NFL History | Eastern High School, East Capitol Street — The Professional Game That Never Got a Building

On 28 June 2003 the D.C. Divas beat the Connecticut Crush 76–0 on the field of a public high school on East Capitol Street, and went through to the second round of the National Women's Football Association playoffs. It was the first playoff game in the franchise's history. A United States Army photographer, Specialist Bill Putnam, was there, which is the only reason a picture of it can be shown here.

The Divas were founded in 2000 as one of ten charter clubs in the NWFA and played their first full-contact season in 2001, losing more than they won that year and never again. By 2003 they were 7–1 and had a running back, Donna Wilkinson, whom the club's own history credits with the first thousand-yard rushing season in the sport — a claim the club states carefully, as the first known one. They lost the conference semi-final to Philadelphia a fortnight after this game.

Here is the mechanism, and it is this collection's oldest argument reaching a place the National Football League left behind seventy years ago. **The women's professional game never got a building.** Thread by thread, the men's league's early history is a history of tenancy — a handshake with a baseball club at Wrigley Field (memory 6687), a university's spare grandstand in Boston (6704), a school board's lease in Houston (6705). The National Football League grew out of that, slowly, through a fifty-thousand-seat rule and a hundred years of public stadium finance. The women's professional game did not. This club has played through three leagues and won three national titles, and its own franchise history, in the version on its website dated 22 August 2025, puts its record at 139–46 over nineteen seasons and describes those 139 victories as making it, at that date, the winningest team in the history of women's football. That claim is the club's own and is made about women's football, not about the sport at large; it has not been checked here against an independent register. The Women's Football Alliance team page lists the club's home field as Annandale High School in Virginia. **Status note: the Divas material in this paragraph was checked on 3 September 2026 against the club's own history page and the league's team page, and both should be re-checked before anyone relies on them.**

The geography makes the point without needing to argue it. The stadium at 2400 East Capitol Street — RFK, memory 6893 — stood about 750 metres east of this field, on the same street, and in June 2003 it was in use. The women's professional league played its playoff football down the road from it, on a school pitch, in front of the scattered crowd visible in the photograph.

One figure is worth setting beside that. The Divas' largest recorded crowd in this period, about 8,200, came the following year and not for a league fixture: it was a charity game against a men's team assembled by a local sports radio show, which the Divas lost 28–6. The record attendance for women's football in the region was drawn by the novelty of women playing men.

After the 2004 season the club left this field for the Prince George's Sports and Learning Complex in Landover, Maryland. It won the NWFA title in 2006, moved to the Independent Women's Football League in 2007 and to the Women's Football Alliance in 2011, and took national championships in 2015 and 2016.

Coordinate: 38.890600, -76.980300, from Wikidata's P625 for Eastern High School. OpenStreetMap places the school at 38.890935, -76.979014 from its A Street frontage, and the Census TIGER address point for 1700 East Capitol Street NE returns 38.889859, -76.980691. The three span about 120 metres, which is the width of a campus filling the block between East Capitol Street and A Street NE. **The playing field is a separate part of that site and is not separately located here**, so this coordinate marks the school rather than the exact patch of grass in the photograph. Precision ±200 m.

Cover: Takiyah Washington of the D.C. Divas reaching the Connecticut quarterback in the first quarter, photographed by Specialist Bill Putnam, United States Army, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. The file's caption gives the date as 28 June without a year and the record date as 2 July 2003; the Divas and the Crush met in the playoffs only in 2003, which is what fixes it. Note what is behind the players: aluminium bleachers, perhaps a hundred people, a chalked grass field.