Women’s talent is already influencing the NFL playing fields

The influence and talent of women is increasingly reflected in the ultimate and most important product that the NFL offers: the games that we watch every year, every weekend, during the fall and winter. Even his work can already boast the conquest of a Super Bowl.

The talent of women on the practice field and video rooms is already part of several final scores in the NFL.

The league was slow to do so, but it has made significant strides on gender equality and inclusion since 1983 when Al Davis, then owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, made Amy Trask the first chief executive officer (CEO) of a team in league history.

For more than three decades, the role of women in the NFL was limited to executive positions, such as that of Trask, who was in charge for 14 years, or owned by franchise owners such as Georgia Frontiere, who became the main owner of the Los Angeles Rams after the death of her husband Carroll Rosenbloom in 1979, or Gayle Benson, who in 2018, after the death of her husband Tom, adopted the same role in the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans of the NBA .

However, the talent of women transcended the desks and boardrooms and reached the playing fields. In the 2021 season, the NFL saw the largest group of women in its history in coaching staff positions around the league with 12 directly involved in player development and performance and four referees.

The influence of women’s work and ability to get involved in American football and in a league that not long ago it was believed that there was no room for them on the training and playing fields, reached a milestone on Sunday, September 27 2020, when Jennifer King, then an intern on coach Ron Rivera’s staff at the Washington Football Team (now called the Washington Commanders), Callie Brownson, Cleveland Browns chief of staff, and Sarah Thomas , who was part of the umpiring staff, met to make that game the first regular-season game with three women involved.

In 2021, Rivera hired King as an assistant running backs coach, which also made her the first African-American to hold a full-time assistant coaching job in the NFL.

The incursion of 12 women on various coaching staffs and four more women on refereeing rosters often goes unnoticed, but it is tangible proof that several NFL teams have begun to value talent regardless of gender and not it is only an advertising act to fulfill some gender quota.

If anyone knows anything about this, it’s Lori Locust, who began breaking stones to be recognized as a coach in 2008 and her work has led her to become the first position-specific female coach in NFL history, after being hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as defensive line assistant coach in 2019.

Watching the final score of any game, it’s worth remembering that it’s becoming more and more likely that behind the victory of one of those teams is the work of a woman whose work is reflected in the conquest of a victory in the Super Bowl

“There’s something about being a trailblazer that makes it seem like I’m doing this for reasons other than just training. That’s why I don’t like that word,” Locust told the NFL Network about his coaching career since the high school level. “I’ve never operated under the premise of, ‘I’m going to do something no one else has done.’ That has never been my motivation. I just wanted to get better.

“I wanted the defensive linemen in my charge to be absolutely obnoxious, fearsome, hated in any league I’ve coached in and I needed to know how to do that better than anyone else (coach) I faced,” Locust added.

The 57-year-old Locust’s intent seems to echo around the NFL.

Of the 12 women who started the 2021 season on a coaching staff in the league, six held a full-time position: King with the Commanders, Brownson with the Browns, Emily Zaler as the Denver Broncos’ assistant player performance coach, Sophia Lewis as assistant offensive coach and Maral Javadifar, along with Locust, as Buccaneers strength and conditioning coach.

With the exception of Lewis, all had previous NFL experience as interns.

The rest of the 12-member group is made up of Heather Marini with Tampa Bay; Angellica Grayson with Washington; Katie Sowers with the Kansas City Chiefs; Jada Gipson and Alex Hanna with the Browns and Tessa Grossman with the Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons.

They all came to the NFL at different times as a product of the Bill Walsh Diversity Scholarship Program for Coaches. Sowers even became the first woman to be part of a Super Bowl coaching staff, when she worked as an assistant offensive coach with the San Francisco 49ers. On that occasion they faced the Chiefs in the LIV edition of the NFL title game, the latter team in which Sowers was in 2021.

Sowers couldn’t top off her feat with a championship ring, but in the 2020 season, Locust and Javadifar accomplished it by becoming the first women to win a Super Bowl as part of a coaching staff.

Beyond the administrative work in the NFL and in which they have made their way to leadership and even managerial positions that influence decision-making on the formation of rosters, women have begun to make a mark in the way those rosters are made. They work from the preparation in the preseason in the training camps, the corrections and reinforcement in the techniques of the players, the strategies created in the video rooms.

The women will not stop there. Their goal is to influence more than they already do in the NFL and it may not be long before we subconsciously know that behind the final score of the games is the work of one or more women.