Six letters. One word. One that defined my household on any given Sunday, let alone any other day of the week.
At five years old, I learned friendly banter with an opposing team at a home game when I drove my electric four-wheeler to the group wearing a different color jersey than ours.
At eight years old, I remember wearing my Wilmington Blue Rocks dog tag every day to recess. I think I lost it since then, but the memories are still there.
At fourteen years old, I was cheering on every Philly sports team, no matter what team it was – unless the Washington Football Team (then Redskins), were playing, and for my mom's sake, we would root for them as long as they weren't playing the Eagles.
At sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old, I was my high school's water girl. I was the "Bobby Boucher," but boy would I have loved to play. Luckily, what I did was just as fun.
Also at seventeen, I did the crazy thing and attended the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade. I woke up at 1am, out the door by 3am, in the city by 5am, and the rest is history.
At twenty-one years old, I'm fortunate enough to say that I'm pursuing a career in the sports world. I want to be a storyteller. I want to be a sports analyst. I just want to be there.
I bring these snapshots of my life up because sports is engrained in me. It's something that, from the start, was a huge part of my life. Sports bring so much good in the world, and it took me twenty-one years to realize it was for me.
But I'm a woman. And before now, it was excruciatingly hard for a woman to land a career in a sports field.
It's 2021, and women are landing jobs left and right in fields that were once dominated by men. And this excites me. I don't even just see it on a national level, but really in the classroom, the office that houses my internship, and the connections I've made through social media. Where I intern now, there are about 2-3 other women who currently or finishing up interning at the office that I do. I think that's so awesome because no matter what we're all going there for – business, writing, talent – we're all there in hopes to dominate what we do in the sports industry.
Looking at the National Football League, walls are being bulldozed and ceilings are being broken. The percentage of women hired by the NFL has increased and reached a peak of 38.2% in 2020. (Statista) Not only is there an overall rise, but women are also tackling the C-suite jobs per the 32 football clubs across the country.
In just the past year alone, there have been a lot of "firsts" for women in the NFL. Lori Locust and Maral Javadifar became the first female coaches to win a Super Bowl, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You may have heard of Sarah Thomas, a down judge, who made significant history as the first woman to officiate a Super Bowl. The Washington Football Team saw its first Black woman to coach full-time in the NFL – that woman is WFT assistant Jennifer King. Maia Chaka became the newest NFL official and first Black woman to hold this position. The list goes on in the NFL and in the whole world of sports, and it's awesome and uplifting. There are generations of women to come who will see this and feel inspired to go for these positions that were once called "unattainable" to women.
I might be just a communications intern right now, and even a novice sports journalist tomorrow, and that is okay. But because of the women before me, paving the way for the sports industry to shift, I'm able to further pave the way for future generations of women to go even further.
