. The athletes were largely working-class women from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and with a large contingent of queer women (on the Dallas team, some teammates decided to try out while at a lesbian bar together). The book is also a celebration of these women as professional football players. Their colorful personalities come through in their personal accounts as well as their pride in their on-field accomplishments.

The authors strike a good balance between descriptive content and analysis. They cover how contemporary journalists treated the women and how the team owners tried to entice the public. The players' stories have often been told through the male lens, focused on entertainment value or as a heart-warming story rather than a sporting event worth discussing on its athletic merits. There was a lot of focus on the women's looks, whether it was to hypersexualize and demean, make fatphobic remarks, or to lob broad homophobic comments at women who didn't fit the feminine ideal (arguably all the players, since they dared to play professional football). Other hurdles were the gendered disparities in equipment available, venues for practice & play, and the complete lack of salary (the standard rate was only $25 a game to begin with) for some players as well as owners who wouldn't always pay medical insurance. The authors also delve into the many reasons the league fell apart, including finances and the nature of sports fandom-- the NWFL didn't get enough time to establish fan support and to see financial dividends.

I recommend this for football fans specifically: positions and plays are described that added to my enjoyment but could be frustrating for someone who isn't already familiar with the game or who wouldn't appreciate that degree of detail. For me, it brought some exciting games to life and highlighted the physicality and achievements of these teams.

Calling all football and sports fans, this non fiction is for you! Hail Mary was well researched with so many stories and information about the women who played football in the 1970s/80s.

I thought it was so interesting the different standards the author brought up about men's vs. women's sports that still continue to exist today. The media portrayal of the women's football teams described in the book was both disheartening and eye opening to read. But despite the lack of funding and many times media/local support, the women who played on these teams really were out there for the love of the sport. This book made me want to watch and support more local women's sport teams.

I enjoyed Hail Mary, however this book felt long to me. Although it was about different women and different teams at times it was hard to differentiate and they all started to run together in my mind. I wish the book would have focused on a couple of the teams and gone really in depth with them.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. I loved learning about a piece of feminist/lgbt/sports history I did not know about. My one criticism is that de la Cretaz comes from the online confession/article world, and her writing reflects that.

When Sid Friedman, a talent agent from Cleveland, thought about creating a women's football team to do barnstorming tours and make a few bucks in the process, little did he realize that he found women who not only wanted to play the game, but play hard and compete – to do the same things that make the men's version of the sport so popular. This led to the creation of the National Women's Football League (NWFL) that had a brief life in the 1970s but impacted many women. This book by Britni de la Cretaz tells about not only the league, but the stories of the players and their teams.
Some of the teams featured in the book are the Detroit Demons, the Houston Herricanes and the Los Angeles Dandilions. But far and away the most successful NWFL team, both before and during the time of the league, was the Toledo Troopers. Their stories make for some of the best reading in the book, along with those about the best player on the team Linda Jefferson. Jefferson's story is first told early in the book and that sets the tone for what every woman wanted – to be recognized as legitimate players of a sport they loved.
As for organizing these teams into the NWFK, that wasn't done by Friedman (who attempted to form a league with teams from the Ohio and Pennsylvania areas) but instead by several businessmen left mainly by Bob Mathews. Mathews had more foresight than Friedman in that he knew that he needed more than hype to sell the game – he needed organization, a schedule, fans, marketing, media coverage, financial backing and much more. Sadly, he and the other owners never really obtained that to what was needed and the league was out of business soon after the 1979 season.
Reading about the teams, the structure of the league and what eventually led to its demise was very good and it is clear that de la Cretaz did excellent research on this aspect which makes up the bulk of the book. The only downfall to this reviewer is that when she adds in some of her opinions, it appears that she only uses facts that would support her viewpoint without the entire picture. The example I use is near the end when she opines that the NWFL and other women's leagues would succeed if the financial backers would not bail on them so soon after realizing that they will not be profitable immediately. That is not incorrect, but the example that she uses that this isn't the same case for men's team with the Pittsburgh Steelers is not completely accurate. Yes, the Steelers struggled for decades both on the field and in the front office, but it should be noted that Art Rooney did not build up his fortune elsewhere – he allegedly used money won betting on horses to buy the Steelers and they became his business. Including that information, depending on how she would use it, could make her case stronger.
There are other aspects that may make some readers uncomfortable, such as the section on the stereotypes placed on female athletes (and her section on the background of some players in lesbian bars may make some readers buy into the stereotype even further) but these are necessary for a complete picture and story of these women who risked a lot to play a sport they loved for very little money.
Any reader wishing to learn more about women's football must pick up a copy of this book. Football fans, including this reviewer, who have never heard of the NWFL will enjoy learning about this short-lived but fondly remembered league.
I wish to thank Perseus Books for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Fun and insightful look at a story most sports fans have no idea about. The history and knowledge of this book will make you view football in a new light thanks to a group who refused to say no.. Any sports fan who loves to learn should take a look at this book and give it a read.