The NFL is already in the 2025-26 preseason, and pretty soon, the regular season will kick off. It’s an exciting time in the league, and seven NFL teams will have new head coaches this season.
There’s always a high turnover rate in coaching in the NFL, because teams obviously want to win, so when that’s not happening, they don’t wait around too long to find a new coach. So, having seven new head coaches for the 2025-26 season isn’t out of the norm.
This season, a handful of women are also coaches in the NFL. While, the majority of coaches in the league are males, but there are several women making waves in the NFL this year.
Female Coaches in the NFL
In a feature published in June, Jayna Bardahl of The Athletic discusses the role of women in the NFL and names the current female strength and conditioning coaches. According to her tally, there are currently six women in those roles for the 2025-26 NFL season.
GettyAutumn Lockwood of the Philadelphia Eagles on the field.
Those coaches are Kaelyn Buskey of the Baltimore Ravens, Allison Haley of the Chicago Bears, Genevieve Humphrey of the Carolina Panthers, Maral Javadifar of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Autumn Lockwood of the Philadelphia Eagles and Haley Roberts of the Las Vegas Raiders.
In the feature, Bardahl adds that in 2024, the NFL employed 15 full-time female coaches, a 47% increase from 2021 and a 1,400% jump from 2015.
“Opportunities for female coaches in the NFL are especially notable in strength, conditioning and performance departments, where six of those 15 coaches worked,” Bardahl states. “As more women break into coaching and the league at large, the natural pipeline to the weight room is increasingly apparent.”
An ‘Exciting Opportunity’ for the NFL
In the same article, Sam Rapoport, founder of the NFL Women’s Forum, discusses the jump that women have experienced going from being in strength, conditioning and performance departments to full-time coaches.
“It’s not surprising because the pipeline was there previously,” Rapoport says. “They could come from the sport that they played. Not too many women play tackle football, but there are many who do,” adding that “it’s an exciting opportunity for the league.”
So, what about positional coaches, such as quarterback coaches and wide receiver coaches? Rapoport says that women in those positions are not nearly as big in numbers.
“There are very few women each year who are qualified to have an entry-level coaching job in the NFL because we never dreamed about this before,” Rapoport states. “No one was going for it. What we’re seeing now is that younger women and girls are looking to take on this career, and they’re excited about it.”
Roberts, who coaches for the Raiders, says that even if she can’t work well with someone on the team, it’s okay. “I’m not going to appease everyone on the team, but we have someone on staff — because we have a very diverse staff — that will,” she says in the piece.
Props to these female coaches in the NFL who are making waves and showing how the sport is evolving.
Like Heavy Sports’s content? Be sure to follow us.
This article was originally published on Heavy Sports
The post Meet the NFL’s 6 Female Coaches appeared first on Heavy Sports.