It’s the first game of the American Basketball League finals, and the Richmond Rage are down a point with a minute to go. The city’s first professional women’s basketball team is facing the heavily favored Columbus Quest on the Ohio team’s home court. Rage center Taj McWilliams muscles to the hoop for a bucket to give Richmond the lead, 89-88. But Columbus star and league MVP Nikki McCray responds with a basket of her own to give the Quest a 90-89 win. It was just the first game of a best-of-five series, and the scrappy bunch from Richmond would win each of the next two contests to put the city on the verge of a championship. But that first win proved pivotal for the Quest, who rallied to win the final two games and claim the first of their back-to-back championships on March 11, 1997. Meanwhile, the Rage fell one game short — one point short. Their championship dreams vanished as they dropped Game 5 in Columbus, and the team never returned to Richmond, moving to Philadelphia the following season.
Richmond Rage point guard Dawn Staley drives by the Columbus Quest’s Valerie Still during the team’s win at the Richmond Coliseum. (Photo by Bruce Parker courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
During that winter of 1996-97, Richmond had a professional basketball franchise of its own, a near champion. There was growing support, both in the community and at the games, which were played at the Richmond Coliseum and the University of Richmond’s Robins Center. There was star power on the roster. Former University of Virginia standout and 1996 Olympic gold medalist Dawn Staley brought innate leadership as the team’s point guard. Adrienne Goodson, an Old Dominion University graduate, was the team’s leading scorer, and she was second in assists and rebounds. Olympic champion track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee was on the team, too, lending name recognition that extended well beyond women’s basketball and giving the roster, well, speed.
Then-prominent local businesses such as Ukrop’s Super Markets, Central Fidelity Bank and Health South, as well as Dominion Resources (now Dominion Energy), agreed to partnerships with the Rage, and fan attendance swelled as the team found its rhythm toward the end of the season and made the postseason run that brought them within a game of the inaugural American Basketball League championship. For a single season, a talented group of women sent ripples through the city and proved a winning franchise could exist outside the country’s traditional media markets.
In addition to losing the snazzy alliteration, the Philadelphia Rage fizzled on the court in their first season after the move, and the following season, the ABL itself would fizzle, leading to the Dec. 22, 1998, announcement that it was suspending operations, in the middle of its third season.
Tammy Holder (left), general manager of the Richmond Rage, and Bill Martin, of Barber Martin and Associates, pose with a new commercial. (Photo by James Wallace courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
Game Plan
Much of the groundwork for luring an ABL franchise to Richmond was laid at the collegiate level. When Tammy Holder was the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Richmond, a local bank helped put the region on the pro basketball map as an early season tournament destination, with the Central Fidelity Bank Tournament. Holder, a Midlothian native who would later become general manager of the Rage, played host to such national collegiate powers as the UConn Huskies, the Tennessee Volunteers and the North Carolina Tar Heels.
“We had great crowds watching, basically, the University of Richmond come in second in every game that we played,” Holder says, “but it was great basketball to watch, and they got an opportunity to see excellent players in person.”
In 1994, Richmond hosted the Final Four of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament at the Richmond Coliseum. Those games and the Central Fidelity Bank tournament gave Sports Backers, the nonprofit that facilitates sports events and programming in the Richmond area, and its executive director, Jon Lugbill, the ammunition they needed to make a legitimate case for an ABL team. Supplementing the city’s pitch was the success of Virginia’s in-state collegiate programs. In 1985, Adrienne Goodson had led ODU to the national title. Dawn Staley guided UVA to three Final Four appearances in the early 1990s. The evidence was compelling enough for Richmond to join Seattle, Denver and Atlanta as one of eight markets for the brand-new league. Each franchise was assigned two stars with regional connections in order to draw interest. Goodson and Staley became Richmond’s on-court cornerstones, but it was Holder’s local ties that helped ease the transition for the league-owned team’s roster full of transplants.
“None of us were from Richmond, so we all dropped down in there, and she was just amazing in the things she could tell us,” former Richmond Rage Head Coach Lisa Boyer says. “Where to live, where to shop, what bank to go to — stuff that people need.”
Jackie Joyner-Kersee (left) with teammate Taj McWilliams during practice (Photo by Dean Hoffmeyer courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
The league began play during the traditional winter basketball season, giving it a half-year head start on the competing WNBA, which would start its inaugural season the following summer. The ABL paid its players more, and the Rage benefited from having two Olympians, fresh from the 1996 Atlanta games, on its roster. While Staley was the only basketball-playing Olympian, having earned her first gold medal with the U.S. team in Atlanta, she was joined by track and field star Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Yes, that Jackie Joyner-Kersee. The gold-medal-winning heptathlete and long jumper — who fought through a hamstring injury to take a bronze medal in the long jump in Atlanta — wasn’t a stranger to the court, having earned a collegiate basketball scholarship to UCLA, where she played for four years.
“I moved to Richmond, and I was just going to give it a shot,” says Joyner-Kersee, who had met Staley at the Olympics.
Jackie Joyner Kersee speaks at the Metropolitan Richmond Sports Backers forum at the former Landmark Theatre. (Photo by James Wallace courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
Joyner-Kersee wasn’t a regular rotation player, but her presence — and her fame — gave the team instant recognition. She endeared herself to teammates through her acceptance of her limited role, but every so often a timely reminder that the Rage’s reserve guard was one of the best athletes in the world would emerge.
Coach Boyer implemented a play that involved a player racing toward the Rage’s basket at the other end and the inbound passer heaving the ball the length of the court for an easy layup — a “home-run play” in basketball parlance. One day, Staley took the ball and jokingly threw it as hard as she could to overthrow her runner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. In a burst that Goodson compares to Mighty Mouse, the track star took off, caught up to the pass and laid the ball into the basket on the other end. The gym erupted.
“Sometimes you think somebody is fast, but you don’t know,” Joyner-Kersee laughs when recalling the moment. “I ran the ball down and almost passed the ball. It was really, really a great team.”
The excitement among the women on the team, many of whom had spent years playing overseas, to be able to return home and play gave the Rage an effervescent personality. The bench was engaged when the starters were in the game. The starters were supportive of the reserves when they saw action.
“Everybody was so upbeat,” Holder says. “Just imagine wanting to do something that you love and never thinking that you will be able to do it and get paid for it, then all of a sudden you can. They were just empowered by that and just in a constant good mood any time I saw them.”
Rage Head Coach Lisa Boyer (Photo by James Wallace courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
The leadership started with Staley. Boyer was still finding her way as a head coach, and she leaned on her Olympic point guard to keep the team dialed in. It was the beginning of a bond between the head coach and point guard that led them to the same bench again years later, with Boyer serving as Staley’s go-to lieutenant upon the latter’s ascendance to the head coaching positions at Temple University and later the University of South Carolina.
“Dawn just has a gift. She can lead a team,” says Boyer, who’s now Staley’s associate head coach at South Carolina. “She can lead any kind of personality. She has an ability in the way she talks to them, gets them to play for her. Obviously she knows their strengths and their weaknesses and was putting them in places where they would be successful. She led by example verbally and with her actions, so that was all very good.”
Adrienne Goodson (left) takes it to the hole against the New England Blizzard. (Photo by Don Long courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
The result was cohesion that Goodson rates among the best of any team she’s been a part of.
“Our mentality was incredible, and I never played for another team that cared for each other in that way,” Goodson remembers. “So selfless, where ‘I want you to share in the good as well.’ That was the personality of our team, and everybody had it.”
The Rage front office tried to leverage that positivity into magnetism. During timeouts and halftime, children were invited onto the court to dance the Macarena. A’Net, the team mascot that defies description, patrolled the aisles and stoked the crowd’s energy. Fans were catching on and coming out to the games, about three-quarters of which were at the Robins Center, with the remainder played in the Richmond Coliseum. The two venues lent different home-court advantages.
“The Coliseum looks like a saucer turned upside down, and the interior has been accurately described as looking like the inside of a UPS truck,” says Vic Dorr, who covered the team for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It drew more of an urban audience. The Robins Center is in the Far West End of Richmond on U of R’s very, very scenic and very, very suburban campus. It was smaller and probably more intimate.”
The arrangement, which Holder credits to strong relationships with both VCU and UR, improved the team’s citywide visibility.
“It gave an opportunity for everybody in Richmond to have access, so I’m glad we had the opportunity to play in both venues,” Holder says.
It was a new team fighting for fans, a new league fighting for traction and a new product fighting for legitimacy in a male-dominated industry. Players, coaches and the front office knew that every handshake, photo op and autograph mattered. The team participated in school engagements and public appearances, and players mingled with fans after games.
“They wanted to be accessible to people, and I think that they were pioneers,” Boyer says of the women who played in the ABL. “They understood that they were in this fight together and that they needed each other, and they genuinely cared for each other.”
As the season wore on, along with growing gate totals, Holder also began to notice a demographic shift. More and more men were bringing their daughters to games.
“A lot of dads had never been to a girls’ game, thought they were going to be boring back in the 1990s, and they go to an ABL game and see what Dawn is doing with the ball, what Adrienne is doing, how fast and how athletic they are,” Holder says. “Over and over again, I’d hear, especially from men, ‘I had no idea women could do this, I’m going to be bringing my girls to these games.’ ”
Adrienne Goodson poses with young players at the Full Court Press NBRPA (National Basketball Retired Players Association) Camp in Boston. (Photo courtesy Adrienne Goodson)
The Rage made the playoffs and swept the Colorado Xplosion in the first round to set up a best-of-five championship series with Columbus. After their devastating single-point opening loss, Richmond won the next two games and found itself a game away from claiming the inaugural ABL championship trophy. Game 4 was in the Robins Center, an opportunity for coronation in front of the fans that had come to love the team since its arrival a few months prior. Richmond was ready.
“The fans were just into it,” Holder recalls of the finals series. “Back then, University of Richmond was kind of polite and proper and clap-clap-clap, golf clap. That changed overnight with the pro league. You had a mascot and players who were trying to get the crowd into the game. A lot of things changed for how women’s basketball was viewed in Richmond and really took it up a notch.”
It was fun, while it lasted.
Dawn Staley, now coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of South Carolina, celebrating their NCAA national championship win. (Photo courtesy South Carolina Athletics)
Game Over
In the summer of 1997, while the competing WNBA was riding television contracts and an NBA partnership to a successful launch, ABL Commissioner Gary Cavalli announced that the league would be moving the Rage from Richmond to Staley’s hometown of Philadelphia. Dorr covered the announcement for the Times-Dispatch.
“I do recall asking Gary at the press conference what, given the opportunity, he would say to the young fans who had become so attached to this team in its one year in Richmond, and that’s when he got kind of emotional,” Dorr says. Cavalli told him that for the long-term future of the team and league, they needed to be in a major city.
The team struggled in Philly, finishing outside of the playoffs with a 13-31 record. Anne Donovan took over as the team’s head coach prior to year three, but the Rage played only 14 games in 1998 before the ABL folded in December.
The short-lived league doesn’t have a long entry in the history of women’s basketball, but it’s an important one. The ABL started months before the WNBA and had a much bigger talent pool. The league drew attention to women’s basketball, which made the WNBA’s job of establishing itself a lot easier, coupled with name recognition, television contracts and the umbrella of the NBA.
The Rage never regained the magic from its year in Richmond, which Boyer and Goodson both say was among the best experiences of their careers.
“The thing that stands out the most is how much we were out in the community, and how much that community loved us in Richmond and how much support we had,” says Goodson, now a basketball coach at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey.
Tammy Holder is now a basketball coach at Veritas School. (Photo courtesy Veritas School)
Staley, who went on to a hall of fame career as a player, winning two more Olympic gold medals and starring in the WNBA, has ascended to become one of the biggest names in coaching. She guided South Carolina to a national championship in 2017 and will serve as the USA women’s Olympic coach in the 2021 Tokyo games. Joyner-Kersee devotes most of her time to her eponymous children’s center in her hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois.
While the resonance of the Richmond Rage’s lone season wasn’t seismic, it was certainly concentrated. Dorr still owns a Richmond Rage polo shirt. Most people who see him wearing it are unfamiliar with the logo or the team, but it is a conversation starter for those who do. Holder is back in Richmond coaching at Veritas School and remembers running into Ray Bullock, a high school basketball official who called a few Rage games, and recognizing him like an old classmate.
“There’s not that many people that know much about it,” Holder says, “but every time I come across somebody who does, you become instant friends.”
