The Twin Cities are central to the story of women’s professional basketball. Clad in yellow, royal blue, and white, the Minnesota Fillies of the Women’s Professional Basketball League (known as the WBL) were one of just three franchises to survive for all three seasons in the fledgling organization (1978-1981). Decades before the WNBA and women’s college basketball drew many millions of viewers and earned massive television contracts; decades before the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx were the toast of the Twin Cities; and decades before spectators flocked to arenas to see Caitlin Clark, a former minor league baseball pitcher from Edina named J. Gordon “Gordy” Nevers invested in one of the eight original franchises in America’s first women’s professional basketball league.
Courtesy of Gretchen Pinz Hyink
There had been previous attempts to create a national women’s professional league, but momentum coming out of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal generated unprecedented interest in the venture. The Montreal Olympics were the first time that medals were awarded for women’s basketball at the summer games, and the U.S. won the silver medal in the round robin, six-team tournament. The post-Olympic buzz came on the heels of Title IX, the 1972 federal civil rights law that banned sex-based discrimination in public educational institutions. Title IX kickstarted women’s college athletics and basketball became the most prominent women’s intercollegiate sport. The National Women’s Basketball Championship drew large, televised audiences as previously little-known colleges like Immaculata (Pennsylvania) and Delta State (Mississippi) became household names.
“The WBL was launched because of the popularity and level of play that was shown at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. The whole idea after ’76 was to get this thing rolling,” recalled Lynette Sjoquist, who was a jack-of-all-trades for the Fillies. She played center for the team in its first season, worked in public affairs in years two and three, and served briefly as the team’s head coach. For more than 20 years, Sjoquist has been a commentator for the Gophers Radio Network.
Like many future Fillies, Sjoquist first heard about the team in a newspaper advertisement placed by Nevers in the summer of 1978, not long after he secured the franchise.
Nevers starred in baseball at the University of Missouri before embarking on a five-year odyssey in the Kansas City Athletics organization, reaching ‘AAA’ baseball in Portland, Oregon but never cracking the big-league club.
He married into the funeral home business but wanted a foot in the sports business. Nevers learned of the new women’s basketball league being put together by Bill Byrne, a serial sports entrepreneur who figured prominently in the short-lived World Football League (1974-1975). The Edina native wanted a team and spent $25,000 to secure a franchise, which began play in December 1978. Though hardly well-heeled by the standards of professional sports franchise owners, Nevers proved to be a stable if cash-poor owner in a thoroughly unstable league. The WBL had a total of 18 different franchises in three seasons, the majority of whom simply went out of business.
Nevers owned the team, served as team president, general manager, and occasional head coach. He ran player-personnel and had a taste for wheeling and dealing. Many of the most talented players in the league had at least a stopover in Minnesota courtesy of a Nevers trade.
“That was a tough task,” Sjoquist said of the many hats Nevers wore. “You had to pay salaries, pay the venues that you played in, pay for office space, pay for printing a program,” all the while team struggled to generate more box office revenue.
“Gordy Nevers was a good guy, he was very involved and he was always around. They didn’t have a lot of money to work with, but I think the organization was very well run,” said Terry Kunze, the team’s longest tenured coach.
“Gordy was very friendly, very encouraging,” said Gretchen Pinz (Hyink), who was a member of the Fillies during their first season. Pinz was one of several Minnesotans on the Fillies’ initial roster. She grew up in the small town of Isle, Minnesota, playing sports with her brothers in the backyard. Her high school offered no girls sports. When she enrolled at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD), she took advantage of the new opportunities that Title IX provided for female athletes. She played volleyball, track, and basketball at UMD. After graduation, she and basketball teammate Sherri Mattson played professionally for the All-American Redheads, a barnstorming women’s basketball team that toured the country, playing men’s teams from the 1930s until the 1980s. Sjoquist and her twin sister, Lynnea, also played for the barnstorming team, the country’s first women’s professional basketball team.
Pinz heard about the Fillies and started traveling to the Twin Cities regularly to practice at Bloomington’s Decathlon Club with other prospective players, driving 100 miles each way from Isle. Eventually, she got a job with her aunt and uncle in Richfield, worked for them by day, and played basketball at night with the Fillies. She earned a spot on the Fillies’ practice squad.
Sjoquist grew up in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Like Pinz, her high school offered no girls sports. She and her twin sister gained athletic experience playing for teams sponsored by the 4-H and Jaycees. They enrolled at Golden Valley Lutheran College, where they played volleyball, basketball, and softball. While students at Golden Valley, the All-American Redheads happened to be playing in Cannon Falls. The sisters returned home for the game and went up to the Redheads’ coach afterwards, expressing their interest in playing. They tried out and made the team, then hit the road for the next four years with the club.
Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society
The experiences of Pinz and Sjoquist were common among the first players in the WBL.
“Most of the players at that time from each franchise were regional to that franchise. Then drafting started taking place and you started to see women from all over on all of the teams,” Sjoquist said.
The WBL held its first draft in July 1978, but Minnesota, like a number of other teams in the league, struggled to turn draftees into roster players. Many of the drafted players held jobs that paid better than their positions in the WBL. A high-end WBL salary at the time was roughly $5,000 (equivalent to roughly $24,000 in 2024). Almost immediately, a volatile trade market developed in the WBL, as teams sought to acquire the rights to players that had been drafted but were not yet signed to a team.
“When they started trading players, it was like, woah, what’s happening? I don’t want to go to Chicago. That was something completely new, something completely unexpected,” Pinz said. She never played in a regular season game for the Fillies. Pinz dressed for the early home games at the Met Center in Bloomington but was cut soon after more draftees from around the country started arriving.
“It was exciting. It was fun to be a part of it. I was from a small town and in college we never had big crowds at all,” Pinz said. “I loved playing. For me to even be at practice and playing, I loved it. I knew that I wasn’t quick, I wasn’t tall, I wasn’t a particularly good shooter, I was in it for the love of the game.” Pinz said she wasn’t completely crushed by being released, realizing the high caliber of players that had joined the team.
Among the top-level players that Minnesota acquired in year one were Brenda Chapman, Donna Wilson, Trish Roberts, and Marie Kocurek. All four had been major college stars—Chapman had been one of the country’s leading scorers at Western Kentucky. Lightning-fast Donna Wilson had been a junior college sensation in Florida.
Courtesy of Lynette Sjoquist
Roberts had starred at the University of Tennessee and been a member of the 1976 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team. “When I saw Trish Roberts, I thought, wow, what a quick first step. She was tremendous but unfortunately she suffered a knee injury the very first year she was with us,” Sjoquist said.
6-foot-2-inch center Marie Kocurek had been an All-American at Wayland Baptist, a AIAW power in women’s college basketball.
“I could tell that they could really play ball. They were better,” Pinz said of the new wave of players. “As they came in, they also demanded more money, more things. I felt bad because the group I was with, we loved to play, and we were willing to sacrifice. We enjoyed the opportunity. As they came in, they wanted more. And I think that ended up being the demise of the league, because the league couldn’t support it.”
“The locals, I don’t think we faced the hardship that women did who came from other places,” Sjoquist said, noting the local support systems that many of them had in place.
“When I think of Marie Kocurek coming to play in Minnesota, Wayland Baptist was known for a very generous benefactor who flew the team to their games. When she comes to Minnesota and we’re bussing to Milwaukee, to Iowa, to Chicago, it was a definitely stretch for her to say ‘wow, this is a step up,’” Sjoquist continued.
More than 4,000 fans turned out for opening night at the Met Center on Dec. 15, 1978, to watch the Fillies take on the Iowa Cornets. Although the Fillies lost, the strong turnout created optimism in the organization about local support for the team. But in fact, garnering consistent support proved a perpetual problem for the team.
Nevers and his public relations team worked hard to promote the Fillies, a daunting task for a newly-minted professional sports franchise with a small budget and virtually no broadcast media coverage. Fillies games were televised locally and nationally on just a couple of occasions.
“The local press were generous and did some decent coverage for the Fillies. There were two people from the Star Tribune on our statistician’s crew,” Sjoquist said.
“I thought the media treated us pretty well. I knew a lot of the writers. We weren’t on the front page but we had a couple of TV games,” Kunze said.
Over the course of three seasons, the Fillies averaged between 1,500 and 2,000 fans at home games.
They called the cavernous Met Center their home court during their first two seasons before moving primarily to the Minneapolis Auditorium for year three. Built during the Coolidge Administration, the Auditorium was by no means small. The 10,000-seat venue had once housed the Minneapolis Lakers.
Despite far from filling their buildings, Kunze said “the support we had was very enthusiastic at home.”
“If you didn’t have a lot of fans in that huge arena, it seemed empty,” said Kathy Hawkins, who played for the Iowa Cornets before being traded to the Fillies.
Minnesota received considerably less support than the Iowa team for which Hawkins played. For one thing, the Hawkeye State was one of the country’s historic hotbeds of women’s basketball. 6-on-6 women’s basketball had been a popular participatory and spectator sport in the state since the early 20th century. Additionally, the Iowa team scheduled its home games across the state, playing games in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Storm Lake, Council Bluffs, and other smaller communities. An Iowa Cornets game was an event in the communities in which they were played. They also played in smaller gyms, which were packed with spectators rather than the cavernous Met Center in which the Fillies played.
The Iowa club was owned by George Nissen, the gymnastics equipment manufacturer who popularized the trampoline. He outfitted a customized bus for the team’s travel until hard times fell on his firm.
“We started out with decent hotel accommodations, anything we wanted to eat, and then right after I was traded, Iowa went to taking sack lunches,” Hawkins said. She remembers flying to all far away games with Minnesota and receiving a decent per diem.
Hawkins was a standout at the University of Nebraska in both basketball and tennis. After graduation, she was working as a tennis pro at a racquet club in Lincoln when she heard from her college basketball coach, George Nicodemus. He had been hired as the head coach of the Cornets.
“He called me and tried to get me involved during the first season. I kept saying ‘no, I’m happy with my job.’ I finally thought, what the heck, this is a once in a lifetime experience, I’m going to give it a try. So I went over to the tryouts,” Hawkins said. She played not quite one full season with Iowa before being traded to Minnesota. Soon after coming to the Twin Cities, she broke a finger and missed the end of the season.
“I came back the next season and played roughly half the season in Minnesota. They were looking to trade me a second time and they were going to trade me to Dallas. At that point, I decided it was time to get back to my career in tennis,” Hawkins said. She remembers her time with both teams fondly, noting the many common interests she had with her teammates—fellow basketball enthusiasts and college graduates.
Despite the talent Nevers acquired for the Fillies, the team had an up-and-down first season. He went through a handful of coaches in year one, which was not uncommon in the WBL. Unlike many of the other WBL owners, Nevers hired several female coaches to run his team. Initially, he hired Dee Hopfenspirger, who led Redwood Falls in 1976 to the first ever Class A state championship in Minnesota girls high school basketball, as his head coach. She resigned before the season even started, citing her incompatibility with professional players. Nevers led the team himself for a while before hiring Julia Yeater, the women’s coach at Western Kentucky. Brenda Chapman had recommended her college coach to Nevers.
Disagreements on strategy and personnel made Yeater’s tenure as head coach similarly short-lived. After Yeater’s departure, he brought in a coach named Lou Mascari, who clashed with players and lasted just a handful of games. Trish Roberts, too, served briefly as head coach late in the 1978-1979 season. Nevers returned to the bench to finish off the Fillies’ first campaign.
The Fillies finished their first season at 17-17, good for third in the Midwestern Division but not good enough for a playoff berth.
For the 1979-1980 season, Nevers brought in additional top-line talent for his team. He acquired Marie “Scooter” DeLorme, a standout point guard at the College of Charleston. She became an on-floor leader for the Fillies. Additionally, Nevers swapped Brenda Chapman for Kathy DeBoer and Marguerite Keeley, two All-Stars from the Milwaukee Does.
“Kathy [DeBoer] and Marie [Kocurek] were the two most vocal leaders. They would speak out if something wasn’t right. They led on the court and they led off the court,” Hawkins said.
Nevers found a more permanent head coach that season in Kunze, a well-known figure in Minnesota basketball circles. He’d wowed fans across the state at Duluth Central in the early 1960s as a point guard, putting on a show with his dribbling and passing skills. He led the Trojans to an undefeated season and a state championship in 1961. At the University of Minnesota, Kunze became one of the most accomplished guards in school history, captaining the 1964-1965 team which finished seventh in the final Associated Press poll. He was drafted by the St. Louis Hawks but instead chose to play professionally in Europe. He played briefly in the American Basketball Association for the Minnesota Muskies.
After his retirement as a player, he served as an assistant coach at the University of Minnesota and East Carolina before taking the Fillies job.
The combination of a talented roster and an experienced coach paid dividends in the standings. The Fillies finished the 1979-1980 season at 22-12, good for second in their division.
“I thought overall we were the best defensive team in the league. We weren’t a team that went up and down. We defended well and ran our stuff. We had a real good post player in Marie Kocurek. We played a lot of inside out. Played the post and kicked it out. We could shoot the three. We had some good athletes. We were tough to beat,” Kunze said.
“They were all good players, great teammates, and fun to watch. It was an exciting time,” Sjoquist said.
“He was always telling me to shoot more. I had been more of a playmaker in college,” said Hawkins, who speaks highly of Kunze as a coach.
The Fillies were one of the league’s best three-point shooting teams under Kunze, taking advantage of the rule change that added the shot in year two, several seasons before the NBA.
“Marie Kocurek was a terrific turnaround jump shooter. She could catch the ball, make a couple fakes, turn around, and make a jump shot,” Kunze said.
“Scooter Delorme was just very competitive,” Kunze continued. “And Donna Wilson was a very athletic wing.”
In the playoffs, Minnesota faced New Orleans in a first-round best of three series. A scheduling conflict at the Met Center forced the Fillies to move their postseason game against New Orleans to the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena, which the Fillies lost before a sparse crowd. The Fillies went down to New Orleans and pulled off consecutive comeback wins to advance to the semifinals.
Kunze recalls that the Fillies were missing injured point guard Scooter DeLorme for the first game in New Orleans. DeLorme had not made the trip with the team. Nevers put her on a plane down to New Orleans after learning there would be a game three.
“I call Gordy after the game and said ‘we won!’ and he flew my point guard down. The next night was the same kind of game where we were down the whole game and came back and won at the end,” Kunze said. The Fillies lost a best-of-three semi-finals series to Iowa, which lost the championship series to New York. After the season, the cash-strapped Iowa franchise disbanded, a sign of things to come for the WBL.
During the Fillies’ third season, 1980-1981, Nevers struggled to make payroll. He reached out to other investors but had trouble securing enough financing to keep the club going.
“All the money went to the players first. If there was a time that I didn’t get paid, it was a lot longer than the players,” Sjoquist said.
The team struggled in the standings in year three just as much as they did financially.
“In the last year, we had a lot of injuries. We were kind of up and down. Not knowing who could play and who couldn’t,” Kunze said.
Early in the season, Fillies players started missing checks. By the season’s second half, many players hadn’t been paid in two months. The Fillies’ best and most vocal player, Kocurek, spoke out about the situation and was traded to the Nebraska Wranglers, whom she helped lead to the 1980-1981 WBL title.
“The league was going in the right direction, but they just ran out of money,” Kunze said. While the WNBA has enjoyed decades of financial support from the NBA, the WBL had to stand on its own two feet from day one. In its final season, the WBL faced competition from a rival league called the Ladies Professional Basketball Association. The rival league never amounted to much but drained talent, publicity, and potential revenue from the more established WBL.
The tensions of season three came to a head on a road trip to Chicago, when Nevers’ credit card was rejected at the hotel where the team planned to stay. The Chicago team worked out arrangements for the bill to be covered. The combination of the team’s tenuous accommodations and back pay led the remaining players to vote to boycott the next game. Even their coach, Kunze, was unaware of their plans. Playing in front of WBL commissioner, Sherwin Fischer, the Fillies did their pregame warmups with their street clothes underneath. They never returned to the floor for the game and instead boarded the team’s van.
“We played Chicago with a really good crowd. And my girls weren’t getting paid then. And they warmed up with their street clothes under their warmups and we went down for the pregame talk and they left,” Kunze said.
“I came up alone with cameras flashing all over the place. And that was the start of when the league went down. I wasn’t involved, they never told me this was going to happen,” Kunze said. The very public fashion in which the team boycotted their game brought as much media coverage to the WBL as virtually any event in its history. The league suspended Kunze and his players indefinitely.
“They’d warmed up, gone down to the locker room, and then they didn’t come back,” Sjoquist recalled. “That set Mr. Nevers and I in motion to try to create another team. We had four games left. I called people that I knew, made contact with people that had tried out for the team and hadn’t made it, called some soon to be graduates of the University of Minnesota. Within a day’s time, we had made a collection of players,” Sjoquist said. Sjoquist coached the team and played in a pair of road games in Dallas and San Francisco. The Fillies took their lumps but managed to finish out the season.
The Fillies finished the chaotic 1980-1981 season with a 7-28 mark. The league disbanded soon thereafter. Virtually every franchise in the league struggled to meet payroll that last season. Soon after the team’s demise, Nevers filed for bankruptcy protection as former players continued to seek out back pay. He died in 2017 but remained involved with sports for the remainder of his life. His son, Tom Nevers, was a hockey and baseball star at Edina High School before becoming a first-round pick of the Houston Astros in 1992. He spent more than a decade as a professional baseball player.
For many years, the memory of the WBL was surprisingly absent from the sports landscape, both locally and nationally. In recent years, as the profile of women’s basketball has increased further, renewed interest has emerged in this fledgling and the pioneers who made it go for three seasons.
“There was a great lull where nobody ever mentioned it but then just a couple of years ago, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame [in Knoxville, Tennessee] honored the WBL as ‘Trailblazers of the Game,’” Sjoquist said, pleased by both the recognition the league received and the opportunity that the ceremony offered her to reconnect with teammates. “It was a celebration of the teams and the WBL and what it did to lay the groundwork for the WNBA.”
“You look at the players of today and the way they can make a career out of this,” Hawkins said. “Growing up as a young girl, they know they can make a profession out of this, that’s something I never thought was possible, even when I was in college.”
The future of women’s professional basketball in America looks increasingly bright. Any telling of this multi-generational success story must make reference to what the players, coaches, and investors in this league brought to fruition more than four decades ago. The legacy of the Minnesota Fillies is firmly implanted in the foundation of every possibility for women’s professional athletes today.
