Meet Sam Mullet: The first woman head coach in Michigan high school football history

BEAR LAKE, Mich. — The football field here is all of 40 yards long. There are no yard lines or out-of-bounds lines marked on the grass, but there is a goalpost.

Just one.

The field is plenty big enough to accommodate the entire Bear Lake High School football team. All 13 of them … and their coach.

After decades of not having a team of its own, Bear Lake, located in northwestern lower Michigan between Manistee and Traverse City, is in its seventh season of having an eight-player team. It plays its home games at nearby Brethren.

"We’ve got 13 players now," said coach Sam Mullet, "but we’ll be at 14 soon and there’s another one hanging around so we could be at 15."

Mullet is the head coach at a school with only 73 students. It is a Title I school, in which more than half of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

With 15 players, Bear Lake could almost have enough players to have an honest-to-goodness scrimmage.

"I do play a lot of scout quarterback out there," said Mullet, who just so happens to be the first woman to be the head coach of a varsity football team in Michigan.

Bear Lake is a rural community where most of the people hold jobs in Manistee or Traverse City or at Crystal Mountain.

It is home to Mullet, who played basketball, ran cross country and played on the boys golf team and now helps her mother teach third grade.

The elementary school and high school are housed in the same building and four classrooms are dedicated to the high school.

"I like it here," she said. "This is where I belong."

For now.

Playing scout team quarterback is nothing compared to what Mullet has accomplished in her mere 28 years on this planet.

She named a play for the Baltimore Ravens.

She returned kickoffs for the Buffalo Bills in training camp last summer.

She nearly had Tremaine Edmunds’ facemask tattooed on her left arm.

She helped design and then implement every aspect of the new program at Tift County High School in Georgia.

And now she is back home running the football program at her alma mater, which is 0-3 after losing Friday against Cedarville in De Tour.

"Sam was the natural choice," said John Prokes, the man she assisted before he stepped down last spring because of family issues. "Woman or not, intellectually, her knowledge of the game is one of the best I’ve ever been associated with for sure.

"She loves it. She breaks it down at a level it’s just unbelievable. She learns so quickly. She was a 4.0 student and valedictorian."

How her love of the game started

Mullet has been infatuated with football for decades and attended her first NFL game when she was 4 months old, while the family was visiting friends in Atlanta.

Her parents have had Michigan State football season tickets for decades; that is where she began viewing the game differently than most of the fans in Spartan Stadium.

"What I loved about football is the patterns," she said. "I wasn’t very old when I started noticing the patterns at those games. The way things were happening on the field, you can see it’s not random. You can see how it fits together.

"It’s like chess with big people trying to kill each other."

When she graduated, she took 47 college credit hours with her to college, and after she graduated from Concordia University with a degree in English in December 2016, she returned to Bear Lake.

She learned that Onekama had dissolved the co-op program it had for years with Bear Lake students.

The kids from Bear Lake could have transferred to Onekama and would have been immediately eligible because they were already playing there.

But they were adamant they wanted their own team in 2017.

When she returned home, Mullet visited Prokes in his classroom, as she often did when she was a student and the two would talk football.

She volunteered to help in any way possible – filming, keeping statistics, being the ball person.

"I got this playbook from my brother’s friend downstate," he told her. "Could you kind of look through it and see what you think?"

It was an eight-player playbook and she thought a lot. She began cutting up index cards and drawing plays. She watched eight-player games on YouTube. She drew up the best plays used in the state championship games and sorted them by formation and concept.

A few weeks later, Mullet told Prokes he should build on the playbook.

"Great, teach it to my players," he told her. "You obviously know the ins and outs of it, so just explain it to the players."

So Mullet went from researcher to something of a teacher.

She attended the summer workouts and taught them the new offense and they seemed to adapt well to it.

As August approached, Prokes told her: "Be ready to call the plays on Friday nights."

Mullet was mystified. First she was the research guy, then the teacher and suddenly she was the offensive coordinator?

"You know this the best," Prokes said. "You’ve been looking at this for six months. You just call it."

Getting to the big league

But let’s get back to the NFL. She has been in the NFL for two training camps. They were paid internships – while none of the interns got rich, they earned fair salaries.

It all began when she first became Bear Lake’s offensive coordinator. She garnered some publicity from that and was invited to attend the NFL’s 2019 Women’s Forum during the scouting combine in Indianapolis.

There was a question/answer session and a lot of women asked rather generic questions. Not Mullet.

"Oh, no, if I’ve got access to these brains, I’m asking serious questions," she said. "I wanted to know the X's and O's, started picking their brains. What do you do if a defense does this? How much time do you spend preparing for this? How much do you change your game plan on a weekly basis based on the other team, or how much do you stick to what you know?"

Afterward she sent Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh an email thanking him for taking the time to speak at the forum and for answering her questions.

She enclosed her résumé and eventually she received a phone call, saying offensive coordinator Greg Roman would be calling her for an interview.

At the conclusion of the interview, he said she had one of the four or five internships with the Ravens.

If you ask her how tall she is she will tell you: "I’m NFL elbow height."

Naturally, it comes with a back story. You see, Mullet worked with the Ravens tight ends.

"You know how the guys on the sidelines stand there with their hands on their hips?" she asked. "Well, whenever I would say, 'Hey Mark,' he would turn to look at me and his elbow would hit me in the face.

"I’m the perfect height that when Mark Andrews turns, his elbow hits my face."

To the rest of the free world, Mullet is 5-5. One day in the tight ends room, they were stuck for a name to call a certain play.

"This play needs a name, and had to fit certain criteria under 'Dodge,'" she said. "I said: 'Let’s call it Durango,' and the coach said: 'Done.'"

Several weeks into the season, Mullet received a text from the Ravens: "Hey, we’re using Durango this week. It’s on the list for the week."

You can imagine how Mullet felt when she saw the play work to perfection in the game.

Her time with Baltimore was devoted to nothing but football, except during lunch when she and the interns sat at the table with Harbaugh and his assistants.

Harbaugh took a genuine interest in Mullet and the other interns. He wanted to know what book she was reading. He wanted to know all about her brother, who had recently adopted two boys.

He talked with them about his favorite "Seinfeld" episodes.

He was very much a regular guy, except when it comes to football.

He also explained his views on how the NFL should run its overtime period. One team spots the ball and the other chooses to go on offense or defense.

"The way John’s mind work is outrageous," Mullet said. "He’s got this whole spreadsheet in his mind and the whole diagram of how it’s going to work out and why it’s better. You start thinking about it and it’s genius."

Georgia on her mind

After the 3½ weeks with the Ravens, Mullet returned to Bear Lake and the players riddled her with questions: What is Lamar Jackson like? Can she call Mark Andrews for them?

Mullet did not attempt to bring the Ravens offense to Bear Lake. Not even the "Durango" play made it – they would need more players to run it.

But there were some aspects that she could adapt to her Bear Lake players.

"They approach everything with a certain mentality and there’s no reason we can’t have the same mentality here," she told them. "This is your job and this is serious. You’re fighting for your teammates. Your sleep is just as important as what you eat. And what you eat is just as important as how you perform on the field.

"I’m trying to instill in the boys here there’s more to football than just the two hours we are at practice or the two hours we’re at a game. There’s no reason why you can’t prepare like an NFL guy."

In 2021, former Lowell High School coach Noel Dean, a hall of famer, took a job in Tift, Georgia, trying to resurrect a program longing for the success he enjoyed at Lowell, where he won three state championships.

He placed an ad in the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association’s newsletter, looking for a young assistant willing to help him build the program as something of a director of football operations.

Mullet applied and the interview didn’t last long before Dean offered her the job.

"She organized every aspect of our football program and implemented structure and accountability, and there was transparency to it all," said Dean. "It covered academics, character development, service hours."

Dean and Mullet spent every Wednesday afternoon teaching the eighth graders all about the program and what would be expected of them when they reached high school.

"After about four weeks of that, she took that class by herself a lot," Dean said. "It was kind of interesting watching her run that class. A room of 30 eighth-grade boys, and she did such a great job of engaging them.

"She’s a great kid. I would be really intrigued to see her teach third-graders. She’s a football coach, man!"

When Tift’s season began, Mullet also worked in the passing game, and on game nights signaled the plays into the quarterback.

She gave Dean a one-year commitment and was planning to return to Bear Lake as offensive coordinator for the 2022 season when she received a call from the Buffalo Bills.

The Bills flew her out for the team’s organized team activities, and she returned a few weeks later when training camp began.

She assumed she would be working with the offense, but head coach Sean McDermott had other ideas.

"Coach McDermott has this theory, and it’s a great theory, that you should cross-train as a young coach," Mullet said. "He wished when he was younger that he had learned more about the other side of the ball. When you submit an application to him of what your preference is, he picks the other one."

That is how she wound up coaching the linebackers, including Edmunds, who signed a massive contract with the Chicago Bears this spring, and Matt Milano.

"They were some dudes, for sure," Mullet said.

She worked with them, but nothing schematically. They needed something else from a coaching intern other than X's and O's.

"The things those kind of guys want is: 'How can you help me remember this?'" she said. "The volume of things those guys have going on in their brain is outrageous. They’re like: 'Do you have a handy way I can remember this or sort this in my brain so this fits with this?'

"They’re looking for ways to compartmentalize things and put defensive calls together."

Quite often, players asked Mullet to hang around after practice for a few minutes and hold a tackling dummy for them, which is how Edmunds accidently smacked her left arm and left the impression of his facemask on her arm for a few hours.

Then there were the occasions where she returned kickoffs and had the bejabbers scared out of her as 10 large men and a kicker raced at her.

"The guys are terrifyingly fast," Mullet said. "They just needed someone to be the kick returner so they can work on their angles. The special teams coach was saying they’re not going to hit me, and no they didn’t, but they got darn close.

"They finish through the ball and they’re about 2 inches away at top speed."

Ready for the top job

When she returned to Bear Lake before last season, Prokes informed her that her summer experience made her the ideal person to become the defensive coordinator.

"Our defense was the best part of our game last year," Prokes said. "She would do everything to prepare and get kids prepared for the game in the best way she could."

After last season, a family situation arose that made it impossible for Prokes to continue as head coach. In his mind, there was only one person for the job.

The program was his baby and he didn’t want anyone else running it other than Mullet.

"She’s got all the qualifications and capabilities to succeed, she just needed the opportunity," Prokes said. "She’s got the opportunity she deserved."

The immediate concern could have been how would the players respond to being coached by a woman.

Would there be a rebellion because the players might be too macho to be coached by a woman?

"We didn’t lose one player," Prokes said. "They know her, they know hard she works and they respect her knowledge of the game."

Truth be told, the players love being coached by Mullet, who many view as something of a big sister. They see all that she has accomplished and they know she has enough experience to be their coach.

"The gender doesn’t really matter, she’s a great football coach," sophomore wingback/defensive back Myles Harless said. "She’s been in the NFL. Not many guy coaches have been in the NFL. She knows so much football, It’s almost kind of dumb.

"Every time we have a question, she’s answering it because she knows so much about football it’s crazy. I love playing for her; she’s amazing."

The players grew up watching Mullet serve as an assistant in the program. They realize she will go the extra mile for them.

"It’s mostly her commitment," said senior running back/linebacker Coley Merrill. "Even before she was the head coach she did a lot for us. When she went away to Tift, she was still breaking down film for us in her free time.

"She’s had a commitment to us and she has a lot of grit."

Her practices can be intense, but also lighthearted. That was evident when a player was nearly offside on a kickoff.

"Pickles, you almost jumped it. It’s a good thing you’re slow."

When the boys begin getting silly, she can bring them back to the task at hand without screaming like a lunatic.

“Stop being a bunch of weirdoes and start playing freakin’ football.”

She proved again how much football she knows when Bear Lake trailed Bellaire, 20-8 in the opener.

In the past, that might have become a 40-8 deficit with a running clock.

This time, Bear Lake rallied and took the lead, though Bellaire came back to win, 28-22.

"It was great," said Merrill. "We came back once before in our history, but not from that much. We just had to work a few things out. She changed a few things up and we came back."

She also made an impression on Bellaire coach Jeff Hebden, who was quite taken with the way Mullet handled herself and her team in that game.

"Her players were well-disciplined," Hebden said. "They were well prepared for the game. The kids she had played hard and played disciplined football, played fundamental football. I was impressed with her and her kids.

"As a matter of fact, there were a couple of guys on our chain gang that were on that side of the field and one of them commented after the game: 'That lady knows her football.'"

The significance of that game wasn’t lost on Hebden.

"It was pretty incredible to be part of history like that and why not?" he said. "Why not a female head coach in football? She deserves to be there. They’re going to be successful with her at the helm."

Jim Nowak is Mullet’s lone assistant coach and he sits up in the booth on game nights, leaving Mullet as the only coach on the sidelines.

Sure enough, a player sprained his ankle and Mullet had to tape his ankle as the game went on without her.

She also had to tape a player’s fingers, and when the quarterback’s helmet broke it was Mullet who had to fix it.

Prokes was at the game and told her she needed more help. Mullet disagreed.

"To me, it was fine because Coach Jim and I have trained the boys," she said. "They have a different understanding of the game this year. I could leave them and turn my back on them and they could have called the defense for three or four plays and been OK.

"I wouldn’t just leave them out there to their own devices and the QB have a free-for-all for four quarters.”

Merrill said he doesn’t think Mullet needs any more assistant coaches.

"Nobody would change this," Merrill said. "She’s been doing the work the whole time. A lot of things we’ve been doing have been because of her knowledge. We trust everything she has to say."

There are only a couple of seniors on this team; quite often the Lakers are physically overmatched. Last week, they lost 66-0 to Marion, a team with almost twice as many students as Bear Lake.

There are only two schools playing eight-player ball with fewer students than the Lakers.

But these are Mullet’s guys and she sees a lot of potential that others might miss.

"They’re tough and they’re smart and they’re willing to do whatever, they just don’t have a ton of experience under their belts and there’s not very many of them," she said. "They have realized that there are only 13 of them – we’re headed to 15. They’re looking around and saying we’re the right 13 to make this happen."

What the future holds

When you see the interaction in practice between Mullet and her players, you know there is a genuine connection between her and the guys, and she loves coaching them.

But there's this thing she has for the NFL. She estimates there are about six or so women with on-field coaching jobs and right now she is enamored with the league.

She just isn’t sure what to do about it.

"I don’t know what I wanted to do in terms of pursuing the NFL," she said. "Do I want to go show up at John Harbaugh’s door and say, 'Look, I’m here. You can either pay me or not, but I’m here.'

"I could just show up. Why not? Put myself out there."

She has put herself out there already and after spending a few hours with her, you get the feeling Detroit Lions owner Sheila Ford Hamp would enjoy visiting with the only female head coach in Michigan.

At 28, Mullet said, there is nothing or no one preventing her from doing whatever she wants, wherever she wants.

She just has to decide what and where.

When she graduated from college she thought she would enjoy writing creative non-fiction. Now? Not so much.

"I’m not a planner," she said. "As far as what I’m going to do with my life, I’ll go one day at a time. Football will be in it. It wasn’t in the plan before, but it is now."

Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mickmccabe1. Order his book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” now at McCabe.PictorialBook.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan's first woman high school football coach leads with NFL mind