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Josh Weinfuss
AMELIA WILSON LOVED basketball.
A decade ago, when she was 12, hoops was her thing. It wasn’t her first love, though. That was always football.
Starting when she was 3, Wilson remembers sitting with her father, former Div. III player Lawyer Wilson, Jr., and watching his beloved Philadelphia Eagles, who eventually became her beloved Eagles. They’d sit on the couch for a few hours on Sundays, and he’d teach her the game — the intricacies, the passion, the fandom. It was a way for a father and daughter to bond.
Wilson got hooked.
But she didn’t settle on just being a fan. That passion for the game evolved into a history-making journey. Wilson is entering her second season as an assistant coach with the Buffalo Bills, working with the offensive line.
“There was just something about football when I first watched it, it was like, ‘Man, I want to be a part of that. I want to play it. Anything I could do, I want to be in football,'” Wilson told ESPN.
Like with many childhood dreams, however, reality eventually interfered. As she got older, Wilson learned there weren’t many opportunities for women in football.
Things changed, however, on July 27, 2015.
That’s when Jen Welter was hired by former Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians as a training camp intern, becoming the first woman to coach in the NFL.
“It was larger than life, and yet so normal,” Welter said. “The idea of it was bigger than I could have ever dreamed possible as a little girl who remembered somebody telling me, ‘Girls don’t do that.’ …
“For us, it was so normal, but for the rest of the world, it was something that they had never seen before, and so many people were certain that it would fail.”
Wilson noticed.
“I think at the time it was like, ‘Wow, this really just happened,'” Wilson said. “Because obviously growing up that wasn’t a thing.
“So to hear about her story and see what she was doing, it was amazing, it was inspiring and encouraging. Because I always thought in the back of my mind, once I was done playing basketball, maybe there will be a time where women do get into football and then I could navigate my path to start getting into football. I think it definitely gave some sort of hope that, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a possibility that I could get into football one day.'”
In the 10 years since Welter was hired, the landscape for women in the NFL has changed significantly. Last season, Wilson was one of 15 women on NFL coaching staffs, according to the league. That’s just a fraction of the women in the NFL, however. There is at least one woman working for every team’s scouting department, and there are women working in analytics departments, front offices, football operations, strength and conditioning departments, and in training rooms. And there’s reason to believe a woman GM might be the next milestone.
“It goes to show what happens when you have an intentional effort behind something,” said Sam Rapoport, who recently left the NFL after spending the past nine years as a coordinator spearheading efforts to increase opportunities for women in the NFL, “and a leader in [NFL commissioner] Roger [Goodell] who wants this and requires it of us to make the league better by opening the door to everyone.”
THE HIRING OF women was slow going those first few years after Welter was hired.
Kathryn Smith became the first woman to be hired for a full-time coaching position when ex-Bills coach Rex Ryan hired her as a special teams quality control coach in 2016. But when Sean McDermott replaced Ryan in 2017, he didn’t retain Smith.
The Atlanta Falcons hired Katie Sowers as a training camp intern in 2016. A year later, Sowers joined the San Francisco 49ers as a Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellow.
Momentum began to shift in 2018, when 10 women were hired in coaching roles — three full time and seven interns — doubling the number from 2017.
Former Washington and Carolina coach Ron Rivera hired Jennifer King as a coaching intern three times, starting in 2018, before promoting her to the Commanders’ assistant running backs coach in 2021. She spent last year as the Chicago Bears‘ assistant running backs coach but is not currently with a team.
“They got to be willing to put up with it and deal with it and continue to fight and earn your stripes, earn the right to be there and do things the right way,” former Washington and Carolina coach Ron Rivera said. “And it’s not easy.”
In 2019, Arians made history when he hired two women as full-time coaches in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ staff.
As opportunities for women coaches increased, more were able to show they, just like their male counterparts, were qualified for the jobs, Rivera said.
“To make sure we were getting people that were qualified and good at what they do, you had to open up the pool of people who to interview and who to hire,” Rivera said.
Rivera even conducted an experiment. He said he took King’s name off her résumé to conceal her identity and showed it to other coaches while asking: “Would you hire that person?”
“I’ve had people tell me, ‘Yes,'” he said. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s funny because that’s who this is.’ And it’s like, ‘Wow, OK.'”
And, Rivera said, players don’t care who’s coaching them as long as that coach can help them get better.
“If you know your stuff and you can help them,” he said, “they’re all in”
In 2023, there were 10 full-season/full-time women coaches in the NFL, according to the NFL’s 2023 Racial and Gender Report Card. That number jumped to 15 in 2024, according to the NFL.
“It’s been exciting to see internships turn into full-time opportunities and assistant coaches,” King said. “The evolution has been exciting to see and it’s exciting to be part of it as well.”
As of August 2024, the number of women in coaching and football operations has increased 187%, according to the NFL. And the number of women in just football operations has grown 185%.
That first wave of women coaches — Welter, Smith, Sowers and King, among others — has inspired the newest generation of women in the NFL.
“There’s now generational representation that’s happening, and that, to me, is a sign of sustainability,” Rapoport said. “It’s a sign that it’s working and it proves the power of representation.”
In 2020, Welter became the first woman coach in Madden in the Superstar KO mode. In the Madden 2024 game, Madden NFL and EA Sports used Sapien technology to allow female football character skeletons to be accurately depicted in game. Madden 2025 had the first woman broadcaster in Kate Scott in a pro-football simulation and the “Create a Coach” function was expanded to include 10 female avatars.
Women like Amy Trask, who first started working in the then-Los Angeles Raiders’ legal department in 1983 before becoming their chief executive in 1997, and Connie Carberg, who was the NFL’s first woman scout in 1976 when she worked for the New York Jets, have waited decades for the current movement.
“I’ve seen the evolution of this over time,” Trask said.
For women to become a part of the fabric of the NFL, there still needed to be a head coach willing to make history.
That was Arians.
“I think it was the door that needed to be opened,” Arians recently told ESPN. “[Welter] was the one that opened the door, and [Cardinals owner] Michael [Bidwill] was good enough to share that vision with me and it started with the Cardinals.
“It was just a matter of somebody doing it.”
And the progress hasn’t stopped since.
King saw the evolution in team facilities. When she worked as a coaching intern and assistant running backs coach for the Commanders from 2020 to 2023, there were only a handful of people using the women’s locker room. That changed in Chicago when she was the Bears’ offensive assistant for running backs in 2024.
The Bears’ women’s locker room was full on game day, King recalled, sometimes overflowing.
Teams are making sure their facilities have equal access for men and women, such as having bathrooms an equal distance from the locker rooms.
“These women,” Rapoport said, “are literally the Billie Jean King of football for everything that they’re going through.”
SO WHAT’S NEXT for women in football?
“I think that, honestly, just the goal for us women is just for it not to be a big ordeal of like, ‘Oh, the first woman to do this. The first woman to do that,'” Wilson said. “I think we all got into it because we love football the same as everyone else does. And so for us, I think now we’re at a point where we just want to continue seeing the growth as far as women in football and just continue it, just making it the norm.”
Progress, while being made, can be slow.
Trask remembered being asked numerous times when Sarah Thomas, the NFL’s first woman official, was named to the Super Bowl LV officiating crew if it was a performative act by the NFL. Her response was consistent: the NFL cared about the officiating not being a storyline after the game. And then Trask related that story to Welter’s hiring: Teams don’t hire coaches to be performative, she said.
“His job was to make his team the best it could be,” Trask said of Arians. “He wasn’t doing favors when he hired Jen. He wasn’t looking to make a name for himself. That’s not who Bruce Arians is.
“Bruce hired someone he believed would help make their team better and it speaks to the man and to the coach. Well, I’ll say more to the man that Bruce is, that he was not deterred by the fact Jen is a woman.”
There are still uncharted territories for women in the NFL and around football, one of which some don’t think is attainable anytime soon.
Arians, Carberg and Trask don’t foresee a woman ascending to a head coaching role in the near future — Rapoport doesn’t think she’ll see a woman head coach in her lifetime — mainly because there hasn’t yet been a woman promoted in the pipeline from position coach to coordinator.
“It’s just hard,” Arians said “There’s only 32 of them, and the pool of people is gigantic and it’s got to be somebody that has earned their stripes and has proven it on the field, and I don’t see that many women calling plays yet in college football.
“So, I think it’s just a growth process.”
The most attainable role in the short term, Carberg believes, will be a general manager, and Browns assistant general manager and vice president of football operations Catherine Hickman is on the precipice. In January, she interviewed for the Tennessee Titans‘ then-vacant general manager opening but didn’t get the job. The Denver Broncos‘ executive director of football operations Kelly Kleine Van Calligan also interviewed for the Raiders’ GM position.
“I’m interested in flooding the pipeline with women in scouting, women in football, admin, women in player personnel,” Rapoport said. “So that the best people can rise to the top.”
In 2022, the NFL expanded the Rooney Rule to include women in the league’s definition of minority candidates. Teams are required to interview two minority candidates for head coach openings and one for quarterback coach vacancies. In 2020, however, the NFL required teams to interview a minority candidate and/or a woman candidate for senior-level positions.
Welter thinks there’ll “definitely” be a coordinator in the next five to seven years, and that the emergence of flag football will create a feeder system for NFL coaches. Flag football — for men and women — will be in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, and is on track to become an NCAA sport. In February, the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics recommended that all three divisions sponsor legislation to add flag football to the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program. As of now, 65 schools have flag football at the club or varsity level.
“There’s so much to learn in coaching, and people that start early have a great advantage,” Rivera said. “Well, young ladies that are now starting to play flag football are going to get into it. They’re going to learn to understand the X’s and O’s of the game, too, the strategy and the coaching aspect of how to teach, how to lead.
“I mean, those are all things that you have to develop and grow.”
Titans defensive quality control coach Lori Locust has been involved with helping develop flag football, and she’s also a former tackle football player with the semiprofessional Central Penn Vipers.
“She played, so she’s smart,” Titans outside linebacker Arden Key said. “She’s been around some guys when she was at Tampa, when they went to the Super Bowl. She was around the guys in Baltimore. So, she’s been around and knows a lot, and she knows exactly what she’s talking about. I just appreciate her.”
For most of her life, Welter, like other women, looked at football as the final frontier of sports.
She put an end to that. For the past 10 years, women could turn on NFL games and see people who looked like them on the sidelines.
“I think progress is never as fast as we want it, but progress is still progress, and they’ve made a heck of a lot of progress in just 10 short years,” Welter said. “It looks completely different than it did.
“And that’s a really cool retrospective to have and such a cool place to be able to say, you know what, something we did was a part of a movement that’s so special to so many people.”
