When people tell Jen Welter she doesn’t look like a football player, she asks them how many female players they’ve met. Just one, they usually reply, referring to her. “So,” she replies with a grin, “I guess I do look like a football player then, right?”
Welter has been breaking boundaries in sports and gender stereotypes for decades now. A longtime player in women’s leagues and a former coach with the Indoor Football League’s Texas Revolution, the 38-year-old recently completed an internship with the Arizona Cardinals, becoming the first woman to earn a coaching position in the NFL. The experience was thrilling—“There are so many fantastic guys playing the game,” Welter says—but it was also challenging. Once more, she was a pioneer, just like when she first began playing tackle football: “I loved that football was the game that women were never really supposed to play,” Welter says of her first foray into the sport with other female players. “We were literally defying the odds by playing. We were opening doors for other people. This was the final frontier: We were sacrificing for the common good.”
Welter didn’t plan to become a coach. “I didn’t dream of becoming a coach because there were no other female coaches,” she says. But her skills and smarts as a player impressed Wendell Davis, a former Dallas Cowboys player and Texas Revolution coach. He offered her a job, and when she initially turned it down, he reminded her that such opportunities for career advancement are rare. She accepted his offer, and the experience ultimately helped her land an internship with the Cardinals, which wrapped up last fall.
Welter’s passion for football is all-consuming. In addition to playing and coaching the game, she also has a deep interest in the psychology that helps athletes in football—or in any sport–play at the top level. She holds a Master’s in Sport Psychology and a PhD in Psychology from Capella University, and that academic understanding of the sport has been critical to helping her success—both on and off the field. “Psychology is every moment of every day,” Welter says. “It’s human interaction. It’s people.” And understanding athletes as people, rather than just players on a team, is critical to helping them succeed, she says.
Welter chose Capella partly because it had “the best sport psychology program in the country” and partly because it was flexible. Her study time often had to be wedged into short spans of time. “I read a lot of journal articles on very long bus rides,” she says. “I probably should have been studying my plays at times, and yet I was reading journal articles and balancing my laptop on my knees to write posts for classes. Education is a commitment. I didn’t complete my degree as fast as I would have liked, but the promise I made to myself was not to quit or stop completely.”
Many young women see Welter as a role model for breaking gender barriers. Her advice for women and girls who hope to follow a similar path is straightforward: “It’s not an easy road,” she says. Welter is encouraging, but also suggests that such individuals should be realistic. “Look at all of the women’s football teams around the country—adult women playing 11 on 11 NFL rules football. Those women are doing it strictly for the love of the game. You have to be playing for a bigger purpose.”
Welter’s advice for people considering getting a degree at Capella sounds similar. It will require sacrifices, but it’s definitely worth the hard effort. “If it’s your dream, make a commitment and go all in,” she says.
Learn more about Capella’s online psychology degrees.
