Nationally, the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League seemed doomed from its early stages, but in Chicago, the city’s upstart franchise flashed promise. The team led the WBL in attendance all three seasons before the league collapsed in 1981. Its inaugural game was spotlighted on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Les Grobstein served as the play-by-play radio announcer. Nancy Faust played the organ at home games. Jerry Sloan, Walter Payton, and Reggie Theus would show up to watch the women play. Games were broadcast on WGN-TV. But even with that hoopla, there was a bootstrap aspect to the Hustle: Shriver contracted with auto mechanic students at a local community college to paint a secondhand school bus with the team’s colors and logo, serving as an in-town rolling billboard and means of transportation for visiting teams.
The whole enterprise was challenging from the beginning. As the league bore into years 2 and 3, several teams stopped paying players altogether. Franchises crumbled, players protested and left town without notice. Amid the detritus, Chicago remained standing, if only falteringly, as a viable professional option for women hoopers.
The Ford Econoline 150 came without windows or back seats. It was a cargo van. Red. Garage-band chic. Doug Bruno had acquired it to transport his players while coaching the women’s team at DePaul. He carved out some windows from the side panels and installed three bench seats in the back. A few of his players chipped in to buy their coach a cassette speaker system. When Bruno was hired as the head coach of the Hustle, he brought the van with him.
The Hustle’s first season was its best. The team finished 21–13, won the Western Division, and made the playoffs before bowing out in the first round. When the team broke for the 1979 off-season, most of the women traveled home to work and train near their families. A few stayed in the city that summer, including Debra Waddy-Rossow and Elizabeth Galloway McQuitter, best friends from Texas who had played ball together at a junior college, then at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before signing with the Hustle and finding apartments in the same building on Winthrop Avenue on the North Side.