Female Officials
Historically, all American football officials have been males, corresponding with the male-dominated sport. In 2007, Sarah Thomas became the first woman to officiate a major college football game, working a game between Memphis and Jacksonville State. Thomas later became the first woman to officiate a bowl game when she worked as a line judge during the 2009 Little Caesars Pizza Bowl between Marshall and Ohio. Since then, other females have officiated Division I college football games.
Terri Valenti became the first female to officiate professional football when she began working United Football League games in 2009. The UFL later hired Thomas in 2010.
In 2012, Shannon Eastin became the first female to ever officiate an NFL game. However, she is a replacement referee while the league has locked out the regular officials due to a labor dispute, and thus writers such as Darin Gantt of Profootballtalk.com and Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times lamented the fact that this gender barrier was broken in this manner, while those like Thomas chose not to be a strikebreaker like Eastin.
Read more about this topic: Official (American Football), History
Famous quotes containing the words female and/or officials:
“We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)