Women’s passion for football runs deep at Slippery Rock University. A lot of it has to do with the Pittsburgh Passion, a professional, full-contact women’s football team that occasionally plays its home games at SRU. But most of all, it’s about the connections that women make at SRU through the grid-iron.
The matriarch is an SRU alumna Teresa Conn, ’86, who started playing for the Passion when the team was formed in 2002, before their inaugural season in 2003 with games played in front of a couple dozen fans at a high school stadium in Belle Vernon. Working as a health and physical education teacher in Edinboro, Conn was driving more than three hours to practices and games.
She became a team captain and the ownership group recognized her commitment to the team, so in 2004 they asked her to become a co-owner, in addition to being a player/coach, a move that would require her to change her career.
“That was a leap of faith,” said Conn…
