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Kirsten Grohs' CIS-CFL-NFL executive path got an assist from Marcel Bellefeuille
How did a 28-year-old from Kincardine, Ontario wind up as one of the highest-ranking female football operations executives in the NFL? Well, the answer has a lot to do with Canadian football, and with how Canadian leagues fit into the larger football world. The woman in question is Kirsten Grohs, the Jacksonville Jaguars' manager of football administration, who Ryan O'Halloran of The Florida Times-Union profiled in an excellent piece this week.
Grohs got her start as a student volunteer with the Golden Hawks football team at Waterloo's Wilfrid Laurier University while earning a degree in psychology and French, then applied for a master's program in sports administration at Ohio University, but was told she needed an internship to make the cut. Then-Laurier head coach and CIS legend Gary Jeffries (now the special-teams coordinator at Guelph) called his contacts with the CFL's Hamilton Tiger-Cats and convinced them to create an unpaid internship for Grohs, which eventually turned into a paid one and then a full-time position after she impressed in a variety of roles. She found a particular supporter in then-Hamilton head coach Marcel Bellefeuille (currently the receivers coach for the B.C. Lions) and his wife Julie.
Grohs used her internship to get into that master's program, where she excelled, but was then pondering what to do next before a May 2013 visit to the Bellefeuilles. Interestingly enough, Marcel was out of football himself at the time; he was fired as Hamilton's head coach after the 2011 season in favour of George Cortez, then was the offensive coordinator for the UFL's Omaha Nighthawks in 2012, and would later be hired as Winnipeg's offensive consultant and then offensive coordinator in August 2013. As O'Halloran writes, the Bellefeuilles came up with the strategy that helped Grohs get to the NFL:
Bellefeuille recommended Grohs include a $5 Starbucks gift card in her cover-letter-and-resume packet and send it to all 32 NFL teams.
“People like getting free stuff, it doesn’t matter what your stature in society is,” Bellefeuille says.
To save money, Grohs sent $3 gift cards, hoping to get a phone call, hoping to secure an internship — just hoping to get involved with the sport she fell in love with as a sophomore at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
Grohs’ letter to Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell was dated June 5, 2013. It read, in part:
“I have experience working in Football Operations at the collegiate and professional level in Canada and am extremely interested in continuing a career in this field. I would love five minutes of your time over coffee to talk about the industry and any advice you may have for me. In this letter, I have included a $3.00 gift card to Starbucks and a copy of my resume and references. Please enjoy a coffee on me, and at your convenience, I would truly appreciate hearing from you.”
Impressed by her ingenuity but more with her CFL experience, the Jaguars called Grohs, brought her to Jacksonville for an interview and hired her.
Since the Jaguars hired her, Grohs has overcome visa issues and been promoted twice in three years. She started as an executive assistant in 2013, then was given the title of contract research/salary cap analyst for 2014 and 2015, and was promoted to manager of football administration in June. She now is involved with everything from team travel arrangements to roster move paperwork submission to streamlining the team's computer records of contracts, as well as working on salary cap and CBA issues, and she'll soon begin working on contract negotiations. That's an impressive rise, and it speaks to both the lessons she learned in many of those areas with the Golden Hawks and Tiger-Cats and the potential she showed there:
“There wasn’t going to be anything that would stop her,” Jeffries says. “It was going to be very expensive and she knew that. But she was going to attack it like a bulldog and find a way.”
...Shortly after Grohs began working for the Tiger-Cats, Marcel and Julie Bellefeuille decided she was not just an employee and they went all-in on helping her.
“We just felt, ‘She is doing all of this because she has dreams and aspirations and someone along the way has to help her,’” Julie says.
If the Bellefeuilles were Grohs’ Hamilton emotional support, Alicia Brenzil was her professional beacon. As the Tiger-Cats’ director of football administration, she gave Grohs a crash course in operations — training camp organization, team travel (CFL teams fly commercial), forming a day-care center for the players’ children, making the play-list wrist-bands for the quarterbacks, picking up tryout players at the airport — CFL teams work with skeleton support staffs so having a jack-of-all-trades set of skills becomes an immediate strength.
“When I was looking at her background, she didn’t seem to be a fit for what we needed,” Brenzil says. “But when I sat down and talked to her about why she wanted to do this, I couldn’t help but fall in love with her enthusiasm for the sport. Kirsten really did create her own position because of her persistence and wanting to go after it.”
Grohs' path certainly can't be followed by everyone, as for every success story like hers, there are plenty of others who tried a similar path and never found long-term employment in football. That's the case for athletes as well as executives, of course, and it illustrates that you have to be just as motivated, talented and lucky to find success on the executive side as you do on the playing side. However, Grohs' story also illustrates the value of CIS and CFL positions, which can offer a lot of valuable experience to those just starting out. She started as a volunteer at Laurier, videotaping practices, helping the booster club, and arranging team travel, but then advanced to breaking down tape for assistant coaches, and she was able to work in a ton of different areas for the Tiger-Cats. All of that experience was crucial to her eventually landing the job with the Jaguars.
One final takeaway from Grohs' story is that it would be terrific to see more Canadians and women in high-level positions in the CFL. There's been significant progress on the Canadian front recently, and Hamilton has been a leader there with major football roles for Canadians (including assistant general managers Drew Allemang and Shawn Burke, plus offensive coordinator/receivers coach Stef Ptaszek), but only three of the nine general managers in the CFL were born in Canada (B.C.'s Wally Buono, Winnipeg's Kyle Walters and Ottawa's Marcel Desjardins), and the same's true for only two head coaches (Buono and Winnipeg's Mike O'Shea).
Women are even less represented in CFL football operations at the moment. There are numerous women in business-focused roles throughout the league, but very few in football operations and none in coaching. Canada has been a leader on that front in the past with Jo-Anne Polak (the Ottawa Roughriders' general manager from 1988-1992, and the first woman in that role in North American professional sports), and it would be great to see that again. There are unquestionably plenty of talented women like Grohs out there who can excel in football operations; it's just about giving them the chance.
