Jen Welter, who broke the NFL’s gender barrier as a Cardinals training camp coaching intern last summer, has yet to sit down and talk with Kathryn Smith, who earned a full-time job with the Bills this offseason.
But when they talk, Welter will have one message for her, the same one she got from Terry Glenn when they were coaching a minor league team together.
“My biggest hope for her is they let her be great where she’s great,” Smith said, via Tyler Dunne of the Buffalo News. “Don’t try to make her something that she’s not. If they made me coach a quarterback, I would suck. I would be horrible. Right? I don’t know anything about being a great quarterback. I was a linebacker. If you made me someone who yelled at players as a disciplinarian, that’s not going to work either. They would flick me aside and say, ‘What is this little woman doing?’ You have to be authentic.
“Terry said, ‘Jen, the best advice I can give you about going to the NFL is to be 100 percent authentic. If you’re the person you were here with us every single day, those guys will love you just like these guys did. But if you go in there but you’re fake in any way, they will eat you alive.’”
Welter said there was never an issue during her time with the Cardinals, other than finding coaches shorts that fit her. But she said the tone was set early in camp, when veteran linebacker Lorenzo Alexander backed her coaching points up to young players.
“I was teaching one of the rookies something,” Welter said. “It was something on technique, coming off the edge or something for special teams. Zo’s walking by. Zo’s like a legend. So Zo’s walking by and one guy says, ‘ Zo, what do you think I should do?’ And he said, ‘I think you should listen to her right there because everything she said was on point.’ So when you have the stamp of approval from a vet like that, it’s those things that carry over. It very easily could’ve gone a different way if he said, ‘Hey, don’t listen to that. Come here, rook.’ But that’s the difference. Guys like that set the tone and everybody else falls in line.”
Welter was also fortunate enough to fall into a coaching staff that was full of diverse voices anyway, so it was easy to fit in. And she hopes the Bills are willing to put Smith into a position to succeed, so that they don’t have to be such isolated cases.
