Delmarvelles start ‘no boys allowed’ league

With Super Bowl XLIV just a few days away, Dover’s Sandy Kinkus and some of her closest friends are bracing themselves for a sad reality — football is over until September.

Along with nine other area women in their 50s and 60s, Kinkus became fanatical about the NFL this season after they started their own fantasy football league.

Kinkus and friend Doris Solomon created the league — named the Delmarvelles since all 10 participants live on the Delmarva Peninsula — following their participation in a similar league the year before.

“We were in a football league last year,” Kinkus said. “But they were a keepers league. We learned a lot, but by the time we got there all the best players were taken.”

Solomon added that on top of their old league having a keeper format, it also was co-ed, something she wanted to get away from.

“We only wanted ladies in our league,” she said.

“There were no males allowed,” Kinkus added. “The whole idea was to get a group of gals that didn’t know that much about football together for a learning experience.”

Finding other women to join the league, Solomon said, was her biggest concern in starting things. However, the response was greater than she had expected.

Friends Carol Doyle, Linda Gehling, Jenny Harris, Jan Kirk, Nancy Wallace, Karen Smith, Robin Engstenberg and Julie Solomon joined the two founders to form the Delmarvelles.

“I was kind of scared and was thinking we wouldn’t be able to get enough girls,” Doris said. “But Sandy knows a lot of people and now we have a waiting list if people drop out.”

The league appointed Doris’ husband, Marv, the commissioner and held a live draft. Each team bought in with $25, and drop/add player transactions cost $1 apiece.

The final total of money was split up and awarded to the first-, second- and third-place winners, with a portion paying for a trophy to be presented to the league champion, who just so happened to be Kinkus.

Doris came in second, followed by Kirk in third place. Marv said that every woman that participated, though, did much better than he thought they would.

“These ladies really got into it,” he said. “Surprisingly, they did very well. Throughout the season, they were on the website. They were into it. They did a lot of drop/add and learned a lot.”

Once the season started, Doris said football would take up chunks of her time and that on more than one occasion she was up late reading up on trends or watching games.

“I put in quite a bit of time,” she said. “In fact, Marv got a little irritated because I was a bigger football fan than he was.”

On top of learning the game, though, Kinkus said starting and playing in a fantasy football league had other benefits.

“It gives us and our husbands something else to talk about,” she said.

Marv, however, looked at Kinkus’ view differently, and said his wife’s obsession with football gave him the chance to get some payback.

“The biggest thrill for me was that they really got into football,” he said. “And for my wife, I was able to say, ‘Oh, Doris, that’s all you do is watch football!’ She used to scream at me for doing the same thing years ago, so that was funny to be able to turn it around on her.”

The Delmarvelles already are making preparations for next season and plan to meet again in April for the NFL Entry Draft.

Kinkus said she and the rest of the group already are itching to get started for next year, and expects things to get more competitive now that the women have learned as much as they have.

“The group really gels together,” she said. “We were all learning this year so it was friendly and we didn’t trash talk … but we might get into that next year.”

Email Brian Citino at brian.citino@doverpost.com