Bowling Green State University Athletics
Gladieux, Ault Shine On Gridiron
May 12, 2003 | Women's Basketball
May 6, 2003
By STACY KESS, Sentinel Sports Writer - This isn't Saturday afternoon backyard football.
This isn't a gym class flag football.
It's bone-crushing tackles. It's stare-downs at the 20-yard line. Third-and-eight plays.
It's injuries with 2:22 left in the third quarter.
This is the Toledo Spitfire, one of 30 teams in the National Women's Football Association.
And if you ask players like tight end and punter Jena Ault, a Bowling Green High School and Bowling Green State University graduate, she'll tell you it's real football.
"I think so. We hit pretty hard," Ault said, with her ankle still wrapped from an injury in the third quarter that pulled her out of a game against the Cleveland Fusion. "We hit just as hard (as in men's football)."
Wide receiver April Gladieux, a Rossford High School graduate, agreed.
"It's the same, pretty much," she said. "Yeah we get a lot of crap from guys, but it's football."
The crowd at Rossford High School's Stadium, now doubling as home to the Spitfire, seemed to think so.
For the team's home-opener, the stadium was filled with cheering fans made up of players' family, friends and co-workers.
But for Ault and Gladieux it's about the love of the game.
Ault, 29, who played basketball at BGSU, said she was interested in football, but played sports already set up with women's teams.
She now owns her own business as an accountant and splits her time between that and 12 or more hours of practice time for the team.
And the start of football season meets the busiest season at work: the end of tax time.
"People look at me like I'm crazy," she said.
Gladieux, 21, who attends Owens Community College, was also interested in the sport, but started playing volleyball and didn't look back -- until this year, when her mother heard about a Toledo expansion team in the two-year-old NWFA.
"I wanted to play (football), but I'm such a volleyball freak," Gladieux said.
As many times as Ault and Gladieux have been told they are crazy for playing football or questioned on how rough and tough women's football can be, both persevered over the last year, to begin the 2003 season.
Now football, despite Gladieux's full-time job and school, is her first priority.
"I'm going to play as many years as I can," she said. "Football comes before kids and marriage."
But the future of the Spitfire and the NWFA is uncertain.
The league follows the defunct National Women's Football Association, which had two Toledo teams during its duration -- the Toledo Troopers, 1971-79 and the Toledo Furies, 1983-89.
Last year, the disbanded NWFL was reborn and changed its name, becoming the NWFA.
Sarah Dowd, who played for the Detroit Danger in 2001, used a settlement from a 1999 traffic accident to buy her own team: the Spitfire.
Tryouts were held in July 2002.
The team played its first game against the Indiana Thunder on April 12 and opened with a win.
Still, Ault and Gladieux see the future stability of the team and the league in its fans.
"We have to get a good fan base," Ault said.
"We have to get a lot more people interested," Gladieux said.
But both said they hope the fans will come, because they aren't ready to quit playing football.
