After only two years in Northeast Ohio, the Cleveland Crush of the Legends Football League — formerly the Lingerie Football League — will relocate to Toledo.
According to LFL Founder Mitchell Mortaza, Cleveland has been an incredible home for the Crush, and the Quicken Loans Arena a fantastic venue, but " the combination did not fit within [its] business model moving forward."
The Crush will play in Toledo's Huntington Center. The relevant management team hopes to attract crowds from not only Toledo, but Cleveland and Detroit as well. In other news, the Browns hope to make the playoffs this year.
Here's a brief selection from Kyle Swenson's piece on The Crush and the Lingerie League writ large in his news feature from September, 2011, when anticipation for women's football was at its height:
If most organized women's sports market their sex appeal on the sly, the LFL is openly fishing the waters. And that garish honesty has drawn prudish ire, eye-rolling dismissal, and perhaps an unfair rep as a holding pen for reality-TV wannabes, models, and other aspirants trying to start the clock on their 15 minutes. The league maintains that fans come for the beauty, then stay for the action — the football action, that is.Keeping the fans in the seats is key; the league has pulled out of cities where attendance and enthusiasm were low. The big question mark hovering over the enterprise here is whether a rust-belt burg — where the gridiron is holy ground — will take football spiked with a heady dose of skin seriously. The Crush is gambling Cleveland will appreciate the balance.
Looks like the gamble didn't pay off in quite the manner Mortaza & Co. were hoping.
The Crush will play two home games at the Huntington Center in Toledo on May 10 and June 21, open tryouts for the Crush will be held on January 4, location TBA).
And here's a bunch of photos from a Crush game last season, to relive some of the memories.
