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HOUSTON — In the late 1970s, the Houston Angels women's professional basketball team defied the odds and captured the inaugural championship of the Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL). The Angels' improbable success story began when a man claiming to have bought a team in the new league called Don Knodel, the former head coach of the Rice University men's basketball team, and asked him to lead the franchise. "’I was looking for a coach, and I was told you would be a good one to have.
’ And I thought, ‘Wow.’ I was stunned," Knodel recalled of the conversation he had with Angels owner Hugh Sweeney, who, incidentally, is a member of the Texas tennis hall of fame. Knodel, who had never coached women before, assembled a squad through an open tryout, where he discovered Karen Aulenbacher - now Aulenbacher Heintz - a star player from Baylor University who was coaching seventh graders at the time.
"My mother and I hopped in the car. She made a shirt with my name on the back of it," said Aulenbacher, who later became a successful high school coach in the Houston area. The Angels' inaugural season was a financial struggle, with sparse crowds of around 1,000 people attending games at Astro Arena.
“How they got there, I don't know," Knodel said. He also had to get creative to keep the team afloat, sometimes scraping together just enough players to make road trips. “You can kind of see the energy of the 1970s in the WBL, where it's sort of shotgun in a lot of ways,” notes Kate Fagan, a former professional player and the author of Hoop Muses: An Insider's Guide to Pop Culture and the (Women's) Game.
“The stories that come out of the WBL are fascinating, as well as just a short glimpse into the financial picture of so many of these women's leagues,” Fagan told KHOU 11’s Jason Bristol in March 2023. “Like there's just this idea, like, let's do this thing and let's get just enough money to start it, and not the long-term vision of what's truly needed, the losses needed to sustain a league.” Salaries for WBL players ranged from $3,600 to around $15,000 for ‘star’ players.
Aulenbacher told Bristol the Angels coaches ended up getting no money. Despite the challenges, the Angels thrived on the court in their first season, winning 26 of their 34 games and capturing the league championship. Their physical, aggressive style of play earned them the nickname "Houston Muggers.
" Knodel credited his previous experience as the Rice men's coach for the team's success, saying he decided to stop coaching the players as women and start treating them as basketball players. "I think we figured it out," he said. "We need to quit coaching them as women.
We're going to start coaching them as basketball players. And from that day on, they got better, got better, got better." The Angels' championship game was played in front of nearly 6,000 fans, the largest crowd to watch either team all season.
The WBL folded after three seasons. The Angels only made it through two of those. The team's initial success and the opportunity it provided for many young women to fulfill their professional basketball dreams have left a legacy, said Aulenbacher.
"It just it was one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life,” she said..
