Houston is rich with football history. From Earl Campbell’s legendary career with the Oilers, to Andre Ware’s Heisman-winning campaign with the Cougars, to the birth of the NFL’s youngest franchise in the Texans, the City of Houston has a multitude of stories to tell from the gridiron.
This weekend, another team in the city’s history will finally get to tell its story: The Houston Herricanes, Houston’s women’s tackle football team.
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From Friday, Oct. 25, through Wednesday, Oct. 30, the documentary “The Herricanes” will play at select Houston theaters.
River Oaks Theatre will host the opening on Friday at 3:45 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Tickets for the shows are available here.
The Herricanes were a member of the National Women’s Football League from 1976 through 1979.
Women from all over the Houston area came together to put on their pads, strap up their helmets and run the damn football—all in an era that was far from accommodating to women playing the violent sport.
The film was directed by Olivia Kuan, a cinematographer who has worked on numerous films, but never on a project of her own. She felt that she was at a point in her career where she needed to lead a project, and she had a personal connection to this story: Her mother, Basia Haszlakiewicz, was a member of the Herricanes.
When she was growing up, Kuan said her mother’s memories playing tackle football were commonplace around the house, and she thought it was a regular experience for girls. It wasn’t until she told others about it that she realized how unique it was for women to play football at the time.
“I’ve always kind of had this story in my mind, because I grew up with it,” Kuan told KPRC 2′s Michael Horton. “I grew up in this reality where women played football, and eventually, I came to realize that most people were not growing up in that same reality.”
Kuan’s documentary has been featured in several prominent film festivals, including Austin’s South by Southwest and Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. However, this success and notoriety was not without labor.
The film took about five years to complete. One of the biggest obstacles Kuan and her team faced during the process was retrieving archival footage. The team was not widely supported by the media during its playing days and the additional complications of videography in the 1970s didn’t help.
“We knew we were going to be up against a lot of lack of archival, so that was something that we kind of had to design from the very beginning,” Kuan said. “Like, how are we going to replace this lack of archival? That made us find some creative ways to tell the story.”
Another issue that the team faced was contacting all of the players. Kuan’s mother was not in contact with any of her former teammates, but she said it wasn’t because of any animosity between them.
“Back in the 70s or 80s, if you moved to a different place, your phone number changed,” Kuan explained. “There was no consistency as far as like social media is concerned or anything like that. So, it just was a lot easier to lose touch with people if you’re not constantly talking to them the way that you would be if you were on a football team together.”
Through the internet, Kuan and Haszlakiewicz were eventually able to track down around 20 former Herricanes players to participate in the documentary. With four decades having passed since the squad suited up, she said the players were definitely surprised to hear from her.
“It was definitely a long pause,” she said. “People were like, ‘What? This is like something from 40 years ago that’s suddenly ringing on my phone.’ But I also had my mom do a lot of the first phone calls because she actually was their teammate, and they know her. And then I would usually do the second phone call, but it was definitely a lot of surprise coming from the other end of the line.”
Despite some initial skepticism, she said the players who participated are happy with how their story was told. She noted how difficult it can be to tell a story from nearly 40 years ago with very little documentation of specific events to fact-check. It took tireless research and recounting from multiple sources to accurately tell the stories.
Kuan said the pursuit of that accuracy was another big motivator in making the project.
“It was interesting, because this story almost exclusively exists in the oral histories, and that was also part of what pushed me to do this film,” she added. “Now, as opposed to waiting a bit longer is that these women are getting older, I wanted to preserve the history before it was lost. So that was, that was definitely a big part of what was in my mind going into this project.”
In the years since the Herricanes were dismantled, the idea of women participating in male-dominated spaces like football has become much more widely accepted. Jen Welter became the first female NFL coach in 2015, working with the Arizona Cardinals. Welter’s impact on football is paramount, and she is featured in the Herricanes documentary.
Other strides have been made to open doors for Houston-area women to participate in football. In August of this year, the Houston Texans raised more than $1.4 million to fund girl’s flag football programs across all 25 high schools in Houston Independent School District. Texans’ owner Hannah McNair, whose daughter plays flag football, said she has seen the positive impact that football can have on young girls.
Kuan said she’s hoping that the Herricanes documentary can open even more people’s eyes to the magic of football, regardless of gender.
“When I got to high school and, you know, was telling people about [the Herricanes], everyone was really incredulous. They had grown up in a world where women didn’t play football, and it was so indoctrinated into them that football is a man’s sport, that they really had trouble believing that this was true. That’s a sad thing, and I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”