Guest Post By @XFLChick

Tonight, Sunday, March 8th, 2020, the LA Wildcats are facing off against the Tampa Bay Vipers as the concluding game for Week 5 of the XFL.

It happens to be International Women’s Day and it also so happens to be that the Los Angeles Wildcats’ president, Heather Karatz, is a female blazing the trail for other women who are passionate about sports and aspire to work in the sports management realm someday.

In an LA Times article, Heather Karatz acknowledged that the XFL is revolutionary in the sense that the league has females in what are normally seen as male roles, but she made sure to note that when it came to hiring, the XFL wasn’t simply trying to check the gender box, but the focus was on making sure that each person hired brought “a unique perspective and a special set of experiences that are going to help add to the quilt of talent that is now within the XFL” (Hellene, 2020).

There is still something to be said given that there are two female presidents, at least one female in each officiating crew for every XFL game, one female head athletic trainer, and two female head communication directors in the entire XFL league.

All of these women are inspiring to so many young girls by emitting a powerful message: one’s gender has no say in one’s capability to work hard and work in sports if that’s where one’s passion lies.

Heather Karatz and Janet Duch set an incredible example by simply being two of the few women who hold a high-ranking executive position with a professional football team.

In closing, I want to make a note that coincidentally the journalist who wrote the article about Heather Karatz in La Times is also a female pioneer in her field as she was the first female journalist to be honored with a plaque in the Hall of Fame of a major professional sport as the 2005 winner of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Elmer Ferguson Award.

Guest Post By @XFLChick