Meet Sam Mullet, a female head coach with the NFL on her mind
BEAR LAKE, Mich. — The football field here is all of 40 yards long. There are no yard lines or out-of-bounds lines marked on the grass, but there is a goalpost.
Just one.
The field is plenty big enough to accommodate the entire Bear Lake High School football team. All 13 of them … and their coach.
After decades of not having a team of its own, Bear Lake, located in northwestern lower Michigan between Manistee and Traverse City, is in its seventh season of having an eight-player team. It plays its home games at nearby Brethren.
“We’ve got 13 players now,” said coach Sam Mullet, “but we’ll be at 14 soon and there’s another one hanging around so we could be at 15.”
Mullet is the head coach at a school with only 73 students. It is a Title I school, in which more than half of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches.
With 15 players, Bear Lake could almost have enough players to have an honest-to-goodness scrimmage.
“I do play a lot of scout quarterback out there,” said Mullet, who just so happens to be the first woman to be the head coach of a varsity football team in Michigan.
In high school football, female coaches remain a rarity. There have been few women during the past decade who have coached high school football, either as assistants or as head coaches, but no New Jersey team has been led by a woman.
The most well-known — Natalie Randolph — served four seasons as the head coach at Coolidge High School in Washington, D.C., before resigning in 2013. She finished 16-26 during her tenure, with a career-best 8-3 finish in 2011.
Bear Lake is a rural community where most of the people hold jobs in Manistee or Traverse City or at Crystal Mountain.
It is home to Mullet, who played basketball, ran cross country and played on the boys golf team and now helps her mother teach third grade.
The elementary school and high school are housed in the same building and four classrooms are dedicated to the high school.
“I like it here,” she said. “This is where I belong.”
For now.
Playing scout team quarterback is nothing compared to what Mullet has accomplished in her mere 28 years on this planet.
She named a play for the Baltimore Ravens.
She returned kickoffs for the Buffalo Bills in training camp last summer.
She nearly had Tremaine Edmunds’ facemask tattooed on her left arm.
She helped design and then implement every aspect of the new program at Tift County High School in Georgia.
And now she is back home running the football program at her alma mater, which is 0-3 after losing Friday against Cedarville in De Tour.
“Sam was the natural choice,” said John Prokes, the man she assisted before he stepped down last spring because of family issues. “Woman or not, intellectually, her knowledge of the game is one of the best I’ve ever been associated with for sure.
“She loves it. She breaks it down at a level it’s just unbelievable. She learns so quickly. She was a 4.0 student and valedictorian.”
How her love of the game started
Mullet has been infatuated with football for decades and attended her first NFL game when she was 4 months old, while the family was visiting friends in Atlanta.
Her parents have had Michigan State football season tickets for decades; that is where she began viewing the game differently than most of the fans in Spartan Stadium.
“What I loved about football is the patterns,” she said. “I wasn’t very old when I started noticing the patterns at those games. The way things were happening on the field, you can see it’s not random. You can see how it fits together.
“It’s like chess with big people trying to kill each other.”
When she graduated, she took 47 college credit hours with her to college, and after she graduated from Concordia University with a degree in English in December 2016, she returned to Bear Lake.
She learned that Onekama had dissolved the co-op program it had for years with Bear Lake students.
The kids from Bear Lake could have transferred to Onekama and would have been immediately eligible because they were already playing there.
But they were adamant they wanted their own team in 2017.
When she returned home, Mullet visited Prokes in his classroom, as she often did when she was a student and the two would talk football.
She volunteered to help in any way possible – filming, keeping statistics, being the ball person.
“I got this playbook from my brother’s friend downstate,” he told her. “Could you kind of look through it and see what you think?”
It was an eight-player playbook and she thought a lot. She began cutting up index cards and drawing plays. She watched eight-player games on YouTube. She drew up the best plays used in the state championship games and sorted them by formation and concept.
A few weeks later, Mullet told Prokes he should build on the playbook.
“Great, teach it to my players,” he told her. “You obviously know the ins and outs of it, so just explain it to the players.”
So Mullet went from researcher to something of a teacher.
She attended the summer workouts and taught them the new offense and they seemed to adapt well to it.
As August approached, Prokes told her: “Be ready to call the plays on Friday nights.”
Mullet was mystified. First she was the research guy, then the teacher and suddenly she was the offensive coordinator?
“You know this the best,” Prokes said. “You’ve been looking at this for six months. You just call it.”
Getting to the big league
But let’s get back to the NFL. She has been in the NFL for two training camps. They were paid internships – while none of the interns got rich, they earned fair salaries.
It all began when she first became Bear Lake’s offensive coordinator. She garnered some publicity from that and was invited to attend the NFL’s 2019 Women’s Forum during the scouting combine in Indianapolis.
There was a question/answer session and a lot of women asked rather generic questions. Not Mullet.
“Oh, no, if I’ve got access to these brains, I’m asking serious questions,” she said. “I wanted to know the X’s and O’s, started picking their brains. What do you do if a defense does this? How much time do you spend preparing for this? How much do you change your game plan on a weekly basis based on the other team, or how much do you stick to what you know?”
Afterward she sent Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh an email thanking him for taking the time to speak at the forum and for answering her questions.
She enclosed her résumé and eventually she received a phone call, saying offensive coordinator Greg Roman would be calling her for an interview.
At the conclusion of the interview, he said she had one of the four or five internships with the Ravens.
If you ask her how tall she is she will tell you: “I’m NFL elbow height.”
Naturally, it comes with a back story. You see, Mullet worked with the Ravens tight ends.
“You know how the guys on the sidelines stand there with their hands on their hips?” she asked. “Well, whenever I would say, ‘Hey Mark,’ he would turn to look at me and his elbow would hit me in the face.
“I’m the perfect height that when Mark Andrews turns, his elbow hits my face.”
To the rest of the free world, Mullet is 5-5. One day in the tight ends room, they were stuck for a name to call a certain play.
“This play needs a name, and had to fit certain criteria under ‘Dodge,’” she said. “I said: ‘Let’s call it Durango,’ and the coach said: ‘Done.’”
Several weeks into the season, Mullet received a text from the Ravens: “Hey, we’re using Durango this week. It’s on the list for the week.”
You can imagine how Mullet felt when she saw the play work to perfection in the game.
Ready for the top job
When she returned to Bear Lake before last season, Prokes informed her that her summer experience made her the ideal person to become the defensive coordinator.
“Our defense was the best part of our game last year,” Prokes said. “She would do everything to prepare and get kids prepared for the game in the best way she could.”
After last season, a family situation arose that made it impossible for Prokes to continue as head coach. In his mind, there was only one person for the job.
The program was his baby and he didn’t want anyone else running it other than Mullet.
“She’s got all the qualifications and capabilities to succeed, she just needed the opportunity,” Prokes said. “She’s got the opportunity she deserved.”
The immediate concern could have been how would the players respond to being coached by a woman.
Would there be a rebellion because the players might be too macho to be coached by a woman?
“We didn’t lose one player,” Prokes said. “They know her, they know hard she works and they respect her knowledge of the game.”
Truth be told, the players love being coached by Mullet, who many view as something of a big sister. They see all that she has accomplished and they know she has enough experience to be their coach.
“The gender doesn’t really matter, she’s a great football coach,” sophomore wingback/defensive back Myles Harless said. “She’s been in the NFL. Not many guy coaches have been in the NFL. She knows so much football, It’s almost kind of dumb.
“Every time we have a question, she’s answering it because she knows so much about football it’s crazy. I love playing for her; she’s amazing.”
The players grew up watching Mullet serve as an assistant in the program. They realize she will go the extra mile for them.
“It’s mostly her commitment,” said senior running back/linebacker Coley Merrill. “Even before she was the head coach she did a lot for us. When she went away to Tift, she was still breaking down film for us in her free time.
“She’s had a commitment to us and she has a lot of grit.”
Her practices can be intense, but also lighthearted. That was evident when a player was nearly offside on a kickoff.
“Pickles, you almost jumped it. It’s a good thing you’re slow.”
When the boys begin getting silly, she can bring them back to the task at hand without screaming like a lunatic.
“Stop being a bunch of weirdoes and start playing freakin’ football.”
Jim Nowak is Mullet’s lone assistant coach and he sits up in the booth on game nights, leaving Mullet as the only coach on the sidelines.
Sure enough, a player sprained his ankle and Mullet had to tape his ankle as the game went on without her.
She also had to tape a player’s fingers, and when the quarterback’s helmet broke it was Mullet who had to fix it.
Prokes was at the game and told her she needed more help. Mullet disagreed.
“To me, it was fine because Coach Jim and I have trained the boys,” she said. “They have a different understanding of the game this year. I could leave them and turn my back on them and they could have called the defense for three or four plays and been OK.
“I wouldn’t just leave them out there to their own devices and the QB have a free-for-all for four quarters.”
There are only a couple of seniors on this team; quite often the Lakers are physically overmatched. Last week, they lost 66-0 to Marion, a team with almost twice as many students as Bear Lake.
There are only two schools playing eight-player ball with fewer students than the Lakers.
But these are Mullet’s guys and she sees a lot of potential that others might miss.
“They’re tough and they’re smart and they’re willing to do whatever, they just don’t have a ton of experience under their belts and there’s not very many of them,” she said. “They have realized that there are only 13 of them – we’re headed to 15. They’re looking around and saying we’re the right 13 to make this happen.”
What the future holds
When you see the interaction in practice between Mullet and her players, you know there is a genuine connection between her and the guys, and she loves coaching them.
But there’s this thing she has for the NFL. She estimates there are about six or so women with on-field coaching jobs and right now she is enamored with the league.
She just isn’t sure what to do about it. “I don’t know what I wanted to do in terms of pursuing the NFL,” she said. “Do I want to go show up at John Harbaugh’s door and say, ‘Look, I’m here. You can either pay me or not, but I’m here.’
“I could just show up. Why not? Put myself out there.”
She has put herself out there already and after spending a few hours with her, you get the feeling Detroit Lions owner Sheila Ford Hamp would enjoy visiting with the only female head coach in Michigan.
At 28, Mullet said, there is nothing or no one preventing her from doing whatever she wants, wherever she wants.
She just has to decide what and where.
When she graduated from college she thought she would enjoy writing creative non-fiction. Now? Not so much.
“I’m not a planner,” she said. “As far as what I’m going to do with my life, I’ll go one day at a time. Football will be in it. It wasn’t in the plan before, but it is now.”
Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mickmccabe1. Order his book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” at McCabe.PictorialBook.com.