In the last ten years, female coaches in the NFL have joined players on the field and have carved out positions for themselves in the front office. Throughout the league, a number of women have been appointed into roles that few women have occupied in the male-dominated sport.
Kathleen Wood is another woman who was promoted to roles she could not have held before. Wood will take on the role of Scouting/Personnel Assessment and Development for the Cleveland Browns, according to a tweet from NFL Network analyst Scott Pioli.
Pioli began by thanking general manager Andrew Berry for the hiring decision and then told Wood’s tale of how she got her start in the industry as a scout. According to Pioli’s LinkedIn article, Wood got her start in the league by working as an unpaid scout for colleges in Delaware and Maryland to polish her skills.
Wood attracted Berry’s attention while working at the Reese’s Senior Bowl and went on to become one of the league’s first full-time female scouts. In 2020, she worked with the Browns as the Northeast Area Scout, visiting schools in Maryland, Maine, and Washington, D.C. According to the NFL, Wood was a member of a female workforce that has increased to make up roughly 42% of the entire staff as of 2022.
In the late 1970s, Connie Carberg was acknowledged by the NFL as the league’s first female scout. She worked in that capacity for a number of years, assisting the team in identifying several players who went on to win the AFC Championship in 1983. As a member of the board of trustees for the Women’s Sports Foundation, Pioli is involved with the organization.
