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Even in her twilight years, Florence Murphy remembered the penalty kick like it was yesterday.
Speaking on the phone, she remembered the walk to the spot and how her boots — they were her boyfriend’s, actually — pressed into the muddy playing surface at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. The fans, thousands of them, drew to the edge of their seats in anticipation. Her teammates, decked out in sweaters, shorts and headscarves in the winter cold, lined up at the edge of the area. 
Murphy — she was Flo Kondracki back then — was the Bobby Soccer’s choice penalty taker. She set the ball down and took a few steps back. She’d earned a reputation with her teammates as being unflappable in these sorts of high-pressure situations. 
“And I was fine that time, too,” Murphy said just before her passing last year at the age of 90, “until the announcer came on and said, ‘And now, Kondracki taking the penalty kick!’ I thought, ‘Oh shut up, you’re making me nervous!’ We were rookies, by gracious.” 
Murphy converted the penalty kick, as she almost always did. Her teammates mobbed her. The Bobby Soccers went on to win the game, 6-2. They didn’t win many that year — they finished last in the Craig League — but it didn’t really matter.
You’ve likely never heard of St. Louis’ Craig League, which existed for two years in the early 1950s. All but one of the 70 or so players who participated in it have passed away. The Athletic compiled a list of 40 of those players and exhaustively set out to find any surviving members. But only Murphy and Mary Wright, the former captain of the Bobby Soccers, were the lone players still living in the summer of 2021. Now, after Murphy’s passing, it’s just Wright.  
For years, the surviving members would often say that the league was no big deal, that they didn’t think of themselves as pioneers. But these women were pioneers, undoubtedly. At Sportsman’s Park — and on much smaller fields, out there in the rain and snow, in front of a handful of family and friends — the women of the Craig League were participants in what’s often called the first organized women’s soccer league in the United States. 
At 92 years old, Mary Wright resides at an assisted living facility in the St. Louis suburbs. Her voice comes through clearly over the phone, bright and full of life.
“Are you ready for this?” she asks. “I can still walk and talk and think.”
If you poke around in newspaper archives, you can read little blips about the Craig League, and about Wright. On crumpled pages, you’ll find snippets of match reports and a few longer features, all written in the same tone. Mostly they focus on the novelty of seeing a woman play any sport at all — it was 1951, and for years women had sometimes been considered too fragile, unfit for competition. Though those attitudes had at least begun to cool by the time the Craig League was founded, much of the written history of the league feels steeped in that mentality. 
In any other city, the league may have been nothing more than a blip, if it had happened at all. But St. Louis has always been a soccer town. The history of the game there is lengthy and vibrant, full of National Challenge Cup and Open Cup championships, NCAA titles, along with less glamorous moments; regular people playing in ethnic leagues and keeping the game alive during stretches of time when soccer was almost forgotten in the country at large.
In 1950, St. Louis itself was in transition, grappling with the realities of the civil rights movement and accompanying integration. In the city’s Catholic community, soccer had long played a part in centering youth, and at St Matthew’s Parish, Father Walter Craig had plans to integrate. The fund the archdiocese had set aside that year for youth activities had a surplus, and if Craig didn’t find a way to use it, they’d take it back. 
Catholic youth programs were a big deal in post-war St. Louis, with some 18,000 kids a year taking part in activities organized by the local Catholic Youth Council. There were social and philanthropic activities, but the main driver of membership was athletics — and soccer played a key part. The city’s dominant club team at the time, Kutis FC, was almost entirely composed of players from CYC programs. Six members of the U.S. men’s national team squad that would shock England at the 1950 World Cup were CYC products. 
Father Craig carved out his own chunk of this landscape, founding the Craig Club in 1950. He envisioned leagues for baseball, basketball and soccer teams that would be fully integrated. And there’d be a curious wrinkle to all of this, one largely unheard of at the time: he’d form a women’s soccer league, as well.
There was no shortage of interest. Young girls and women in St. Louis had been playing the game for years in parks and backyards, and had formed a keen interest in local amateur and professional men’s leagues. Jog back 40 years from the founding of the Craig League to 1909, and you can find a reference in the local newspaper to women playing the game for fun, a snippet tucked in between a snake oil ad and a news item about a boy dying after eating 16 frozen bananas.
Many who would eventually participate in the Craig League had already been spending their Saturdays playing with boyfriends and acquaintances at St. Matthew’s Parish, so when Craig put a call out for players, about 70 girls aged 16-22 responded. 
They were divided into four teams: the Bobby Soccers, Bombers, Co-eds and Flyers. 
“I graduated from a girl’s Catholic high school,” says Wright. “Then I went to work for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and then I got married and had six children. We kind of hung around that neighborhood with the soccer team boys after high school. Most of the girls I knew had boyfriends who played soccer. Soccer was everywhere while we were growing up.”
Listening to Murphy’s and Wright’s accounts of the league and life in 1950s St. Louis transports you into some sort of “Pleasantville” time warp, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. 
“I was 19,” said Murphy. “My sister Mary was 15, but most of the girls were my age plus or minus a year or two. It was just — life was just totally different. Like you were on a different planet. Everything was safe — you obviously had crime, but nothing like today. Mary and I would hitchhike to the games. You couldn’t do that today. It took an hour to get there by public transportation, so Mary and I would just hitchhike, no problem, we’d get maybe one or two rides to get us there.”
The league played its season in the winter, from November to February, with each team playing 15 games, always on Sundays and in a handful of locations. The first was a former streetcar lot at the corner of N Market Street and N Spring Avenue, a dirt patch that was smoothed out and converted into a makeshift field 70 yards long and 50 yards wide. They also played at Fairgrounds Park and had a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park, the massive baseball stadium used by the professional soccer league in St. Louis.
The parish provided their uniforms, but did not provide them with other gear — boots, socks and the like. Murphy remembers having shin guards, supplied to her by a male friend. Wright was not so lucky.
“Mary Catherine, who was our captain,” said Murphy, “she put issues of Reader’s Digest magazine in her socks to use as shin guards.”
The opening round of Craig League games is painted out in rich detail in the Nov. 19, 1950, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which dedicated a full page of its color photo section to the spectacle. Right there at the center of the photo selection’s front page, is Flo Kondraski, leading a throng of teammates as they chase after the ball.
“In its first round of play,” said the paper, “the Craig Club Girls’ Soccer League — thought to be the only girls’ soccer league in the country — disproved the widely held opinion that soccer is a game for men only. Although far from experts in the sport, the girls played with enthusiasm and determination. Wearing usual soccer uniforms and playing with a regulation ball and under men’s rules, they chased up and down the field, intent on a single purpose — scoring a goal. Bruises and scratches attested to the roughness of play.”
Things got brutal for at least one participant, Sis Hackett. She charged toward a 50/50 ball, striking it just as her opponent arrived. Hackett broke her ankle. 
“That was the end of Sis Hackett,” says Wright, with a chuckle.
The league had a few coaches; Wright and Murphy both remember midweek meetings with Red Layton, a local coach who’d long been a fixture in the youth sports community. Layton couldn’t always make it and Wright remembers one particular match where another coach subbed in. The coach, says Wright, was dating one of the older players in the league, Dot Gilda. 
“She was our goalie,” says Wright. “There was one game — she was just yelling at us, and I turned around and yelled back, ‘You’re not the coach, your boyfriend is the coach.’ Years later, at one of the soccer banquets, I brought that up to Dot and she said, ‘Yeah, I always remembered that.’ I felt guilty about it. But she was just blasting us all there from that goalie’s position.”
Father Craig’s stated goal of making the league available to participants regardless of race was a noble one, but it didn’t really pan out. This was a half-decade before Brown vs. Board of Education and St. Louis schools remained segregated, even for years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling. 
“There weren’t any actual Black girls in the neighborhood, honestly,” says Wright. “Most of the girls on that team went to a public high school in the area, and at that point I don’t think there were any Blacks in the neighborhood at all. So that wasn’t even a thought.”
By most accounts, the league’s matches were well attended, with usually at least a few hundred onlookers. Wright remembers her co-workers at the railroad coming out every week, while Murphy recalled a bunch of friends and family. Newspaper reports usually focused on the curiosity seekers, of which there were undoubtedly more than a few. 
“We were described as ‘women’s suffrage coming to the soccer field,’ ” said Murphy. “And we played every Sunday — they never canceled a game. There were two Sundays — one where it snowed very heavy — and they canceled the men’s game but not ours. There was another time where it rained for hours and, I mean we were muddy from head to toe, playing. Goodness gracious.”
“Sometimes the way I looked getting on the streetcar to come home,” adds Wright, “you wouldn’t believe it. My mother was proud of me, but I looked like a mess.”
Mary Wright still watches soccer. And though she sometimes struggles to follow the action on the screen — her eyesight is failing in old age — she describes the way the U.S. Women’s national team plays as “beautiful.” She takes pride in her part in the early history of the women’s game in the United States and says she keeps a keen eye on one USWNT player in particular, a defender and native St. Louisian.
“Becky,” says Wright. “She’s the captain of the team.”
Becky Sauerbrunn seems genuinely moved when informed of Wright’s interest. 
“This is filling my heart with joy,” she says, laughing warmly.
Wright and Murphy may have felt fairly certain that their legacy had been entirely forgotten, but Sauerbrunn — who was interviewed for Dave Lange’s “Soccer Made in St. Louis,” the definitive history of the game in the city — does indeed have at least a vague recollection of the existence of the Craig League.
By the time Sauerbrunn became an All-American in high school, the women’s soccer scene in St. Louis had already been thriving for years. But the common misconception — that the history of the women’s game in the United States started with Title IX — felt off to her. 
“I’d always been like — ’I’m sure there were women that loved the game and wanted to play the game and maybe just didn’t have someone to help facilitate it,’” says Sauerbrunn. “When I got (Dave Lange’s) book, I was kinda going back through it and I think that’s when I first heard about (the Craig League). It made me really happy to see that it existed, but I also just thought ‘of course it did,’ because I’m sure there were women who were dying to play. And there are always going to be women who are going to be dying to play.”
The fact that the league was covered in the newspapers — and that hundreds, and sometimes thousands, turned out to see the women of the Craig League play — touches on an old theme for Sauerbrunn. 
“Nowadays we’re struggling to get our scores into the newspaper, and to have our league covered,” says Sauerbrunn. “It’s phenomenal, (the crowds back then) are just another point proven that there is a market for (women’s soccer) as long as people put in the work.”
The league helped produce at least one St. Louis soccer legend. When the North American Soccer League’s Tampa Bay Rowdies drafted Perry Van der Beck out of St. Thomas Aquinas High in Florissant, Missouri, Van Der Beck became the youngest American professional player in the history of the game and the first ever drafted straight out of high school. As America’s first teen phenom, he’d go on to have a distinguished career in the NASL and also became a U.S. men’s national team regular, playing in qualifiers during the 1982 and 1986 World Cup cycles. 
Nowadays, Van Der Beck is an executive at USL. As he sits at his desk, he looks at a framed photograph that’s followed him around for years — it’s a team photo of the Craig League’s Bobby Soccers. Tucked away in the corner of the photograph, in the second row, is his mother, Aileen.
“Growing up, kids would always ask me, ‘Did your parents play?’” says Van Der Beck. “And I’d say, ‘You know it’s funny you ask, my mom played — in 1950.’ People were just totally baffled. They’d just answer ‘What?!’ But she never viewed herself as a pioneer. Obviously, she had shown us the picture, but it’s not like she had it displayed anywhere at the house. She didn’t have her uniform, or anything like that, we just knew she’d played soccer.”
Aileen, who passed away in 2009, may have been humble but she had a deep, lifelong appreciation and love for the game of soccer, something that was easy enough to see. As her son navigated the youth ranks and eventually became a standout at Aquinas, his mother was ever-present, never missing a game. Van der Beck, who’d go on to earn a reputation as a fiercely competitive pro, remembers the origins of that work ethic well. To him, it started in the bitter cold at that former streetcar lot. It started in the Craig League, with the Bobby Soccers.
“My mother was very, very loving, but she wasn’t soft,” remembers Van der Beck. “Here I am, in grade school, and we’re still playing in the winter months. And my mom would say, ‘Perry, you’re not cold. You gotta get out there and play.’ It wasn’t something where I wasn’t allowed to be injured, it was just her mentality sometimes. I’d tell her my feet were cold. She’d say, ‘That’s okay, after the game we’ll get home and get you warm. For now, just get in there and play.’”
“For St. Louis to be called the birthplace (of organized women’s soccer) and for my mom to be involved in that, I’m very proud of her,” says Van der Beck, clearly holding back tears. “It’s only through her encouragement, through the way she was for both my brother and I growing up — I owe all my success to her, and I know she truly enjoyed being part of the history of the game.”
The Craig League stopped after the 1952 season. Neither Murphy nor Wright remembered why, specifically – it just kind of fell apart. Many of the league’s participants married and moved away, crafting lives of their own. A few of the players got together in the ‘90s at the St. Louis Soccer Hall of Fame, where they were honored, briefly, during a dinner, and given medals. Little else has been done to celebrate them.
Murphy went on to become one of the first women to work as a computer programmer for the U.S. government in the ‘60s. Her Catholic faith took her to over a dozen countries, where she spent long stretches of her life performing missionary work, helping the less fortunate. She credited the Craig League for honing her social skills and turning her into a “joiner,” always curious and eager to meet new people and do new things. 
“A stranger,” Murphy said, “is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” 
Following her soccer days, Murphy (far left) became a pioneer in the computer industry. (Courtesy of Florence Murphy)
For years, the Craig League has been considered the first organized women’s league in the United States. But that’s not really true — in notes compiled by the U.S. Soccer Federation about 30 years earlier, in 1919, the organization’s secretary general spoke of a women’s league operating in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A quick search of the newspapers of the time reveals reports of organized games between girls at local high scho
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