Her team may not have won Super Bowl LIV, but NFL coach Katie Sowers just scored a significant victory for women all the same.
Sowers, the offensive assistant coach for the San Francisco 49ers, became the first woman to ever coach a professional football team in the Super Bowl when she helped lead her team in the big game. She is also the first openly LGBTQ coach ever to work in the NFL.
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It’s a victory for representation that was spotlighted in a Microsoft ad highlighting the importance of women trailblazers and role models. Sowers herself is featured in the commercial, talking about her lifelong love of football and the lack of future she saw in the sport for herself due to the dearth of women on and off the field. “I never saw an opportunity in football because I’d never seen a female coach before,” she says.
Now, thanks to her, it will be much easier for future generations of women to picture themselves occupying leadership roles in sports. “We have all these assumptions about what women do in life, and what men do,” she says. “All it takes is one, and then it opens the door for so many.”
We’ve always said that women cannot be what they cannot see. And we’re cheering for Sowers as she makes it possible for women to imagine even more possibilities for themselves.
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