Go Sportsball, Go!

I am not a huge sportsball fan, particularly professional sportsball because it’s all about dudes all the time. But I do both understand how the various sportsball games are played and their general rules – you know, playtime involving running and shooting, running and tackling, running and hitting and so on and so forth – and why people like them. The world needs more diversions from the relentlessness of life and we’ve collectively decided that the games we play as children can be Very Serious Business as adults. Which, you know, if fine.

But what isn’t fine is how many of the things we deem Very Serious Business tend to exclude women (and LGBTQ people, and people of color, and the differently abled because all these groups threaten the current power structure). So this weekend, while I probably still won’t really watch, I’ll be rooting for the San Francisco 49ers as they continue their playoffs run. First, because hello NorCal forever. And second because they have offensive assistant coach Katie Sowers. She is only the second female assistant coach ever hired by the NFL and the first out LGBT coach ever in the league.

You might recognize her already because she is featured in a Surface Pro ad which has played in heavy rotation recently. And while corporations continue to not be our friend (again, their only true friend is money), when corporations do good things in spite of themselves it’s definitely worth noting.

Sowers has had a long career both on and off the field. She played for the Women’s Football Alliance, a full-contact American women’s pro-league. Then when her playing days were over she started coaching, first as a scout for the Atlanta Falcons and then
joining the 49ers in 2017. That’s the same year she came out, making her the first out NFL coach male or female. If you watched any of the 49ers/Vikings game you saw her in the booth making offensive (the good kind of offense, mind you) calls. The bad kind of offense is us living in the year 2020 and it still being almost unheard of for women to coach/lead men – in almost any setting from the boardroom to the Oval Office and the football field.

So go Niners, go Katie and go sportsball.