With the recent determination of who will be playing in the Super Bowl LV in Tampa, Florida, this year (Go, Bucs!), you would think that there isn’t much more to be excited about. Usually, I only really pay attention to the ads and who wins the game. However, this year, there is something else to be excited about (besides the bomb nacho dip): Sarah Thomas.
Who is Sarah Thomas? She will be the first female to officiate the Super Bowl on Feb. 7. She will be the down judge in a crew of eight other officials (for those who don’t know, a down judge oversees the line of scrimmage and watches for offsides, encroachment, etc). This isn’t her first broken barrier—in 2015, she became the first female to be hired by the NFL as a full-time on-field official. Additionally, she became the first female to officiate an NFL playoff game in 2019.
In 2021, it may seem like it shouldn’t be a big deal to have a female officiating in the NFL; however, Sarah Thomas remained the only female referee in the NFL in 2020. In the NFL’s over 100-year history, 2020 marked the first time there were three females on the field in an official capacity during a regular-season game—two female coaches and Thomas officiating.
With all of her accomplishments, it’s become challenging to do her primary job as a referee: stay invisible on the field. She has to hide her ponytail under her cap to look like any other official.
“If I have a ponytail then I separate myself immediately,” Thomas said in an interview with CBS News in 2019.“So, tucking my hair, I blend in and I’m just another official.”
Thomas graduated from the University of Mobile in 1995 and left her college basketball career for a job that would keep her in the world of sports and competition. From there, she started to officiate junior football games until she was promoted to high school football, where she received glowing praises. She caught the eye of Gerry Austin—an NFL referee with three Super Bowl appearances—and she soon progressed to officiating college football.
In 2007, Thomas became the first female to officiate a major college football game. She continued to add to her impressive list of firsts by being the first woman to officiate a college bowl game. In 2013, she became one of the 21 finalists of the NFL’s officiating development program, leading to her historic achievement of officiating this year’s Super Bowl.
Officiating the Super Bowl isn’t an easy feat. It is considered one of the highest honors in the profession. The NFL mandates that anyone up for the position must have at least five years of experience and must have a stellar in-season performance, which Thomas most certainly has.
“Sarah Thomas has made history again as the first female Super Bowl official,” Troy Vincent, NFL executive vice president of football operations said in a recent statement. “Her elite performance and commitment to excellence has earned her the right to officiate the Super Bowl.”
This past year has been inspiring for women and girls who aspire to make their way in football. For example, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to play and score in a Power 5 conference football game for Vanderbilt in 2020. No female before her had played in an SEC game, much less for a Power 5 team.
“This whole time has been if I can do it, if I’m good enough to do it,” Fuller said to ESPN. “It wasn’t if I was a girl or not…at the end of the day, they treated me like an athlete and that’s the best I could ask for.”
Also, six out of the eight women coaches in the NFL were on the sidelines in the NFL playoffs—the Washington Football Team vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers conference championship was the first time in NFL history that both sides had female coaches on the sidelines. More recently, Jennifer King from the Washington Football Team has become the first full-time Black female assistant position coach in NFL history. She will serve as the assistant running backs coach after serving as an intern for a year under Coach Ron Rivera.
With all of these exciting firsts, there are now role models for girls who aspire to work within football but never thought it was possible. Instead of being confined to traditionally female-dominated sports or jobs within sports, girls have the chance to follow in these trailblazers’ footsteps and do what they love, regardless of their gender.
I will be especially excited to watch the Super Bowl this year as I know it’ll mark a very important ‘first.’ For Sarah Thomas, she just wants to be seen as any other official, since her gender should not have any impact on her ability to officiate. As she believes, hard work always pays off, regardless of your gender expression. After all, isn’t that what we should be showing girls and young women everywhere? As Thomas once said to CBS News, “I’ve always said that if you do something because you love it and not try to prove somebody wrong or get recognition for it, the recognition probably just is going to happen.”