“He wanted the carnival,” Stamps explains. At one point in his women’s football venture, Friedman imagined tear-away jerseys and miniskirts, and he once sent a Hustler photographer to the team’s practice. Before the 1973 season started, he’d lost his most prominent team, the Toledo Troopers, because the coaches and players were sick of his antics and looking to take themselves more seriously than they felt Friedman would allow. They decided to call the team the Columbus Pacesetters, a name that, in retrospect, Stamps admits was pretty long to print on uniforms and pretty hard to fit into a cheer. Stamps put out an announcement to the press and held a meeting for interested athletes. Friedman liked the idea and said he would provide uniforms. After Stamps watched the Daredevils play, she approached Friedman about her desire to start a team in Columbus.

Sensing an opportunity, he pivoted and started an unofficial league with other women’s franchises to compete against each other.īy 1973, Friedman had four teams, three of them in Ohio. He quickly realized, though, that women who had been denied the opportunity to play the sport wanted to play real football.

In 1967, he started a women’s team as a gimmick, a gridiron-centric version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Growing up, the closest she could get to football was to play flute in the marching band, which at least put her on the field at halftime and in the bleachers during the games.īut that day, Stamps watched women play for the Cleveland Daredevils, owned by Sid Friedman, a Cleveland-based promoter who showcased beauty pageants and sideshow-like events. It was a blue-collar steel town on Lake Erie.

A woman with feathered hair and round glasses nearly as large as her face, Stamps grew up in Lorain, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. In 1973, she was a 23-year-old community organizer at a settlement house in Columbus, Ohio. Stamps had been “football-crazy” her entire life.

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