Milwaukee Does: No Support, No Money, No Chance

Abstract

The Milwaukee Does have been forgotten over time and are unknown to most of the world. That was also true of the Women's Basketball Leagues, WBL, of 1978-1981 until Karra Porter, a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah and fellow advocate of history and sports, wrote her book, Mad Seasons: the story of the first Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978-1981. Her fear of the league's history going untold and erased from history is the reason she began researching the leagues and produced her book. Mad Seasons is the only book written on the WBL and covers the Milwaukee Does. In this paper I will look at the beginning of the WBL in 1978 and take a journey through time to give a better background of the Milwaukee Does. However, the Does only made it two of the three seasons due to many factors that took them out of the league and failed to succeed, a path the entire league would inevitably travel. This paper uses primary documents compiled together in a collection in Milwaukee that covers the Does seasons in the WBL, including newspaper clippings, pictures, and programs from games. In dealing with the limited amount of information that is available, I intend to bring the Does to life again and present their existence in a professional matter. I will finish the paper by explaining what I feel went wrong in the WBL and the main reasons it could have never made it in that era. I will also provide ideas and thoughts of what should be done in the future.