It was just another night in the football career of Virginia Leon. Ice packs were wrapped around an elbow and a knee; a heating pad lay on a hip. Then her husband looked her over and decided he could not take it anymore. He considered his wife, who had broken fingers and torn muscles in service of her sport, who had been through three knee operations in the past six years, and he said, “How long are you going to do this?”
This is not an easy question for Leon to answer. Weeks later, she is still wrestling with it. She is 41 years old and, to make a living, she works as a substance-abuse counselor at a Staten Island hospital. But when she discovered a women’s football team in New York in 2000, it was as if she had a spiritual rebirth. Even now, Leon, who is nicknamed Cha Chi, cannot discuss it without waving a hand in front of her face to fight off the tears.
“I just wish I was 26 when I first learned about this,” she said. “I’d do it for the rest of my life if I could.”
Leon, a running back and a cornerback, played for the New York Sharks of the Independent Women’s Football League in the team’s formative years. She tried to quit once, after the 2005 season, but she could not stay away.
So this spring, she once again chose to pay money out of her own pocket — the cost per player this year was about $650 — to join the Sharks.
It meant driving to practice and home games at a series of locations, including high school fields in the Bronx and Staten Island. It meant adjusting to another new coaching staff, this one led by Debra Vance, the longtime coach of the junior varsity football team at Lehman High School in the Bronx. It meant playing in front of sparse crowds again— a couple of hundred for home games — and earning virtually no recognition for the game that was racking her body and straining her personal relationships.
And it meant Leon would have to come to terms with the fact that if women’s football ever entered the mainstream of American culture, that time would come long after her retirement from the game.
The women’s game continues to face an uncertain future, even though there are three leagues and more than 80 teams throughout the country. Attempts to join forces have been unsuccessful. Until recently, there were two teams in New York, both angling for the same sliver of spectators and sponsorship: the Sharks and the Dazzles of the Women’s Professional Football League.
The Dazzles are embroiled in a legal dispute with their league and may not play this season, which begins Saturday.
The executive director of the W.P.F.L., Dawn Berndt, would not comment on the dispute with the Dazzles. A lawyer for the league, Don Adair, said he remained hopeful that the parties would reach a settlement. The owner of the Dazzles, Neil Scheier, an internist in Rochester, did not return phone calls seeking comment.
But this is just another in a long line of difficulties for the W.P.F.L., which emerged from a 1999 barnstorming tour involving two teams, the Minnesota Vixens and the Lake Michigan Minx.
“If we continue to butt heads and don’t work toward a merger, it’s not going to be around for the next generation,” Berndt said. “The women’s football community is torn into three separate sectors.”
In addition to the 31-team I.W.F.L., which recently rejected a merger with the 17-team W.P.F.L., there is the 35-team National Women’s Football Association. It is headed by the former music promoter Catherine Masters, who broke from the W.P.F.L. in its early days, and it has distanced itself from its competitors.
Masters charges a $35,000 franchise fee to teams, the highest among the leagues. She also maintains autonomy over the league’s operations, to the point that she does not mind being labeled a dictator.
“I actually make all the decisions,” she said. “I don’t feel it’s in the league’s best interest to let other owners make policy. I have no problems making decisions for the betterment of everybody.”
Masters said she had received several calls from owners of teams in the other leagues, asking to join hers. She boasts of successes in cities like Pittsburgh, where the Passion has drawn single-game crowds of up to 4,000 fans, and of promotional activities like the Gender Bowl, a men-versus-women reality show that was put together last year by a Los Angeles production company.
She also points to this year’s inaugural Whammys, billed in a press release as “the first black-tie-optional awards show for women’s football."
