With her blonde hair tucked into her black referee hat, it’s relatively easy to overlook Sarah Thomas and assume that she’s just another male college football referee—only she’s not. Thomas is major college football’s only female referee.
She started as many others did, officiating for youth leagues and studying for tests as she worked her way through middle school and junior varsity games. She reached the high school level in 1999, and worked the game clock while pregnant with her sons, Bridley, now 8, and Brady, 5.
The spouses of her crew even made her a maternity referee shirt so she could continue pursuing her passion during her pregnancy.
When asked whether the players are surprised by her presence on the side line, she told her interviewer that she blends easily into the sideline and is hardly noticed by coaches or players. “Most of the time they are so focused on what they are doing, they don’t notice me,” she said, “and that is what every other official strives for. Our best games are the ones that no one knows we’re there.”
While she may be successful in avoiding the attention of the players, this certainly does not mean that her hard work went unnoticed by everyone. The Times reports that in 2006, she came to the attention of Gerald Austin, an NFL official for more than 25 years.
An officiating scout, another former N.F.L. official, had been impressed by Thomas’s work in a high-pressure playoff game, and called Austin to tell him so. Austin invited Thomas to an officials’ camp in Reno, Nev. “She made one tough call after another and nailed every one of them,” Austin said. “There was no reason not to hire her.”
After two years of training and being eased into the rotation, Austin scheduled Thomas for a full schedule of games this fall. Although the NFL has yet to hire a female referee, Austin thinks that when it finally happens, Thomas would be first on the list, saying, “They have got to look at her,” and “She’s too good.”
Thomas’s success has inspired other women who love football but thought their participation in the sport was limited to screaming at the television to pursue positions as referees. Currently, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference has three women on its officiating crews. And this past weekend, the Southwestern Athletic Conference’s first female football official will work a game.
We wish Thomas good luck with her first season officiating at the top tier of college football, and hope that we’ll be hearing about her appointment as the first female referee in the NFL one of these days.
I always love hearing about women being seen in formerly all-male staffs. Thank you for this! 🙂
http://www.theprettyproject.com
Hope she does a good job. I always wonder with stuff like this is there is a record book of what jobs Women or any groups has or has not done? Seems sort of funny that people keep track of this stuff. I guess it is an interesting human interest story, but I always wonder how people even know really. Who keeps track of this stuff?
Well, I can keep my dream alive of being a third base coach in baseball after reading this. I hope she makes it to the NFL!
this is pretty awesome! I would love to see a woman ref in the NFL! Kudos to her and her hard work! And to the spouses to believed in her enough to keep her working through her pregnancies!
Very cool. Love this post!
Thought-provoking. As Mike sort of hints: I wonder what other arenas are overlooked as to being historically devoid of certain populations?
Robin Wallace has been an assistant high school baseball coach and a baseball instructor to males, too. Justine Siegal spent last summer as an assistant baseball coach to an independent professional baseball team. Women have to work harder to make it in these jobs because they’re female, but now they’re beginning to make it.