Her Story
About Dr. Jen
I've been in sports in various roles for 25 years. I started as a women's tackle football player for about 14-15 years, winning two gold medals with Team USA and becoming a four-time world champion. I was the first woman to play running back in men's pro football. I then moved into coaching, becoming the first woman to coach in the NFL, and have also coached in the XFL, AAF, IFL, and overseas with the Australian Women's National Team and Chinese Women's National Team. I have a PhD in sports psychology, which provides the intellectual counterpart to my practical experience, making me a unique value proposition to the sports industry. I'm a two-time gold medalist and four-time world champion, and I focus on the psychology of excellence and teamwork. I'm also a global motivational speaker and author. I run a non-profit called Gridiron Girls, which I started in 2012, where we provide confidence through football and teach girls there is no game they cannot play and no field they do not belong in or out. Currently, one of my passion projects is celebrating women who have broken barriers in football through an installation called Kick Glass, which we launched in New Orleans at the Super Bowl. It celebrates women in football from the front office to the field who are the strong shoulder pads the game stands on today.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Dr. Jen
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would give advice to anybody to really focus on process and skill development and what you love. It's not enough to just love what you do, but the love of doing what you do will lead to you outworking other people. It's not about just loving it and being a woman in it. It's about letting the love drive you to be competitive in your field, and to develop what your unique and special value add is to any team you're on, any business you're in. You really want to develop a place where you're unique, special, and valuable, and always be a good teammate.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think it's a little bit of a culture shift time, where we're finally looking at women's sports in different ways, and women in football in different ways, and I think it's the educational uptake that just takes a lot of time. When you look at celebrating women in football, there have been women there doing good work for a long time, but almost hidden in plain sight. So developing allyship just takes time, and realizing that we may not have had the same access to networks that some of our male counterparts had. You came up maybe in college and in pros with a locker room of guys who then continued maybe in football and sports and in business in different areas. But then when they go get a job, they say, oh, I got a guy. They may not know the women, they may know of us, but they may not know us personally to the same fluidity of relationships, and I think that that's one of the challenges you have in a shifting landscape.
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