Nearly 51 years after teaming up with her husband, Cliff Crase, to start Sports N Spokes (SNS) magazine, co-founder Nancy Crase has died. Nancy died in Phoenix on Feb. 3, with her adopted daughter, Tori, by her side. She was 81. Unfortunately, SNS didn’t learn of her passing until late this summer, when Tori told them.
In 1975, Nancy and her now-late husband began working on the first issue of SNS on paste-up boards on the dining room table and living room floor of their Phoenix home. Nancy half-jokingly asked aloud while working on that first issue, “I wonder if Time magazine does it this way?” she was quoted as saying in From The Floor Up in the May 2015 issue of SNS.
The magazine was meant to be a six-issue experiment. Five decades later, SNS is still rolling strong.
SNS Is Born
Nancy’s journey with SNS began with Cliff, a U.S. Air Force veteran who sustained a quadriplegic spinal cord injury in a car accident during his service. He was a member of the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) and wrote a sports column called Cliff’s Corner in what was then called Paraplegia News (now PN).
Cliff always had enough content to fill an entire magazine with adaptive sports stories, and he eventually did. A Chicago native and University of Illinois graduate, Nancy contributed to the birth of SNS by growing up around her family’s printing business. That background put her on the production side of operations, according to Sherri Shea, who spent 47 years with PVA working on both magazines and retired as operations manager in 2025.
Nancy designed the layouts, scaled the photos, worked with the printer, labeled each issue by hand, and then took them to the post office. She also helped spread the word about the new SNS. She hand-typed 5,000 labels to stick on subscription cards and send to people on Cliff’s large contact list. All that typing brought in 704 initial subscriptions at $4 each for six issues. The married couple’s new adaptive sports magazine grew from there.
Cliff was named editor-in-chief of PN in 1978, and just six years after launching SNS, PVA bought the publication in 1981. This allowed Cliff and Nancy to hire a staff to help produce the magazine, which they had managed on their own since its inception.
In addition to helping produce the magazine, Nancy also took photos and wrote stories for years. She and Cliff were regulars at numerous adaptive sporting events across the country, which helped them connect with readers.
In that May 2015 article, she recalls parents coming up to her at junior competitions, telling her they hadn’t understood what was possible for their child until they saw it treated as a real sport in print.
“That made the difference for many of them,” she says in From The Floor Up. “They suddenly thought, ‘Oh, I can take this and run with it.’”
That influence on young people inspired Nancy to help create the SNS Junior Athlete of the Year award in 1986, which has encouraged young athletes with disabilities to pursue excellence for 40 years. The 2026 SNS Junior Athlete of the Year was awarded to 17-year-old Mary MacDonald from Taunton, Mass., earlier this year (read more about her in Finding Her Speed on page 22).
From the days of laying out the magazine at her home to celebrating its 50th anniversary last year, SNS has reached new heights, a concept Nancy knew well.
New Heights
Before helping pilot SNS to success, Nancy was a pilot.
Nancy’s father and brother were both pilots, but her then-boyfriend, Cliff, truly inspired her to fly, according to a tribute from the Ninety-Nines (99s), an international organization of women pilots founded in 1929 by aviation pioneers including Amelia Earhart.
The tribute recounts how Nancy earned her pilot’s license in 1967 using her family’s plane and became a lifetime member of the Phoenix Ninety-Nines in 1971. She flew in international races, edited the chapter newsletter and later became chapter chair in 1975.
According to the tribute, Nancy stepped back from flying and from her day-to-day leadership at SNS in 1990, when she and Cliff adopted Tori. The Ninety-Nines tribute says Nancy called motherhood her proudest accomplishment.
Former PVA Publications Circulation Coordinator Suzi Hubbard was also raising a daughter then and remembers trading stories with Nancy about the challenges of raising girls.
“Her sense of humor shone through when she talked about Tori,” Hubbard says. “We shared many chuckles with each other about our kids.”
Nancy spent the following years raising Tori and caring for Cliff, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007. By 2018, Nancy was back in the air and with the Ninety-Nines, camera in hand at every event, even as her health began to slip, according to the tribute.
“She always amazed me with her confidence and ambition,” Hubbard says. “She was smart and never afraid of a challenge.”
Both Nancy and Cliff built a lasting legacy.
“I can remember when we went to a sporting event when PVA owned us, and they were sponsoring an event … and you can see a banner with Sports ‘N Spokes on it, and I’m thinking, ‘Man, we’ve come a long way,’” Nancy says in From The Floor Up in the May 2015 issue. “From the point where I’m sorting the pages on the living room floor to now, there’s a banner at a sporting site — that was impressive.”