The moment has been preserved in photos, a full-color accounting of an unprecedented NFL meeting. Jen Welter, preseason coaching intern for the Arizona Cardinals, and Sarah Thomas, line judge for the Cardinals’ exhibition game against the Chiefs, sharing an on-field handshake.
Mundane? Sure.
Extraordinary? That, too.
“It was the first time in the history of the National Football League that that handshake, so normal between a ref and a coach, took place between two women,” Welter recalled in a telephone call this past week. “I’ve often thought of that, and Sarah and I talking about it as a promise that we’d keep going. That was a new beginning for football, one in which there would be more and more women.”
It was, as it turns out, also prophetic. The face of the NFL is changing, slowly but with intention, as those “more and more women” are making their presence felt in Sunday’s Super Bowl. The years since that 2015 breakthrough have seen doors open to women in new and evolving ways, most obvious in the presence of Thomas as part of Sunday’s officiating crew and Lori Locust and Maral Javadifar as assistant coaches on Bruce Arians’s Tampa Bay staff.
That Arians was the same coach who hired Welter in Arizona is a credit to one man’s effort to diversify his workplace, but other facets have been important, too, beginning with the NFL’s hiring of Sam Rapoport and her ensuing direction of a diversity and inclusion initiative.
The pipeline for women has expanded under Rapoport’s watch, an annual symposium at the NFL Scouting Combine one of the most obvious efforts to widen the talent pool, bringing people who wouldn’t otherwise get that opportunity together in the same room. From the airwaves, where the Amazon Prime broadcasting duo of Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm are into their third year calling games (longer, by comparison, than the current “Monday Night Football” crew) to the sidelines, where Locust is an assistant defensive line coach and Javadifar an assistant strength and conditioning coach, there are clear predictors for growth.
It makes the hope Javadifar put into words this past week seem possible.
“I do look forward to the day that it’s no longer newsworthy to be a woman working in the pros,” Javadifar said. “I look forward to the point where all people are afforded the opportunity to work in professional sports and it doesn’t matter what gender, race, or anything.”
Yet as much as we look to the horizon with optimism, we remember to look back with gratitude. As Welter is prone to repeat, “The opportunity and responsibility of being first is to ensure you’re not the last.”
Back in her years at Boston College, when the diminutive ball of toughness was too engrossed in a dominant rugby career to be thinking about football or the NFL, there wasn’t much indication she would someday be one of the game’s pioneers. But sometimes fate finds its favorites anyway, and Welter, a running back who ultimately played men’s and women’s pro football (including the franchise that would become the powerhouse Boston Renegades), took that ball and ran with it.
She took vital first steps into the unknown, when questions of how pro players would react to a female coach were still being asked, rather than being answered in recent years with a decided shrug and a “no big deal,” as in the case of Locust, who has the ear, and respect, of Tampa’s star-studded front seven.
Earlier this year, the Washington Football Team promoted Jennifer King to assistant running backs coach, making her the first Black female coach in the NFL. There are women on various scouting staffs across the league and more in front office positions.
“You have to get the pipeline going, that’s the key. That’s absolutely the key,” said Kremer, the longtime NFL expert (and Massachusetts resident) whose work is everywhere from CBS to HBO to NFL Network to Amazon. “The thing that I credit Amazon for is they could have just said we want two women. They wrote the job for Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. You may not like us, but you cannot besmirch our credentials. That is important to me.”
It’s important to everyone.
Say it now, say it then, say it again and again into the future: Representation matters. What our eyes see, what our ears hear, it matters. And what others see when they look at us, what others hear when they listen to us, that matters, too.
There is no better endorsement for widening a talent pool than the Buccaneers, with the most diverse staff in the history of the game (all three coordinators are Black), having made it to the Super Bowl.
“Every person, and I say person intentionally, when you look on that field, something different is going to strike you,” Welter said. “For the girls watching, they can dream of football and see themselves in it and know there is a future and a space and a place. For every boy that sees it, it makes it more normal, makes it so that when they have females as authorities in their area, it’s, ‘Of course, why not?’
“There are men who will watch and think, ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’ There are women who will watch and think, ‘It’s about time.’ And it’s so powerful on so many levels. That’s why sports have such a special place in society. This game will have the most diverse staff makeup ever and that shows that our society can and should be more diverse in terms of race and gender.”
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.