[This is the fifth of five articles I wrote in 2017 on the greatest players in women’s football history. For the first installment in the series, read here.]

I am the Vice President of Communications for the D.C. Divas, and one of my responsibilities in that role is to oversee the D.C. Divas Hall of Fame. We are getting ready to nominate our third class for the Divas Hall of Fame in 2017, and that – coupled with the series I recently finished on some of the greatest players in women’s football history – has the topic of a Women’s Football Hall of Fame weighing on my mind today.

I get asked about a Women’s Football Hall of Fame a lot, and many entities have already tried to launch one, largely without success. Could a true Women’s Football Hall of Fame ever actually catch on? And what would it take for it to be a success? Let’s talk about the potential for a Women’s Football Hall of Fame and see if we can answer those questions.

Nominating Players for a Women’s Football Hall of Fame

The phrase “Hall of Fame” is a powerful one in the sports world. For many athletes, it’s seen as the pinnacle of success. However, in any true sports “Hall of Fame” – whether that’s the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and any number of others – there is a clear process for nominating and electing members to the Hall of Fame. It stands to reason that a Women’s Football Hall of Fame should adhere to that same standard…I would never be satisfied with anything less.

There are two parts to that statement, so let’s start with the nominating process. For any real Hall of Fame, there must be clear guidelines about who is eligible to be nominated. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity about who is eligible to be recognized and who is not. These eligibility requirements should be publicly spelled out ahead of time so there is no confusion about who can or can’t be nominated for the Hall.

There are two main eligibility requirements that I think are necessary for any true Hall of Fame. The first is that a Hall of Fame should only be open to retired players. That’s what a Hall of Fame is…it’s the pinnacle of recognition of a retired player’s career. That’s why Cooperstown and Canton aren’t inducting active players…they’re honoring the legends who have retired from the game.

It’s far too tempting with a Women’s Football Hall of Fame to use it as a promotional tool of the active players in the sport rather than what a true Hall of Fame is designed for, the honoring of retired players. It’s clear why recognizing an active player is so tempting: current teams might get behind it, because they could tell the public, “Come see our Hall of Fame players in action!”, while at the same time, the Hall of Fame would get good publicity out of such appeals by teams.

But in my opinion, that would cheapen the concept of a Hall of Fame. The entire Hall would be dismissed as a marketing tactic and would do the sport no favors. Any real Hall of Fame is geared toward former players, and that’s how a Women’s Football Hall of Fame would need to be designed.

Of course, how do you know if a player is retired? Players often step away for a year or two and then return…how do you account for that? In MLB and the NFL, you have to have been retired for five whole years before you’re eligible. For a Women’s Football Hall of Fame, I think a similar five-year time frame would be pretty reasonable.

I think if you were designing a Hall of Fame around a specific women’s football team, however, you’d want to put the number a bit lower…most women’s football teams don’t even last five years on average. With the Divas, we set the number at two years retired: to be eligible for the 2017 class, you have to have last played in 2014. In other words, you have to have been retired for two years already and be preparing to sit out a third when you first hit the Hall of Fame ballot. That seems like a reasonable amount of time for a team Hall of Fame.

The second eligibility requirement for any true Hall of Fame is a longevity clause: that a player should have played a certain number of seasons in order to be eligible for consideration in the Hall of Fame. The Pro Football Hall of Fame, for instance, doesn’t have a formal longevity clause, but it is exceedingly rare for someone who played fewer than seven seasons to get serious consideration; they just handle the longevity issue in their voting.

But back in women’s football, numbers can be overwhelming without taking longevity into account. There have been over 10,000 players who have played at least one season of women’s football and who have been retired the requisite length of time. That’s one big ballot and just too much to process.

However, the majority of women’s football players only last a year or two. Setting a modest longevity clause cuts the number of eligible candidates considerably, which is quite useful. Odds are that a player who only suited up a year or two wasn’t around long enough to make a Hall of Fame type of impact anyway, so a longevity clause can certainly be a useful eligibility requirement.

With the Divas, we set the longevity clause at four years: you had to have played at least four years to be eligible. That cuts the number of eligible candidates by 75 percent and makes the ballot much more reasonable. For a Women’s Football Hall of Fame, you might want to set the number as high as six or seven, because – again – we’re talking about the players that have had the most impact on the sport as a whole. That takes time.

Clear guidelines about who is eligible for the Hall of Fame make the nominating process much easier…in fact, once these eligibility processes are laid out, you can allow every player who meets the eligibility requirements to be nominated automatically. With that said, the process for electing a player to the Hall of Fame is equally if not more important.

Electing Players to a Women’s Football Hall of Fame

Every major Hall of Fame has a formal process for electing players to the Hall. It’s one of the most important aspects of the process.

For instance, a team owner in women’s football could wake up one morning and say, “I’m starting a Hall of Fame for my team and inducting Jane Smith as my first honoree.” That’s certainly been done before, and while it’s a lovely honor for Jane, that’s not an actual Hall of Fame. That’s an owner’s recognition award, and there’s nothing wrong with owner recognition awards if everyone understands that’s what they are. But let’s be clear: that’s not a Hall of Fame, even if that’s what you choose to call it.

A real sports Hall of Fame has a formal process through which players are elected. How do you go from being a nominee to an inductee? That’s the big question. Leaving it to the whims of one person – a team owner – or a nameless group of front office personnel goes against everything a Hall of Fame is supposed to stand for. No legitimate Hall of Fame operates that way. Therefore, the process for electing a player to a Women’s Football Hall of Fame would be an important distinction to work out.

Here’s where women’s football faces an obstacle. The big men’s Halls of Fame, like those in Canton and Cooperstown, rely on voting by sportswriters who have covered the game for decades and are experts in its history. Seems reasonable enough.

The problem women’s football has is that there isn’t an equivalent, large body of outsiders without specific team connections who have been observing the game and can (at least theoretically) impartially vote on who is deserving and who is not. Who then should vote on who makes it into a Women’s Football Hall of Fame?

There are a couple schools of thought on this. One is that you could open it up to “fans”…in other words, make it a public vote. The problem is that there are very few fans of all of women’s football…most “fans” are really just fans of one player or team who will stuff the ballot box for their hometown squad.

When it comes to women’s football, I believe the best group of people to vote on a Women’s Football Hall of Fame would be the players themselves. No one knows the sport better, and no one would have a better idea of who among their peers is deserving of recognition.

I think any legitimate Women’s Football Hall of Fame would need to have its inductees voted on by women’s football players themselves. That’s the easiest way for such a Hall to gain legitimacy, in my opinion.

With that said, players stuff the ballot box in favor of their teammates, too! Therefore, there would need to be safeguards attached to such a process to allow for a wide representation of teams in the Hall. You wouldn’t want to see, for example, half of the Hall of Fame class being players from the Pittsburgh Passion. (I mean, the Pittsburgh folks would, but the rest of country wouldn’t.) You can’t allow teams with the largest fanbases to monopolize membership in the Hall.

Personally, I’d recommend a team cap, where only two players of a given franchise could make it in any given class. What would make this tough is a player like Jessica Springer, who played multiple seasons for different teams…you’d need to figure out how to identify which team’s cap she’d count against. But it could be done.

Finally, after nominating and electing players into a Hall of Fame, perhaps the biggest question is…what then? Ideally, you would have an induction ceremony or a banquet honoring these women, but if you’re talking about several women in several different cities, how do you coordinate it? Do you hold one ceremony in a central location and if so, how do you ensure players will be there? Or do you hold multiple ceremonies, one in each of the cities the inductees are located in? How would you coordinate that, and most importantly, who pays for it?

There’s also the question of how you record their achievements for posterity. A website, perhaps? In an ideal world, there would be a physical space where visitors could stumble upon, learn about, and marvel at these ladies’ achievements. But cost is a factor, who runs it is a factor, and as always, the devil’s in the details.

Women’s Football Teams and Halls of Fame

I’m proud of the D.C. Divas Hall of Fame, which I helped the team launch in 2015. It is, without question, the best such Hall going in women’s football and one we created with the hope that other top-tier teams would eventually emulate it.

To nominate players to the Divas Hall of Fame, we set a longevity clause of four seasons played and a retirement clause of two years (in other words, to be eligible for the 2017 class you have to have last played in 2014 or prior). Three players are chosen every year for the Hall of Fame, which seemed like a reasonable number to keep the group small and prestigious while having a significant number of honorees.

Electing players to the Divas Hall of Fame is a two-pronged process through the fans and the alumni. Divas alumni – current and former players, coaches, and staff members – elect two of the three players every year. Divas alumni also vote every year for one non-playing contributor who deserves to be honored for their contributions to the organization.

The fans are also given the opportunity to elect one player by voting on Facebook or the Divas’ website. But the fans are limited in their choices to only 20 finalists, which keeps their ballot size reasonable and prevents them from “stuffing the ballot box” for a marginal candidate.

The D.C. Divas Hall of Fame Class of 2015 was Gayle Dilla, Vickie Lucas, Tessa Nelson, and Coach Ezra Cooper. The 2016 Class consisted of Claudia Hogan, Rachelle Pecovsky, Ivy Tillman, and trainer Nate Randolph. Every one of these folks has made a significant contribution to the Divas and, by extension, to women’s football.

Other women’s football teams have started their own franchise “Halls of Fame” over the years. The Chicago Force started a Hall of Fame in 2012, inducting Linda Bache and Pam Schaffrath on May 5, 2012, and Melissa Smith on June 7, 2014. The New York Sharks started their own team Hall of Fame in 2015. Their first year, the Sharks recognized Val Halesworth, Missy Marmarale, Anna “Tonka” Tate, Beth Nugent, and Rose Addison as team Hall of Famers. Last year, they added Jennifer Blum, Virginia Leon, Lori DeVivio, Wanda Williams, and Donna Spilotras to their list of honorees.

All of these players were excellent, and I respect the Force and Sharks as organizations. But I’m not aware of any formal procedures these two organizations had for nominating and electing these players to their respective “Halls of Fame.” These seem like more a way for these teams to honor great players for their contributions than a true Hall of Fame process. Which again, is perfectly fine and a worthy effort in its own right…as long as we all acknowledge that’s what it is.

The one team – now defunct – that did appear to have a legitimate Hall of Fame was the old Dallas Diamonds. They called it a Ring of Honor (in a nod to the Dallas Cowboys), but it was more formal in its conception and design than most actual Halls of Fame in women’s football. The Diamonds used their Ring of Honor to recognize Shelley Burnson and Ivette Young in 2010, Aurelia Green in 2011, and Karen Seimears in 2012.

The requirements for the Diamonds Ring of Honor had a longevity clause of three seasons and a retirement clause of two seasons. For their election process, they used a weighted average of three separate votes: a fan vote, which counted 25%; a poll of the team’s front office, which counted 25%; and a vote by existing Ring of Honor inductees, which counted 50%. Inductees were given a plaque and a polo shirt in recognition of their election.

That was a legitimate team Hall of Fame and, frankly, ahead of its time. Hopefully other teams start following suit with true team Halls of Fame, as I think they go a long way toward promoting the sport.

Women’s Football Leagues and Halls of Fame – The IWFL

But now let’s get back to the idea of a Women’s Football Hall of Fame, which could represent the entire sport as a whole. This certainly isn’t the first time the concept has been floated. The IWFL has tried the idea at least twice, and the WSFL did as well. Let’s take a look.

The IWFL was the first league to take a stab at a Women’s Football Hall of Fame. They tried to start one in 2007, housing an exhibit at the Museum of World Treasures in Wichita, Kansas. It stayed there for a couple years until “it was returned to Texas for future exhibit” in 2009. Translated: the same remains went into Kezia Disney’s storage closet, never to be seen again.

(Here’s a worthwhile article about the IWFL’s original attempt to launch a Hall of Fame in 2007. Read it, people. Just read it. Read how insincerely the IWFL’s leadership treated the process and how ten years ago, the IWFL was asked to take down their webpage promoting it…yes, the same webpage that is still up ten years later and linked above. Again, this ridiculousness was ten years ago…why are these folks still in a position of “leadership” in this sport?)

Anyway, to my knowledge, the IWFL’s first attempt at a Hall of Fame wasn’t really a Hall which inducted players but was more of a museum which housed historical artifacts for public display. The IWFL – under the auspices of their charitable wing, the Women’s Football Foundation – would try to launch an actual Hall of Fame in 2014.

The WFF Hall of Fame announced their first honorees in 2014: Franco Harris and the Toledo Troopers. You probably heard about it…it got a substantial amount of media play, including a mention in Reuters. The fact that it involved the Troopers, which have been working for years to turn a screenplay based on their team into a Hollywood movie called Perfect Season, gave their Hall of Fame election a newsworthy angle.

The Troopers were inducted in a ceremony in Rock Hill in 2014, and it’s truly awesome to see all those great Troopers recognized in one place. It really is. But…

Again, is this a Hall of Fame? Is this how a Hall of Fame is run? How were the Troopers nominated for the Hall of Fame? You can nominate whole teams now? I get nominating Linda Jefferson or Bill Stout or any number of players, but what’s the nomination process for this Hall of Fame? How does an entire team from the 1970s get nominated? Or elected? Who voted on this? How were they chosen?

So many questions, so few answers. And just for the record, I admire the heck out of the Troopers and what they were able to accomplish, and they deserve to have their contributions recognized. But I have to ask again…how exactly does this Hall of Fame work?

No one knows, and that’s pretty much the point. The WFF Hall of Fame disappeared after their only induction ceremony in 2014, never to be heard from again. It went into a deep freeze, nothing in 2015, nothing in 2016, gone without a trace. Milk the Troopers for all they’re worth by creating a sham Hall of Fame, get a little national pub for your league, and then drop it the second it no longer benefits you. If you ask the IWFL, though, they’ll be happy to tell you they “started and ran the Women’s Football Hall of Fame” and point you to their website.

Except yeah, that’s not really a Hall of Fame, either. The Troopers deserve better than to get all hyped up over their induction into a “Hall of Fame” only to find out that it was all smoke and mirrors, it wasn’t really a Hall of Fame at all, it actually no longer exists…and maybe it never even did.

Women’s Football Leagues and Halls of Fame – The WSFL

Don’t sleep on the WSFL! Back in the day, Randall Fields and the WSFL loudly promoted the idea of a Women’s Football Hall of Fame, and it even had a sweet Wix website (and you know I love those!). The WFHoF promoted the first ever induction ceremony to be held at the UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls on July 29, 2011.

There was talk of nominations but didn’t appear to be any real process for nominating players. The WSFL’s Hall alleged to have inducted “the players and staff of the original National Women’s Football League and the Women’s Professional Football League” in 2010. But again, how an entire era’s worth of players came to be nominated and elected to this Hall of Fame is a mystery, which means it was a unilateral decision by someone at some point…and, as we know, that’s not what a real Hall of Fame is all about.

Former WSFL staff writer Michael Burmeister (known as Burmy, of course) recently publicized his own Hall of Fame, which he naturally called “Burmy’s Women’s Football Hall of Fame.” I don’t know if it’s a reboot of the WSFL’s old attempt or not, but let’s just say that Burmy’s idea for a “Memorial Wing” looks similar to the one set up by his old employer.

In fairness to Burmy, I give him a lot of credit for establishing meaningful criteria for induction and a process for election. I don’t think a fan poll on Facebook will ever cast a wide enough net of former players to be truly representative of the sport’s alumni as a group, and the process for a finalist to win induction is stupidly easy (75% of respondents have to vote “yes”, but really, what women’s football fan would ever vote “no” on an admirable player in a straight up-and-down vote?). But his heart’s in the right place, as usual.

For completeness’ sake, Burmy’s 2016 Hall of Famers were Sami Grisafe, Marirose Roach, and Adrienne Penn, who were all outstanding people within the sport.

The WSFL didn’t just try to start a Hall of Fame, mind you. In 2012-2013, they also famously tried to start a Women’s Football Player of the Year Award. The WSFL named its award the Hnida-Hirakawa Award, after Katie Knida and Jennifer Hirakawa, and they nicknamed it the “Double H”. They even went so far as to suggest, “The ‘Double H’ is considered the Heisman Trophy for women’s football.”

Except, of course, that it wasn’t. No one considered it that. There were many, many problems with the “Double H” in terms of why it didn’t take off:

1) The name was terrible. The Hnida Award or the Hirakawa Award alone would have been hard to pronounce, much less Hnida-Hirakawa. The league had to nickname the award the “Double H” from the very beginning because the name was so cumbersome. That’s a bad start.

2) The award was designed to go to the “top female football player”, which meant that most of the candidates were women’s football players. No disrespect, but naming the award after Hnida was just confusing, since she’d never actually played women’s football. And while Hirakawa was an excellent player, it was never clearly articulated why the award was named after these two above and beyond any of the dozens of other deserving women out there.

3) Hnida and Hirakawa were honored as the first winners of the award in 2012. That made no sense at all. They were already honored as the namesakes of the award…why feel the need to honor them again with the award? After all, who won the first Heisman Trophy? I can tell you, it wasn’t John Heisman. (For the record, it was an Iowan, but that’s just my Hawkeye State pride shining through. Go Dubuque!)

4) Who nominated Hnida and Hirakawa for the award in 2012? What was the process? As we discussed with the Hall of Fame, these questions hit at the credibility of the entire award.

In 2013, they opened up the voting to outsiders for the first time. However, the process involved choosing one finalist from the WFA, IWFL, WSFL, and men’s football, respectively, and then voting on the field of four finalists. Naturally, this put the WFA and WSFL players of the year on equal footing, which is absurd given how much larger the WFA was than the WSFL. And since the WSFL was the league sponsoring the award, it just created immense distrust of the process.

For players to be eligible as finalists, they had to be nominated…and because so many within the sport viewed the trophy with distrust, they didn’t bother to legitimize it by nominating their candidates. As such, the 2013 H-H finalist from the WFA was Myrt Davis of the St. Louis Slam. No offense to Davis, but Whitney Zelee rushed for like half a million yards that year, so when she wasn’t the WFA nominee, the whole thing looked crooked.

The 2013 H-H Award finalists were Myrt Davis of the WFA’s St. Louis Slam, Laura Cantu of the IWFL’s Houston Energy, Courtney Cole of the WSFL’s West Virginia Wildfire, and Jules Harshbarger of the Roscoe Rush men’s team. Davis won the award, but the H-H trophy was cast into the dust bin of history after one year (or two, depending on how you look at it).

I bring all of this up here because there are a few lessons to be learned in the Hnida-Hirakawa Award saga. First and foremost, any endeavor of this sort – be it a Player of the Year award or a Hall of Fame – needs to be supported by the community of women’s football as a whole. If you don’t get their overwhelming support (and the H-H Award didn’t), you’re finished before you even start.

But there’s another important message here, which is that people get suspicious when leagues take the lead on creating honors designed to recognize the entire sport. Which brings me to…

An Independent Women’s Football Hall of Fame

My last comment on the Women’s Football Hall of Fame subject for the time being. One of the biggest issues with a possible Women’s Football Hall of Fame is simple: who runs it?

If the IWFL and WSFL’s efforts to start a Hall of Fame were failures (and they were), I’d say that was largely because no one league should be running a Women’s Football Hall of Fame. I mean, really, would you trust a Hall of Fame run by the heads of the IWFL to evaluate and honor WFA players fairly? Of course they wouldn’t…that’s just common sense. And that throws into question the legitimacy of the whole thing.

You’d think the best entity to run it would be the WFA…after all, the WFA is the premier league in the sport. But while they are a far better candidate than the other leagues (and their Hall of Fame would likely turn out better, if for no other reason than it could hardly turn out worse), I’m not so sure they can run it effectively, either.

First, if you can’t trust the IWFL or WSFL to evaluate the achievements of players in other leagues fairly, why wouldn’t the same logic hold for the WFA? Moreover, while I don’t see the WFA going anywhere for a while, what if – say, ten years from now – the WFA is replaced by some other league? Should the Women’s Football Hall of Fame go the way of the dodo just because the WFA was surpassed?

No, I think the only way a Women’s Football Hall of Fame would ever work is if the whole thing were run by a body independent of any leagues. It would need to have the wide support of current and former players, who would be the ones choosing the honorees. It would need to have a team cap to prevent one team from monopolizing the inductees, and it would need to have a tangible plan for how to recognize and honor the Hall of Famers once they were inducted.

Finally, and most importantly, it would need a sustainability plan so that it wouldn’t go poof in a year or two if a funding source or the general interest of one individual waned. It would need to be something that was already set up to continue year after year after year for a decade. At that point, the ball would be rolling downhill and probably have built up enough name recognition to survive even if the leadership changed.

Can it be done? One final sobering note: the NFL started in 1920 and their Hall of Fame didn’t come along until 1963. College football started in 1869 and went national in 1901, but their Hall of Fame didn’t come into existence until 1951.

Women’s football has been played continuously since 1999, but a Women’s Football Hall of Fame idea…well, the world may not be ready for that yet. It took over four decades for the NFL to get one ready and five decades after college football went coast-to-coast for them to do the same. Women’s football hasn’t even been around for two decades yet, which seems like an eternity for those of us in the sport now but really isn’t that long at the macro level.

One thing I do know is that it would only work if the collective community of women’s football players came together and made it work. Because that has proven, time and again, to be the one unstoppable force that has sustained this sport throughout the 21st century.