Bucs assistant paid her coaching dues

So Tom Brady is still playing tackle football well into his 40s? Bah. Big deal. That's nothin'.

One Tampa Bay Buccaneers assistant coach didn't START playing tackle football until nearly age 40: Lori Locust, the team's secondyear assistant defensive line coach.

Locust is one of eight women who held an NFL coaching position this past season, either on the football-specific side or in athletic training and conditioning. The league's other half-thousand assistant coaches are all men.

Twelve months ago, Katie Sowers with the San Francisco 49ers became the first female to coach in a Super Bowl, as a designated offensive assistant. Locust will do so on the other side of the ball on Sunday, when the Buccaneers face the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs (6:30 p.m. EST, CTV via CBS).

Tampa Bay has a second female assistant in Maral (M.J.) Javadifar, the team's assistant strength and conditioning coach — whose hiring, too, is in keeping with the diverse, creative team-building approaches of Bucs head coach Bruce Arians.

The attention both women received this week is flattering and nice, Locust said, but she's way past the milestone stuff.

“M.J. and I are here to help Tampa Bay win,” Locust said this week in an interview session leading up to Super Bowl LV. “We acknowledge the fact that there hasn't been many before us, but it's not anything that we keep in the forefront of what we do on a daily basis. That's sort of, I guess, not a consideration when we're coaching.”

Locust said if she had not got injured so much in tackle ball back home in mountainous central Pennsylvania, she might still be playing football rather than coaching it this week — in the biggest game, at the sport's highest level. And she's 56!

“I just wanted to play competitive football. It was NFL rules,” she said of women's tackle leagues that began popping up in earnest in the U.S. about 20 years ago, which have included the occasional Canadian team, the first being in Montreal in 2001.

Locust played from about 2004-08 in Harrisburg, Pa.

“We got bumped and bruised,” Locust said. “I've had a few surgeries playing the game of football. But the last injury kind of took me out of commission, and I didn't want to be away from the game.

“So they allowed me to kind of coach the women's team and that's where I first got bit by that kind of bug. Other than that, I would have still been playing. Had I not gotten hurt I don't know that I would be sitting here in front of you guys, because it was just something I always wanted to do.”

Now, about the coaching profession. Most NFL assistants pay their career dues at football's lowest levels — in high schools, youth ball, small colleges, semi-pro or even in the NFL but in the “Joe-est” of entry-level jobs, if you will — at the photocopier, at the coffee machine, charting practice plays, etc.

Some coaches toil for years like that, waiting patiently for a better gig. Such as Locust. Her stack of dues receipts is thicker than most.

She got her first sniff at coaching decades ago, while attending Susquehanna Township High School in Harrisburg. The team's head coach in the early 1980s “was one of the last, probably, hard-core, hard-nosed football coaches. He'd grab guys by the facemask, yell, spit — all the things you're not supposed to do anymore.

“I had a job on the team … On Friday nights I would be the runner. I would stand next to him or the defensive co-ordinator and I would get the play, run to the (person holding the) clipboard, and the clipboard was always where the ball was at. So I got a lot of cardio on Friday nights. But it was so cool that he allowed me to be that close to the game ... But that's kind of where it stopped.”

Fast forward a quarter century to 2008. By then Locust was suddenly done playing tackle ball herself and raising two boys. That's when she began to help coach her women's team and, two years later, began helping out at her old high school, too. From then through 2017 — in various gigs with high school, semi-pro and women's teams — the cha-ching of dues paying rang loudly in her ears.

Her No. 1 takeaway from those long days? No, it wasn't how she began to employ a peculiar element of football coach speak — the penchant for dropping pronouns at the start of sentences. Rather, it was two words.

“Hard work,” she said. “No job is beneath you when you work for different sizes of schools back in `PA.' Some have resources, some don't. I was at Susquehanna for almost nine seasons.

“Never got paid, never asked to get paid. Did everything I could to learn there. Did every job that maybe the guys didn't want to do, because I knew that it would help round out my experience as a coach.

“Did stuff with the youth league. I was on the JV team's coaching staff, then I'd go right to the varsity program. And this was all around trying to work two jobs and trying to raise my boys … I think it was just a good foundation for my career.”

Her big career breaks came quickly, starting in 2017. First, as a defensive-line/linebackers coach and co-special teams coordinator on the Lehigh Valley Steelhawks of the National Arena League.

In summer 2018 head coach John Harbaugh of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens hired her as a summer coaching intern. That fall she was named assistant D-line coach for the Birmingham Iron in the short-lived Alliance of American Football.

Arians hired Locust fulltime in her current role early in 2019.

How has becoming the NFL forerunner in equity and diversity hiring aided the Bucs?

“Um, I think a good result is to say that we're playing on Sunday,” Locust said.

Lori Locust