Zip it, haters. Hire of female NFL coach ‘important moment,’
Radio host sticking to his belief that there’s no place for a woman coaching men in football
On Thursday morning, hours after Kathryn Smith became the first woman hired as a full-time NFL coach, a radio host in Cleveland was voicing his displeasure. In a polished tone of indignation, he dismissed the hiring as “absurd,” in part because “there’s no place for a woman in professional sports, in football, coaching men.”
Kevin Kiley, co-host of the morning show on 92.3 The Fan, argued that women were not suited to coach because they had never played the game. He was immovable in his belief.
“Men will not take to it,” he said. “If you have 10 men on special teams, eight of them will be mumbling under their breath.”
Teams in the NFL have11men on the field for special teams, not 10.
And next season, one of those teams will have a woman, with Smith promoted to the role of quality control-special teams coach with the Buffalo Bills. At 30, she has already spent more than a decade in the NFL, working last season as an administrative assistant to Bills coach Rex Ryan.
“This is just another opportunity for her to move forward,” Ryan told reporters on Friday. “Is it an entry-level position in the coaching field? It is. A lot of people break in as quality control coaches. But don’t think it’s not an important position.”
As a precedent, as a first, it will also carry importance beyond the field. Smith is the latest in a small but slowly growing list of women coaching in elite-level men’s sport. Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, at the University of Minnesota, described the hiring as “a very, very important moment.”
“Do I think that this signals that the dam has burst, and that there will be a rush for NFL teams and NBA teams and Major League Baseball to hire women as coaches and managers? Absolutely not,” she said. “But it does mean that it’s possible.”
“It’s still probably one of the last sectors that are inviting to women,” said Karin Lofstrom, executive director at the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity. “Sports, somehow, it’s still seen as, if women get involved, it’s not going to work.”
Smith will not be the first woman to coach in the NFL. That barrier fell when Jen Welter, a linebacker who played against men in the semi-professional Indoor Football League, worked with the Arizona Cardinals in training camp last fall.
A year before that, the San Antonio Spurs hired former WNBA guard Becky Hammon to their coaching staff, the first full-time female coach on an NBA team. In tennis, two-time Grand Slam winner Amelie Mauresmo has been coaching Andy Murray for the last two years. Earlier this month, the Clarenville Caribous, a senior men’s hockey team in Newfoundland, named Rebecca Russell its new coach.
Unlike those women, Smith never played her sport at a high level. She was a three-sport athlete in high school, in Syracuse, N.Y., as a member of the swimming, bowling and lacrosse teams. She was captain of the swim team for at least two seasons.
“The biggest advantage I had with those guys was the street credibility having played,” Welter told USA Today.
“That might be the most difficult part for her.”
The Bills did not make Smith available for comment. Her father, Robert G. Smith, a real estate lawyer in Syracuse, declined comment, referring an interview request back through the Bills.
Robert Smith was statistician for the high school football team, and his daughter worked alongside him, according to The Post-Standard, the local paper in Syracuse. She went on to work as a student manager for the men’s basketball team at St. John’s University, in Queens, N.Y., filling an unheralded but critical role while also attending classes.
Matt Abdelmassih is an assistant coach with the men’s team, but worked with Smith as a student manager before she graduated in 2007. He said her gender was never an issue.
“We’re in the same boat — we knew what we were up against, people that didn’t play the sport at a high level, didn’t have a last name that could carry them and get them into the profession,” Abdelmassih said. “We just knew we had to put our head down and work really hard and fight through the naysayers. “And that’s what Kathryn’s done.” “It will be great when it’s not a big, huge news story,” Lofstrom said. “But I think that’s probably a ways away.”
It seemed to be a big news story on Cleveland radio on Thursday, with the hosts debating it for almost a quarter of an hour. At certain points, it was unclear whether Kiley actually knew what the job of a quality control coach entailed.
Smith, basically an assistant to the assistants, will be responsible for breaking down film of opposing special teams, and helping prepare the scout team to help the starting special teams.
In Buffalo, Jeremy White, co-host of the morning show on WGR 550, said there was no such vein of hysteria. Part of it might be that football season has been over for quite some time in the area, he said: “I think the general consensus was ‘Cool, congratulations.’ ”