Whether the Minnesota Lynx or the New York Liberty take home this year’s WNBA championship, this season has already been a big win for the league as a whole, with record attendance and television ratings.
It’s certainly a far cry from the early days of professional women’s basketball. But today’s stars owe a debt to pioneers like the players of the Women’s Professional Basketball League, which debuted in 1978.
The first champions of the short-lived league were the Houston Angels. Danielle Lerner, a sports reporter for the Houston Chronicle, spoke to the Texas Standard about the Angels’ story.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: After reading your article, I found a brochure online that was dated Dec.22, 1978, from the very first women’s pro basketball game. And I want to quote something here. “An open letter to Houston sports fans: Years from now, those of you here tonight will look back on this first women’s pro basketball game and recognize its historical significance, for women’s athletics will have become a part of our daily menu.”
It’s signed Hugh Sweeney, owner of the Houston Angels. I guess it’s safe to say Sweeney would be proven right. But not too many people remember the Houston Angels. How did you become aware of them?
Danielle Lerner: A member of the team and then also the daughter of the former coach of the team actually reached out to me in August because they were having a team reunion.
And, you know, I’m not from Houston and I was not alive when the Angels existed. So I thought maybe my ignorance was unique to me. But as I started asking around, I was kind of perplexed to find out that even people who grew up here in Houston were not aware of this team, and they’ve kind of just slipped away into history.
So I think what Sweeny wrote there was prescient in a lot of ways, but I think it didn’t quite turn out how the WBL had hoped.
Of course, the Angels were ahead of their time in many ways. How did they find their players for that first season?
So there was a draft that occurred for the original teams of the WBL. But the problem was a lot of the players who were drafted didn’t even know that they were drafted. But even once they were drafted, they still had to come to a tryout camp. It wasn’t like you automatically got a roster spot.
So every team, including Houston, held a free agent tryout camp, and then you would get invited back if you impressed at those two-day tryouts, to like a three-week training camp. And then they selected the 12-person roster.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
Of course, I understand some people selected gave it a hard pass because they heard about the salaries.
It was the salaries, but it was also at the time the Olympics still required athletes to be amateurs. And so the 1980 Olympics were coming up.
Of course, the U.S. ended up boycotting those Olympics in Moscow and not going. But a lot of players passed on the WBL because they wanted to play in those 1980 Olympics and they didn’t want to jeopardize their amateur status.
Still, apparently the Houston team did a nice job of selecting its players. They went on to become champions in that first season. Tell us about some of the players.
They did, yeah. Most of the players had played in college. Of course, women’s college basketball at the time was not even nearly as big as it was now. This is before the NCAA took over women’s college basketball.
There were players who had played at Baylor, at UNLV, at Tennessee who were on the Angels roster. So these are big-time programs that were very, very good. Wayland Baptist, actually, back in the day, a Texas school, had a ton of really successful basketball teams, and they produced a lot of players for the WBL in its first few seasons.
But these women were not planning on playing basketball after college. That wasn’t a pathway that existed at the time. So they were doing other things. They were teachers and salespeople, and they decided to take a shot at this league.
And we should point out, we don’t want to leave the Big D out: Dallas actually had the Dallas Diamonds in the second season. They wouldn’t be quite as successful as the Angels were in their two-season run. And I guess the league didn’t really last more than three seasons. What ultimately happened?
They ran out of money, quite simply. You know, this is at a time where it was a new venture. All the teams were purchased for $50,000, which was more at that time than it is today.
But these weren’t millionaires and billionaires who were owning these franchises. The individual owners didn’t have a ton of money. It was poorly managed in the league office, and they just ran out of funds.
You mentioned that reunion that sort of rang your bell and turned you on to this story in the first place. And I gather you spoke with a number of former players and coaches. How do they feel watching the current success that the WNBA is having?
Honestly, they love it. There really is no jealousy or anything like that. They’re very happy to say that they were pioneers and trailblazers. This was, at the time, what they hoped would happen. They just hoped it would have happened 30 or 40 years ago and they wouldn’t have had to wait so long.
But they love seeing it now. They definitely feel like they were a part of it, but they also feel like they are forgotten a little bit. So, you know, they’re happy to be recognized. They’re happy anytime someone knows what the WBL is. But, you know, they’ve had to educate a lot of people.