Buffalo Bills Hire Kathryn Smith, the NFL’s First Female Coach

The NFL’s Buffalo Bills have hired Kathryn Smith to be their quality control-special teams coach, marking this as the first time a major league NFL team has hired a female coach. Smith has worked with head coach Rex Ryan for quite a long time before this recent hire. She began as an intern with the New York Jets organization back in 2003, while Ryan was a coach there as well. Since then, she’s worked closely with him, most recently as an administrative assistant–and now she’s one of his coaches.

You don’t spend that long around the NFL without picking up some invaluable insight. Moreover, you don’t work that long with somebody and not build an incredible rapport, which is something that should prove to be a very valuable asset on the field.

The NFL has long been considered a bastion of masculinity, an impenetrable fortress dominated by males. However, in recent years, with the growing number of female high school football players and with people like Smith, that image is beginning to change ever so slightly. There are going to be plenty of naysayers and awful people who are going to vocalize a lot of gross things about this hiring, though that’s sadly to be expected given the fact that the majority of the NFL’s fanbase is simply drowning in toxic masculinity.

While I’m a Niners fan at heart (woo goo local sports team–don’t talk to me about this last season, thanks), it’s my hope that the Bills see some success with Smith on staff. It’ll be great to see some haters get silenced, if I’m being completely frank. Moreover, I hope this hiring alone sets off a trend throughout the rest of the league. I think that’d be really cool, is all.

(via Jezebel)

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Jessica Lachenal

Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.

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