Colorado Springs Spirit

Minor League Football System (1989-1990)

Tombstone

Born: 1989 – MLFS founding franchise
Folded: September 8, 1990¹

First Game: July 29, 1989 (W 35-9 vs. San Jose Bandits)
Last Game: September 2, 1990 (L 34-7 vs. Oklahoma City Twisters)

MLFS Championships: None

Stadium

Garry Berry Stadium

Marketing

Team Colors: Forest Green, Silver & White²

Ownership

Owners: Will Perkins, Randy Anderson, Bob Fenkel, et al.

Attendance

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Print Download

Source: Grantz, Marty. “Minor-league owners hope to revive team”. The Gazette Telegraph (Colorado Springs, CO) September 17, 1990

Background

Pretty terrific on the field. Pretty messy off of it. That was more or less the book on the Colorado Spring Spirit. The semi-pro football outfit won 17 of 23 games over two seasons before its players and coaches simply walked away from their first place team midway through its sophomore campaign in the Minor League Football System.

The MLFS harbored ambitions of becoming a developmental league for the NFL, somewhat in line with the role the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) played for the NBA at the time. Like the CBA, the MLFS sought to have a nationwide footprint and its teams stretched from the Pacific Northwest to New England and down to Florida. Unlike the CBA, the MLFS did not pay its players, tasking teams instead with finding local jobs for its players during the late summer/autumn season.

The jobs-not-pay scheme would prove to be one of the Spirit’s eventual downfalls, as players found it difficult to support themselves with the type of employment and housing arrangements offered by Spirit management.³[/mfn]

Debut Season

The Spirit ranked among the league’s upper echelon in the debut season of 1989. After compiling an 8-4 regular season record, the Spirit won two playoff games en route to a championship game clash with their in-state rivals, the Pueblo Crusaders, on November 18th, 1989. The Crusaders got the best of the Spirit in a 21-14 victory before a league record crowd of 8,463 fans at Pueblo’s Clark Stadium.⁴

Shannon Ireland Trump

There was a bizarre footnote to 1989 season. A solidly built 25-year old cheerleader going by the name of Shannon Ireland Trump infiltrated the Spirit dance team. Trump, who claimed to be the niece of Donald Trump, was actually a trans woman and notorious area con artist named Charles Daugherty. Daugherty was asked to leave the all-female cheer squad later in 1989 after an anonymous tip-off call to the team.

The following year, the 26-year Daugherty enrolled at local Coronado High School pretending to be an 11th grade exchange student from Greece named “Cheyen Weatherly”. Somehow, Daugherty’s ruse lasted a week, during which time he made the cheerleading squad, performed at a pep rally and joined the school choir. Daugherty was arrested, sparking nationwide headlines and an appearance on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show. Daugherty remained a fixture in salacious Colorado Springs media stories over the next two decades owing to an over-the-top series of cons, arrests and mental competency hearings.

Demise

After falling one game short of the MLFS championship in 1989, the Spirit raced out to a 7-0 start in 1990. But three days after absorbing their first (and only) loss of the season on September 2, 1990 the Spirit simply unraveled. Head Coach Pete Riehlman resigned citing health reasons and “nerves”.⁵ Running back Rick Gales, far and away the MLFS leading rusher in 1990, followed Riehlman out the door the same day along with three fifths of the offensive line.

By the weekend only 22 players remained as the team gathered to board a bus for a road game in Pueblo. The remaining players and coaches voted not to get on the bus, recognizing they could not safely compete with a such a decimated squad. League by-laws called for the immediate termination of a franchise that failed to appear for a game and the Spirit were expelled from the league.

The Spirit were the second MLFS team to fold in midseason in two weeks, shrinking the league from 12 to 10 teams. League officials scrambled to shorten the regular season before anything else could go wrong. Three weeks after the Spirit collapsed, the MLFS played its second and final championship game on September 29th, 1990.

The Minor League Football System quietly went out of business shortly thereafter.

Voices

“She was not what we would consider a very feminine, pretty cheerleader. But she scored high enough to become the head cheerleader. If you judge people on the way they look, you’re not doing a very good service to mankind, right?”

– Betsy Acree, Spirit Entertainment Coordinator (Speaking to The Colorado Spring Gazette Telegraph about Charles Daugherty/”Shannon Ireland Trump” in 1990)⁶