When Katie Sowers was growing up, she loved football and played as much as she could. She played in a women’s tackle league when she got out of college and dreamed of coaching in the NFL. But she didn’t know if that dream could become a reality until she saw a woman get a full-time assistant coaching job in the NBA in 2014.
“I always knew I wanted to coach, but I didn’t know I could coach in the NFL until I saw Becky Hammon become a coach in the NBA. I had this weird feeling then, knowing it was going to happen. I even posted on Instagram: ‘NFL, I’m coming for you.’ It’s hard to explain, but I was positive I was going to make it happen,” Sowers recently told MarketWatch.
But at the time she was working as the athletic director for the city of Kansas City and coaching a fifth grade girls’ basketball team. How did her next employer become the NFL?
“I always preach that you never know who is watching, so I put everything into that team,” Sowers says of her fifth grade hoop players.
And it turns out that a gentleman watching them play was Scott Pioli, a former general manager of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. His daughter was on the team.
Pioli was impressed with how Sowers coached. The two began talking and he learned how passionate she was about coaching in the NFL. When he became the assistant general manager of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, he offered her a coaching internship during the preseason as part of the Bill Walsh NFL Coaching Diversity Fellowship. Pioli kept her on as a scout, and she worked closely with him and the coaching staff in 2016.
Sowers, 32, grew up loving football, but didn’t see playing on the boys’ high school team as an option, so she played sports that could help her get an athletic scholarship to college. Which she did, for basketball. After college, she played professional tackle football as a quarterback for the Women’s Football Alliance, and she played for Team USA in 2013.
She also dedicated a lot of her time to studying coaches, knowing she wanted to be one. Her favorite coach today is Hammon, who is an assistant coach with the San Antonio Spurs, and one of her favorites all-time is Bill Walsh. “To be honest, though, I always looked up to my dad. How players related to him and how he changed their lives as players and as people. I wanted to have that kind of impact.”
Her dad coached the women’s basketball team at Bethel College, and she spent a lot of time with him and his teams....
“We find it so odd when women lead men, but women have been teaching men for years. We have to normalize it.”