Slowly, Path to Hiring of NFL’s First Female Head Coach Is Taking Shape

When the first female NFL head coach dons her headset on the sideline in 10 years, it will be remarkable because of how unremarkable women on the sideline will be by then.

She will be a trailblazer, of course. But she will not be alone. There will be a female coordinator here, a female head athletic trainer there, female position coaches, scouts, assistants and interns everywhere.

That first female head coach will have paid all the dues any male coach pays, and probably one or two more. She will have climbed the ladder from lowly quality control assistant. The only difference is that the ladder no longer leads to a Boys Only tree fort. The NFL is preparing to welcome her arrival.

“In 10 years, I would like to see a female head coach,” said Samantha Rapoport, the NFL’s Director of Football Development. “I’m not saying that’s our metric or our goal, but it would be great.”

Rapoport is spearheading a new initiative to provide more opportunities for women in football operations: coaching, player personnel, scouting, athletic training and so on. Call it the Rooney Rule for Women if you want; Rapoport welcomes the comparison. “I feel what the Rooney Rule did for the NFL was really important,” she said. “To include females in that is great.”

There have already been a few female assistant coaches in the NFL. Jen Welter worked for the Cardinals last year, and Kathryn Smith became a full-time assistant coach for the Bills this year. But Rapoport is not looking to create isolated success stories. With the NFL’s support, she’s working to open up new career paths for any woman interested in pursuing them. “For me, 10-year success would be for it to not be weird or noteworthy to see females on the sideline,” she said.

“We want to flood the pipeline with qualified females so head coaches and general managers have qualified females to select for interviews.”

The first step is to find those qualified females in a football world where men overwhelmingly dominate the professional, college, prep and even minor-league coaching and scouting ranks.

Such women are not nearly as hard to find as you may think. The NFL already knows about a few of them.

   

Coaching Passion

Stephanie Balochko would love to be an NFL defensive coordinator someday. But she’s not ready for the job. Not judging by her cliche-spouting skills, anyway.

When asked what kind of defense she ran while coordinating the Pittsburgh Passion of the Women’s Football Alliance, she said, “I was told not to tell you. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be running it again this year, and I don’t want the team owner to be mad at me.”

That’s not how the pros do it, Coach. Pretend this is your first press conference in the NFL. How about some standard boilerplate?

“We run an aggressive, fast, versatile defense,” she said. “We can drop linebackers to safeties and safeties to corners. We disguise it. We’re very adaptable.”

That’s a little better. But is it an attacking defense, Coach?

“Yes. We are attacking!”

Balochko is a quick study. She played middle linebacker for the Passion for 15 years. She wore No. 58 in honor of Jack Lambert, though she wasn’t a Lambert type: “I wasn’t the crazy one running around like that. I’m more of a thinker.”

Balochko eventually moved from the field to the coaching ranks. She’s now a film junkie who scouts the Passion’s opponents on Hudl and keeps up with NFL defensive trends by watching the coaches’ film on NFL Game Pass. “I can tell you when the guard’s toe is pointed to the right, it was gonna be a run right,” she said.

To clarify, the Women’s Football Alliance is not one of those leagues where women bounce around in shoulder pads and lingerie. It’s a sprawling national association of 45 women’s 11-on-11 tackle football teams. The WFA and other leagues attract hundreds of women like Balochko, who played soccer and softball in high school but wanted an opportunity to try tackle football. Balochko imparts portions of her “guard’s toe” knowledge of football to athletic women who sometimes show up for tryouts not knowing where a guard even lines up.

In August, Balochko parlayed her coaching experience into an unofficial internship with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Balochko got to know Steelers coaches through youth clinics and programs the team runs in conjunction with the Passion. After more than a year of children’s camps and email conversations, she set up an opportunity to work with Steelers defensive line coach John Mitchell during training camp. Balochko took a week off from her firefighting job in Ohio and drove to Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She spent one practice in the bleachers, and then Mitchell called her down onto the field and straight into a coaches’ meeting.

The next morning, Balochko was a full-fledged coaching intern. “I was a part of everything,” she said. “I followed Coach Mitchell, listened to what he had to say. When he got comfortable with me, he started throwing me in to do some things: help this guy with the scout team, help me get the next group ready to go in.”

By the time the Steelers faced the Lions in a preseason game, Balochko was ready to do more than help organize the scout team. In the second half of the game, Mitchell asked her to watch the nose tackle while he watched the defensive ends and then report her observations to him.

“I knew darn well he was able to watch all of them and knew exactly what everyone was doing,” she said. “So I really concentrated on the nose and made sure I was right in what I was saying.”

When Balochko’s observations proved correct, Mitchell had her relay her coaching points to the Steelers defenders, who readily accepted her advice. “They were amazing,” she said. “The guys were great.”

The experience was thrilling, but not overwhelming. “I learned a lot,” Balochko said. “But I also learned that it was just football. It was the same thing I coached for girls. They’re just bigger and faster. We work on the same schemes. We may not hit as hard, but we’re hitting.”

   

Connecting Two Worlds

Balochko’s experience would not be noteworthy if she were a male small-college coordinator (or team executive’s nephew) given the same opportunity. But Balochko had no natural network to rely upon when she worked her way through the Steelers email chain. Other would-be female coaches face the same problem. There is no natural entry position into NFL coaching for women.

That’s where Rapoport comes in.

“My role is really to connect the two worlds,” she said. “I think people just don’t know about the world of women who are extremely knowledgeable about football.”

Rapoport is working with executives in women’s leagues like the WFA to identify candidates. She is also networking with colleges, seeking women coaching any team sport who may be longing for an opportunity to switch to football.

“You can be a female basketball coach who is also very knowledgeable in football,” she said. “As long as you know how to coach and are open to learning, that role is open to you as well.”

As Balochko’s internship illustrates, former WFA linebackers and college lacrosse coaches won’t get handed coordinator positions immediately. They’ll arrive on the ground floor. To prepare them for those entry-level jobs, Rapoport and the NFL are scheduling a series of seminars, one of which will be held during the week of this year’s Pro Bowl in Orlando.

The seminars will lead to networking opportunities, which can lead to internship programs, quality control and …

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