We Are the Troopers by Stephen Guinan: Book Review

We Are the Troopers is Stephen Guinan’s debut release about the women of America’s winningest professional football team. With an expected release date of August 30 by Hachette Books, readers will learn about not only the women of the winningest professional football team but also the men behind the team. All this knowledge, with Toledo, Ohio, in the 1970s as the backdrop.

I want to thank Hachette Books, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of We Are the Troopers. All opinions presented here are solely mine.

Synopsis from Goodreads

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.

My Opinions

We Are the Troopers shares a history that not many people know but one that more people should. The late 1960s was the beginning of the women’s movement. By the early 1970s, the United States Congress had created Title IX, giving females equal education opportunities. Those opportunities were both inside and outside of the classroom. Opportunities arose for girls to start playing more organized and competitive sports and to be recognized as athletes. Before Title IX, most females were relegated to playing with their brothers and the boys around them. There weren’t many opportunities to do much else until Sid Friedman came along!

What did Sid Friedman do? As a promoter of various activities, he envisioned a women’s football league similar to the NFL. He gave women a chance to do something they never thought they could do-play football!

While the league may have started as a bit of a gimmick, it took on a life of its own. It gave the women who participated the skills and confidence to make a difference in their lives and those around them. Some went on to be police officers, nurses, soldiers, and even teachers. But they all carried a part of the team with them.

What did reading We Are the Troopers mean to me?

What did reading We Are the Troopers mean to me? It offered me a glimpse into a world I knew nothing about. I don’t mean football, as I have been an avid football fan most of my life. I mean a women’s professional league. In some ways, I found myself jealous of these women who were able to play and make a difference in the community around them. I want to think that I know a few women who would have played if things were only slightly different when the league formed.

We Are the Troopers tells the story of only one team from the league. But the Troopers were the most dominating team. Linda Jefferson, the league’s best player, had numbers that many of her male counterparts in the Football Hall of Fame wish they could have: 150 career touchdowns, 9,250 yards in seven seasons, with 12.1 yards per carry.

Who should read We Are the Troopers? Do you love sports? Football? Reading about unknown aspects of history? Do you appreciate stories like A League of Their Own? Then you should read this book! You won’t be disappointed.

Looking for some more books to read? Check out my other book reviews and my monthly reading wrap-ups.