The Madison Blaze, a professional team in the Independent Women’s Football League is 2-0 heading into its home opener on Saturday, April 30.
Big deal, you say? Well, it kinda is.
The Blaze, led by several returning players and more than a dozen rookies, outscored its first two opponents — the Detroit Pride and the Nebraska Stampede — 63-20.
Madison faces the 2-0 Minnesota Vixen at Middleton High School’s Breitenbach Stadium at 5 p.m. Both teams will be coming off a bye week.
The Blaze have won three straight IWFL Midwest Division championships and made back-to-back appearances in the Founder’s Bowl, a game featuring some of the league’s top teams. Head coach Rick Heuer has called this year’s Blaze squad the most competitive he’s coached, and Blaze players have the IWFL World Championship on their mind.
Powerhouse female football players are nothing new in Madison. Women’s football in the city dates back to 2006, when the Wisconsin Wolves won two consecutive conference titles in the now-defunct Women’s Professional Football League. The Wolves moved to Wausau in 2010, and the IWFL’s Madison Cougars (groan) emerged in 2011. New ownership and a name change came in 2013, and the Blaze work hard to promote women’s football as a serious endeavor.
This season, the IWFL boasts nearly as many active teams as the NFL (26 vs. 32), and its three-day Championship Weekend (in Charlotte, N.C., in July) is the longest-running women’s tackle football event in North America. Additionally, the IWFL, founded in 2000, is the oldest of the three active full-contact women’s football leagues in the United States.
The league might generate a little more attention this fall upon the September publication of The Legend of Jesse Smoke (Bloomsbury, $26), a novel about a player from the IWFL’s fictitious Washington Divas plucked from obscurity to play quarterback for the Washington Redskins.
Author Robert Bausch writes from the perspective of Skip Granger, the Redskins’ assistant coach — who discovered Jesse Smoke on a beach in Belize, throwing a regulation-size football 60 yards across the water with an arm stronger than John Elway and Tom Brady. Bausch tells this tale as if Jesse Smoke were once the most famous woman in the world.
His vision of the future reveals the present-day ugliness pervading American culture in matters of gender and sexual orientation, and his engaging book (I received an advance reading copy) deserves to begin a new national conversation about the role of women in male-dominated sports.
Until then, go check out the Blaze.
