Katie Sowers To Become First Woman & First Openly Gay Person To Coach In Super Bowl
When the 49ers take the field against the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, Katie Sowers will make history as the first openly gay woman to ever coach in the big game.
One of her most documented coaching moments came in the preseason when she saw rookie Kendrick Bourne visibly discouraged on the sidelines after dropping a couple of passes in a game two years ago. He said he was worried about being cut because of poor performance and was panicking on the sidelines.
“I was kind of down, and she just calmed me down,” Bourne told Yahoo Sports. “She was telling me to live in the moment and this is something I’ve been doing all my life. It calmed me down for real, and I ended up having a really good game. I credit it to her. That’s why I’ll always respect her. I always think about that. That was just a big moment in my life. It was her first year, my first year. She was finding her way; I was finding my way. I just felt like her giving me that tip helped me make my way.”
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Bourne is now in his third year with the team and it’s hard to imagine where he would be if it weren’t for Sowers.
“There was a point in my life when I wrote down my goals, when I felt lost,” Sowers said. “One of the things I wanted to do was something nobody has ever done before, and really be a trailblazer.”
When Becky Hammon was hired as the second female coach in NBA history in 2014, it gave Sowers hope. She had spent eight seasons in the Women’s Football Alliance, a tackle football league, but wanted to find a way into coaching. “If you don’t see it, you can’t dream about it,” Sowers said. She tweeted a photo of an article that announced Hammon’s hiring in 2014 with the caption, Coming for the NFL.. #nfl #womenincoaching #beckyhammon.
Sowers was able to get the chance of a lifetime while she was coaching the daughter of former Atlanta Falcons’ general manager Scott Pioli on a youth basketball team. Pioli found out about her background and helped her get a job with the Falcons as an offensive assistant in 2016. In 2017, she came to San Francisco with Kyle Shanahan when he was hired as head coach and has been here ever since.
Ten years ago she was working at an elementary school making $800 a month, now she’s won win away from being the first female coach to win a Super Bowl Title.
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