Until 2015, all the full-time officials in the National Football League were men.
But that changed with Sarah Thomas, who on April 8, 2015, was hired as the first full-time female official in NFL history. And in 2021, she became the first woman to officiate a Super Bowl.
“I never let my gender keep me from doing something that I wanted to do,” Thomas 49, recently told MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend in collaboration with Know Your Value’s “Celebrating Her-Story” series for Women’s History Month.
Thomas, who grew up in Mississippi, had always been a stellar athlete and played college basketball at the University of Mobile. She then played on a local men’s league but said after three years, she got kicked off because she was female. At the time, her older brother was officiating high school football games and convinced her to attend an officiating meeting with him.
Thomas was hooked on the idea of officiating football and started climbing the ranks, overseeing youth games, college games, and then professional. She said tennis icon and gender rights activist Billie Jean King’s words, “pressure is a privilege” always stuck with her.
“The pressure of me being out there and the challenge of it, it never kept me from continuing to pursue this dream…We don’t press, we just continue to lean on our mentors…None of them looked like me. I had to lean on the guys who had walked this before me and just continue to dig In deeper,” said Thomas. Thomas, a mother of three, also had a message for young girls. “There is nothing you are not capable of doing just because you are a girl,” she said. Just pursue whatever dream [you have], and if you hit that roadblock, just look at it as a speedbump…Capitalize on your failures and they will turn into some of your greatest successes.”
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