We Are the Troopers

The Women of the Winningest Team in Pro Football History

By: Stephen Guinan

Narrated by: Amy Landon, Stephen Guinan

Discover the unlikely story of the Toledo Troopers, the winningest team in the National Women's Football League, who won seven league championships in the 1970s—and gain full access to the players and key figures in the organization.

Amid a national backdrop of the call to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the National Women’s Football League was founded as something of a gimmick. However, the league’s star team, the Toledo Troopers, emerged to challenge traditional gender roles and amass a win-loss record never before or since achieved in American football. The players were housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants. Black, white, Latina. Mothers and daughters and aunts and sisters. But most of all, they were athletes who had been denied the opportunity to play a game they were born to play.

Before the protests and the lobbyists, before the debates and the amendments, before the marches and the mandates, there was only an obscure advertisement in a local Midwestern paper and those who answered it, women such as Lee Hollar, the only woman working the line at the Libbey glass factory; Gloria Jimenez, who grew up playing sports with her six brothers; and Linda Jefferson, one the greatest, most accomplished athletes in sports history. Stephen Guinan grew up in Toledo pulling for his hometown football team, and—in the innocence of youth—did not realize at the time what a barrier-breaking lost piece of history he was witnessing. We Are the Troopers shines light on forgotten champions who came together for the love of the game.

Critic reviews

“We Are The Troopers is the story of a group of game-changing women from all walks of life who came together to leverage the power of sports to influence the gender discussion and inspire their generation and future generations.”—Billie Jean King

“Stephen Guinan has written an important book detailing a crucial time and place in women’s sports history. I grew up in Toledo following the Troopers. This book is a wonderful walk down memory lane for me, and a compelling story about trailblazing women who broke barriers and inspired a generation of girls and women to follow their dreams.”—Christine Brennan, author of Best Seat in the House and Inside Edge

"An incredible story."—Buzzfeed

“We Are the Troopers is a well-written and engaging ode to these women who made history on the gridiron and in the hearts of every little girl who wondered to what heights they could soar.”—G-pop.net

Beautiful account of (almost) lost history

Guinan takes a story that half of us don’t know and the other half continues to overlook, and he gives us a personal, empathetic, and amazingly beautiful tale—a memorable telling of a lost piece of sports history that every fan should know. This story and these athletes deserved for this memory to be preserved and Guinan not only does that, but he depicts these ignored athletes as icons. Bravo!