American dream
NFL coach is planning to lead Britain to glory
‘From day dot, my goal has been to bridge the gap between the US and the UK’
Phoebe Schecter is defined by happy contradictions and ironies. She is an American and British citizen. She says “soccer” but also has an endearing twang to her Connecticut accent when she mentions her northern “gran”. She stands at a petite 5ft 3in and plays swashbuckling linebacker for her American football team. She is a woman and she has coached in the NFL. She grew up in the US, but she did not fall in love with its (unofficial) national sport until she moved across the Atlantic.
She is one of just three women ever to coach in the NFL, but Schecter says she was much too busy with horses for the first 23 years of her life to get caught up in the sport that produces the world’s most lucrative league.
“Horses is a 24/7 thing. I never had an interest in football. Equestrian was what I’d always done, what I thought I’d spend the rest of my life doing.”
It was only when she moved from Connecticut to Cheshire to work for a member of the Dutch Olympic equestrian team that Schecter’s head was turned.
“I worked six days a week. On my one day off I thought it would be good to meet people. I saw an ad on Facebook for American football and took the chance. It was the best decision I ever made. I had no idea what I was doing, I had zero body control. But the girls I met that day were what brought me into it more – and that I got to hit people.”
In the past six years she has dropped
her lifetime horse habit and replaced it with her newfound “addiction” – contact sports. As a defensive linebacker, Schecter’s position involves some of the hardest hitting in the game. It is one of her favourite elements though, and she even plays in a mixed full-contact American football league where she is the only woman in her team, getting tackled by, and tackling men, twice her size.
“You get two types of [men] – those that say, ‘She’s a girl, she shouldn’t be here’, and they come for you, or who don’t want to hit me because I am a girl,” she says laughing.
She also did strength and conditioning coaching for the sport’s Great Britain association and helped develop the women’s team on their rise to fourth-best in the world. And, thanks to her dual citizenship, she will captain the team at this week’s European Championships in Leeds alongside all self-funded team-mates and volunteer coaches.
Schecter is also England captain in kabaddi, an invasion game popular in Asia which she compares to British bulldog with tackling. Watching YouTube highlights of the aggressive low tackling – or “carnage” as Schecter puts it – makes the appeal clear.
But, of Schecter’s wide-reaching sporting achievements, her most prolific was becoming one of a handful of women to coach in the NFL, starting with a Buffalo Bills coaching internship in 2017. A rapid turnaround for someone who never even cared about American football until 2013.
But, upon meeting the charismatic 29-year-old, it becomes obvious how she managed such a rise. Her infectious energy had me considering signing up for an American football session about 15 minutes into meeting her, so it is unsurprising that upon applying to five NFL teams via a diversity internship scheme, she had to turn down offers before taking up the Bills position. That two-week summer camp pushed Schecter right into the deep end.
“It’s very daunting. These guys know so much more than me about football, I was working with the defence team, and the head coach said, ‘How do we get the players to respect you?’ So he took my highlight reel and showed the guys. They were like, ‘That’s sick, she’s better at tackling than us’, and since then they’ve been so supportive, some sending over videos for our GB teams wishing them good luck.”
But for all her enthusiasm, Schecter was plagued by self-doubt during her first tenure with the Bills and had to find ways to negotiate an impostor syndrome brought on by foreign football jargon and being the only woman on the sidelines.
“At first it was a little rocky. It was an incredible opportunity and I kind of felt like other people who had been involved in the sport for much longer deserved that more than me.
“But I figured if I could just get all the little things down, even something as simple as if one of the guys asks me what time this meeting starts I would have the answer for them and they would start coming to me every time. It seems really minute, but when you can build up trust like that it’s huge.”
What has followed – a season-long internship at the NCAA Division One college programme at Bryant University (where she slept in the head coach’s basement and worked for free), consultancy work with NFL UK and even a full season at the Bills for the 2018-19 campaign – shows she must have made an incredible impression in that life-changing fortnight. The Bills made a winning start to the season in their opener on Thursday, but I was baffled to learn that Schecter would not be joining them after the European Championships. Instead, she is taking a sabbatical to commit fully to developing the game here. A bold move some would say, but Schecter is as excited talking about her work with the UK Dukes, an organisation aiming to increase grass-roots participation (with Schecter taking a special interest in female growth), as her time with the Bills.
“I’ve had a crazy moment in my life and I’m staying here for the season. [The Bills] are being so supportive,” she says.
“From day dot, my underlying goal has always been bridging the gap between the US and UK. I thought it was the best time to see what I can do to help. The European Champs should be a huge opportunity for this country to see what we’re doing with this sport.
‘‘There’s lots of positive things going on now for women in the sport, we need to ride the wave.”
It is just another twist in a sporting career trajectory few could have predicted.