Gridiron Gals

On a Fall afternoonin New Orleans, some two dozen padded, helmeted 14- and 15-year-olds huddled on an inner-city ball field for practice. During one drill, a lineman lurched at the running back, nipped his jersey and bear-hugged nothing but Big Easy air. The coach blew a whistle in disgust and stomped toward the offensive tackler. "When are you going to hit him?" barked Tomaris Bolds-Jackson, 38, a mother of four. "You have to hit him. You're playing football, son."

Bolds-Jackson is one rare instructor. With the growth of girls' sports over the past 30 years, female coaches have become increasingly common in most sports--some guiding high school and college squads, others leading a daughter's youth-soccer team to a title. Last season 12% of the Youth Basketball Organization's 4,300 coaching members were women, which is double the percentage five years earlier. Over the same period, the percentage of female coaches in U.S. youth soccer grew from about 2% to 11%.

But the coaching boom has left football in the backfield. Pop Warner, football's Little League, has 20,000 coaches. At most, 200, or 1%, are women. And only one high school in America--George Washington in New York City--has a female head football coach. This isn't shocking, given that few girls actually grace the gridiron. Still, the National Football League (NFL) is eager to address the shortage, starting with moms like Bolds-Jackson in New Orleans.

So this fall the NFL brought veteran high school coach Jerry Horowitz to the city to teach Football 101 to 33 females, a group that included cops, teachers and stay-at-home mothers. After 16 hours of training, the women ran 12 practices for 12- to 15-year-old boys and a few girls taking part in the league's Junior Player Development program.

"When I first heard this idea, I honestly thought it was a joke," says Horowitz, who coached New York City high school football for more than 25 years. "But then I saw how seriously some of these women have approached this. Coaching and teaching are the same thing, and some of the best teachers in the country are women. They're an untapped resource."

The league launched the program in New Orleans because of Louisiana's love affair with the game. It held the training sessions in a tough neighborhood near the Crescent City Connection, a Mississippi River bridge, because of the area's high number of single-parent households. Moms in this part of town don't hesitate to do what traditionalists might see as a dad's job. The new coaches quickly won their players' respect. "They're tough and not afraid to holler at you," said Ryan Aaron, 15. "They get down and dirty just like the men."

The NFL plans to expand the program to women in all 31 of its cities in the next two years. Baltimore, New Orleans, New York City, Miami and Pittsburgh are set for 2005. Will the lessons take hold and actually bring a significant number of women into the ranks? Some are skeptical. "It ain't going to happen," says Carol White, the only woman ever to coach Division I college football. "They would have to change society first," says White, an assistant at Georgia Tech in the late 1980s. "It's not an antiwoman thing. Most women just don't fit the conception of what a football coach is supposed to be, even at the youth level."