It was a lark – the idea of a group of bored girls – that turned into a national sensation. The day in 1939 when Luverne “Toad” Wise Albert tried out for the Escambia High School football team ended up making history.

Albert (1922-1982) was the first female football player in Alabama and, according to some sources, she was the first female player in the nation to score in a game against male players. (There were adult all-female teams at the time and this 1940 college football program lists as a bit of trivia that Esther Burnham played for an otherwise-male Connecticut team in 1935 at age 14. It did not say if she ever scored.).

For Albert, all that mattered was, “those were two of the best years of my life,” as she told an Alabama Journal reporter for an August 1979 article.

Here’s how it went down:

At the start of football season in 1939, a group of about a dozen girls from Escambia County High joked with Coach Andy Edington that they had nothing to do, so they planned to try out for the team. Edington didn’t object; in fact, he dared them to come to practice.

All the girls showed up as part of the “prank,” but only one – a blonde slip of a girl known as “Toad” (a childhood nickname that stuck) – took the challenge seriously.

“About 12 of us tried out but I was the only one that stuck,” she was quoted in the Journal article. “We worked out with them for about a week.”

It turned out, Albert was a natural field-goal kicker, hitting about 75 percent of her attempts. She stayed and was made a member of the Blue Devils team. Later, she learned to pass and played quarterback a time or two.

“Toad,” who would eventually marry Tony Albert and settle down in Atmore, was a player for her junior and senior years at the high school. Dozens of newspapers published stories about her and her photo was in Life magazine.

Albert didn’t wear pads and she didn’t always sit on the bench with the boys. Instead, she’d run down from the stands when needed. Her “uniform” was more of a “cute” outfit.

Edington said in a 1985 article in the LA Times: “We dressed her in a cute little ballet skirt. The only requirement in the rule book about equipment pertained to head gear, so we got a helmet and cut holes in it so her curls would come out,” he said.

A Dec. 5, 1961, article in the Mobile Press-Register said her uniform was “a silver skirt and shorts with matching blue and silver blouse.” She also had one with a dark skirt and white blouse, photos show. Edington found a pair of women’s size 6 cleats and, even though Albert wore a 5 ½, she managed to make them work.

But there was another problem, Edington said. He thought Albert would be a draw for the school’s team but, “I had a boy that just didn’t miss extra points. She would miss now and then. What we agreed to do was that every time we would be 20 points ahead, she would go in. So our team went wild to make points to get the girl into the huddle.”

The school even promoted the fact that it had a girl player and people came from as far away as New Orleans to watch her play, according to the LA Times article.

“It packed the stadium and paid the stadium debt and made the team twice as good as it was because they wanted to get her into the game,” Edington recalled. Escambia’s record was 17-1 over the two seasons Albert played.

READ MORE: 13 female firsts in Alabama

As a junior in high school, Albert considered making football a career. “Some of my friends think I ought to try professional football when I get out of school but I think I’d rather coach a girls’ team,” she told the United Press in 1939.

Instead, she married, became a mother of two girls and operated a sporting goods store in Atmore with her husband.

In December 1940, Birmingham Post staff writer Harold Helfer wrote an open letter to the University of Alabama’s head coach Frank Thomas, asking Thomas to consider Albert for his team.

“Your great big boys of the mighty Crimson Tide this year have been able to kick less than half the point after touchdown,” Helfer wrote. “But little Luverne? Eleven times has she whammed her foot against the pigskin, and eight times the ball has sailed correctly and beautifully between the uprights of the goalposts. … She’s begun to learn to pass and … she threw two passes for the after-touchdown extra point.”

Helfer wrote that finances should be considered, “Since Luverne has been on the team, gate receipts at Atmore games have tripled! All the fans keep hollering all the time, ‘We want Toad, we want Toad, we want Toad!’”

Albert was inducted into the Atmore Hall of Fame in 2011. Three months after her 60th birthday, on July 18, 1982, she died of a heart attack. She is buried in Atmore’s Oak Hill Cemetery beneath a headstone marked with her legal name and “TOAD” etched beneath it.