Super Bowl LV was one for the record books — with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers becoming the first team ever to host the big game — and of course, the game had a decidedly different look in the pandemic with just 25,000 fans in attendance in a stadium that holds about 66,000.
And of course, Tampa’s Tom Brady was the story of the day, collecting an unprecedented seventh Super Bowl ring and his fifth Super Bowl MVP award.
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But there was another slice of history on hand in Tampa Bay as well, with a significant barrier being broken by down judge Sarah Thomas as she became the first woman to ever officiate in a Super Bowl.
Thomas has already been a trailblazer in her career.
In 2015, she became the first ever full-time female ref in NFL history, and in 2019, she earned the honor of being the first woman to ref an NFL playoff game.
“Sarah Thomas has made history again as the first female Super Bowl official,” NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent Sr. said in a statement, according to Fox News. “Her elite performance and commitment to excellence has earned her the right to officiate the Super Bowl. Congratulations to Sarah on this well-deserved honor.”
Decades of hard work are behind all those broken barriers.
As a student athlete, Thomas excelled at softball and basketball. But in her family, football came first.
She started out officiating grade school games, and then high school before moving up to officiating college football games in 2006, and in 2009, she officiated a college bowl game — the first ever woman to do that as well.
The NFL even adopted a title change to accommodate Thomas’s rise through the ranks.
As Sports Illustrated reported, even before Thomas came along, the NFL had been considering changing the title of “head linesman” to a gender neutral “down judge,” but she forced their timeline to move up a bit.
The NFL also wanted more women to pursue careers in officiating, so the change seemed wise.
Although many women and girls will look up to Thomas as an inspiration, she’s more focused on her on-field performance.
Following her first NFL playoff game back in 2019, she told the NFL Network that “Yes, there are still those that identify me as a female official, and a lot of them are young females or female executives or employees…but as far as my peers and those that are on the field, coaches, players, no. They see me as an official and that’s exactly what I want.”
The Super Bowl saw yet another barrier fall as well.
Tampa Bay also became the first team to win the Super Bowl with women on their coaching staff: Assistant Defensive Line Coach Lori Locust and Strength and Conditioning Coach Maral Javadifar.
Katie Sowers became the first female to coach at a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers in 2020, but they were defeated by the Kansas City Chiefs.
h/t: Sports Illustrated
