Yahoo Sports 15 Women Now Coach In The NFL. So What?
For Buffalo Bills coaching fellow Amelia “Milli” Wilson, football isn’t just her job—it’s in her blood. The Philadelphia native’s earliest memories involve watching Eagles games at age 3 with her family of die-hard fans. Her father, Lawyer Wilson, Jr., who once played for the New Orleans Saints under legendary coach Jim Mora, would perch her on his knee and teach her about the game.
But even though football was her first love, she wasn’t sure if it would—or could—love her back. “I didn’t see anyone who looked like me,” she tells Women’s Health. “It was just kind of like, ‘Well, girls can’t really be in football.’” Wilson played tackle and flag for a few years but ultimately switched to basketball, which she believed was her ticket to a Division I college scholarship.
It wasn’t until her senior year of high school in 2020, fresh off a knee injury that ended her basketball career, that Wilson realized her career could follow a different path. She’d already heard that women were making moves as coaches in the NFL: In 2020, former San Francisco 49ers offensive assistant Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in a Super Bowl, and Cleveland Browns chief of staff Callie Brownson became the first woman to coach an NFL position group in a regular-season game. By 2021, Jennifer King became the first Black woman to serve as a full-time assistant position coach when she was promoted to assistant running backs coach with the Washington Football Team. And soon after, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV, making the team’s female coaches, Lori Locust and Maral Javadifar, the first to win the NFL’s biggest prize.
“My brain flipped a switch,” says Wilson, who will graduate from college this May. “If they’re doing this, then there must be a way that I can do it too and get back to that lifelong dream of mine.” She’s now a Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellow for the Bills, working with one of the best offensive lines in the league and preparing for the NFL playoffs this month.
For Locust, who is now at the end of her sixth NFL season and working as defensive quality control coach for the Tennessee Titans, stories like that give her goosebumps. “Those are the things I love most,” she says. “It just gives validity to somebody to say it’s possible.”
This season in the NFL, there are a record 15 women coaching full-time, the most in any male sports league in the world and a 47 percent increase from the 2021-22 season. It’s also a 1,400 percent increase from 2015, when the Arizona Cardinals hired Jennifer Welter as an assistant coaching intern, making her the first woman to coach in the NFL.
But these women say the real progress isn’t in the stats or superlatives—it’s in the fact that having women on the sidelines and in high-level team positions is much less of a novelty than it was when Milli Wilson was growing up.
“It’s becoming less of a story. It’s just the fabric, which is kind of what we’ve wanted,” Locust says. “Nobody wanted to disrupt anything about football.”
They just want to be a part of it.
These days, Wilson has the same hope for the future of women in football as Locust, who was once her idol and is now her peer. It’s pretty simple: They want this to not be a story at all. And in small ways, that’s already starting to happen, says Sam Rapoport, the NFL’s senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She says that a woman even called plays in preseason this year, but it wasn’t publicized at that coach’s request.
“As long as we can continue to show that we can help get the guys better and do our job at a high level, then everything else should take care of itself,” Wilson says. “I think that’s just the goal for all of us, to just make it the norm—just make it the standard.”
A Portrait Of The NFL
In early October, Locust spent the Titans’ bye week at her home in Tampa, Florida, where she’d previously decided to put down roots when she was with the Buccaneers. During her time off, she hired a company to work on home repairs, and during a consultation, its owner made a confession: “My daughter was so excited that I was coming to talk to you,” he told Locust. The owner’s daughter was a huge fan of hers and a supporter of women in sport. “But I have to tell you—I’ve never heard of you.”
Locust was thrilled. “That tells me that I’m doing my job, because you shouldn’t hear about me. You really shouldn’t know who I am,” she says. “You should just know that during that time that I was here, Tampa was pretty successful and Tampa won a Super Bowl.”
Think about it: Can you name any assistant coach or quality control coach or member of the operations team or kitchen staffer on your favorite professional sports team? What matters more: their gender or their ability to win games?
Head coaches and general managers are starting to see things the same way, and that’s been years in the making, Rapoport says. Rapoport is the brains behind the NFL Women’s Forum, an invite-only, multiday conference held yearly at the NFL Scouting Combine to help qualified women learn more about job opportunities in the league and network with head coaches and team leadership. (The combine, a four-day event held in Indianapolis in late February and early March, showcases college football players ahead of the NFL Draft and is one of the few opportunities for decision-makers from all 32 teams to convene in one place.) Many teams make big hires from the connections made there.
“Once you experience the program and you meet the participants, your mind starts to change about women in coaching and the candidates that are out there,” Rapoport says. At the eighth annual Women’s Forum, in February 2024, all of the full-time female NFL coaches (12 at the time) sat on the same stage together for the first time—and while on the surface that looks like a fantastically orchestrated PR moment, Rapoport’s main objective was to spark a new line of thinking for some of the decision-makers in the room.
“To see that many people on stage—women from all walks of life, all genders, all different races and ethnicities, different sexual orientations, what have you—it showed such a beautiful diversity of what the NFL looks like now,” Rapoport says. “And I really believe that that image helped increase the number from 12 to 15, even in one year.”
Let one thing be clear: “It’s not demanding women be hired,” Rapoport insists. “It’s demanding that you’re considering the whole pipeline.”
The Ripple Effect
Former Carolina Panthers head coach Ron Rivera once famously stood up at an NFL owners’ meeting and asked the group why they had not considered hiring the other 50 percent of the population. “This is not just about checking the box,” he told WH back in 2022. “This is about developing the best teams and the best coaches.”
At the first Women’s Forum, in 2017, only three NFL teams sent coaches and executives to participate, Rivera being one of them. By 2021, then-New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, a legendary six-time Super Bowl winner, was speaking on a panel and sharing his email address with attendees. The following year, all 32 clubs signed on in some way.
“When the program started, what we heard from first-time head coaches is ‘I’m willing to do this and I’m all about it, but not in my first year’—because they were worried about it,” Rapoport says of the optics. “Now what we’re seeing is ‘I want this in my first year because it’s a competitive advantage.’” Just this season, Panthers first-year head coach Dave Canales hired Women’s Forum participant Genevieve Humphrey as an assistant strength and conditioning coach.
Many current head coaches have been exposed to more progressive environments in the last decade and are more accustomed to seeing women in roles traditionally held by men. The trickle-down effect is real. Canales, for example, was the offensive coordinator for the Buccaneers, Locust’s former team, before he was hired by the Panthers early last year.
Another example: Back in 2018, the Panthers’ Rivera hired Jennifer King for an internship after meeting her at the Women’s Forum. (When Rivera moved on to Washington, she joined him as a full-time assistant coach.) After Panthers defensive coordinator Sean McDermott became the Buffalo Bills’ head coach, he went on to hire at least seven women in coaching roles over the years, including Wilson. In 2022, former Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll hired two women when he became head coach of the New York Giants.
Rapoport says about 13 women have entered the NFL coaching pipeline thanks to Rivera’s leadership in this area. “When you start with the person who cares and you allow people under him to have that experience, it cascades down,” she says. “You need to experience it. You need to get a feel for it first to see that there’s no boogeyman in the room.”
Increased opportunities for women at the college level is also expanding the hiring pool—Wilson, for one, was a student offensive assistant working with the quarterbacks at the University of Missouri, where she will graduate this May. That type of high-level experience not only looks great on a résumé but also allows coaches to experience an intense, busy football season. “Experience has to be primary and steps cannot get skipped in an effort to get to this level,” Locust says. “It’s really, truly on the person themselves to carve that path.”
Now that we’ve gotten the headline-making “firsts” out of the way, it’s even easier to focus on the game.
Knocking On The Front Door
Five years ago, Catherine Hickman and Ameena Soliman were working for the Philadelphia Eagles and decided to start an informal WhatsApp group called “NFL FB Ops Women” to connect with other women like them. They went to the websites of all 32 NFL teams and invited women working across all branches of football to join. “What we were trying to do is get to know each other and promote vertical growth for women once they are in the league. We felt there was kind of a void there,” Hickman says. “It started with just 30 of us, and it’s over 140 now across the 32 teams.”
The women share work questions and open positions on their teams, and they host professional development events, panels, and happy hours. Soliman also spearheads a mentorship program that pairs senior and junior women from different departments to help build new relationships. In 2023, the league wanted in: Troy Vincent Sr., the executive vice president of football operations for the NFL, has been working with them to enhance their efforts.
Hickman, who is now the assistant general manager and vice president of football operations for the Cleveland Browns, knows firsthand the value of diverse perspectives in positions of power. In her first season with the Browns, the team traded for quarterback Deshaun Watson and signed him to an unprecedented, fully guaranteed $230 million contract—while he was facing allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate conduct by more than two dozen women (Watson denies any wrongdoing and settled the claims against him). It’s just one example of the NFL’s difficult history in handling these types of allegations against players, and one of the reasons Hickman says diversity is a top priority when making hiring decisions.
“I do think about things differently and I look at things differently. I think that’s important,” she says. “If we have 10 Catherines around the table, guess what we’re going to get? Catherine’s solution. But if it’s a group of us that all think differently, look differently, different age groups, experiences—I think overall you’re going to get to the best solution.”
That also doesn’t mean only bringing women into the room. “I want the best person,” Hickman says. “I just don’t want the women to start with a strike behind. I want everybody to be on the same playing field, and then may the best win.”
While Hickman and her staff have made multiple hires from the Women’s Forum, they’re also starting to look beyond that—and that’s the point, Rapoport says. “Its intent was to build a side door into the NFL, because women weren’t able to get in the front door. But I feel like every year, we’re slowly moving that side door to front of house,” she says. “The clubs are the reason that this program will become obsolete, because they will go and find these people on their own instead of necessarily needing the Forum. But until then, we’ll keep doing it.”
Forging Their Own Path
High-profile jobs in the NFL are scarce; they’re also notoriously unstable and ever-changing. If the head coach or general manager who hired you is relieved of their duties, that means you might be next. That’s why it’s so important for the folks in charge to hire the right people—and for the people filling those roles to be ready to go all in, work hard, and prove themselves.
“I would always tell the guys that you can’t have broken focus when you’re here. You have to be 100 percent locked in, and I feel like it’s a lesson that I had to learn too,” Locust says, having spent the past few years working on multiple NFL coaching staffs. “I just have to focus on what’s in front of me. Jen King always says it: ‘Be where your feet are.’ That’s kind of all you can do. Everything else around it has to just be noise and you have to tune it out.”
When Locust meets young coaches and other women in the league, the first thing she wants to talk to them about is the work. What did they do to improve this player’s game? What’s it like working with that superstar? And sometimes: How do you feel about walking off the team plane at 3 a.m. and being back in the building at 6 a.m.? “It is cool to, every once in a while, think about maybe we’ve been the spark to some of these women, but it’s all their hard work that takes it from there,” Locust says. “To me, that’s much more valuable.”
Wilson, for one, believes she has the drive to excel in a field that sometimes requires missing holidays and big milestones, spending months away from family, and working 16-to-17-hour days all season long. “My parents have always taught me that I can achieve anything I want to in this world, but it’s not going to be handed to me,” she says. “It’s not going to be given. I have to earn it.”
The job is hard, but the acceptance of women in this male-prevalent field should be simple. “We just love football,” Locust says. “That doesn’t carry a gender at all.”
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