Four Women Who Broke Through Sports’ Glass Ceiling in 2020

On Wednesday night, just two days before the end of 2020, Becky Hammon made basketball history when she became the first woman to coach in an NBA regular-season game, taking over for San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich in the second quarter against the Los Angeles Lakers after Popovich was ejected for arguing with a referee.

As he was about to walk off the court, Popovich gestured toward Hammon, an assistant coach sitting on the bench, and indicated she should take over. “He officially pointed at me,” Hammon said in a press conference with reporters after the game. “That was it. Said, ‘You’ve got them.’ Obviously it’s a big deal. It’s a substantial moment.” She added, “Obviously I did not walk into the arena thinking I would be coaching tonight.”

But Hammon’s moment, though history making, was not an entirely unique one for 2020. In the past year she was one of four woman who forever changed the sports world, breaking long-standing gender barriers in the male-dominated sports of football, basketball, and baseball. The other three were Sarah Fuller, a Vanderbilt University athlete who in November became the first woman to play in a game for a major college football program; Kim Ng, who that same month was named general manager of the Miami Marlins, becoming the first woman to hold that position in the history of Major League Baseball; and San Francisco 49ers assistant coach Katie Sowers, who in February become the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl.

Here is a look at these four pioneers and their barrier-breaking achievements.

Sarah Fuller

Fuller, a senior and the starting goalkeeper for Vanderbilt’s women’s soccer team, became the first woman to play during a regular-season game in one of college football’s Power Five conferences when she booted a kickoff for Vanderbilt to start the second half of a November 28 game against Missouri, a matchup of two SEC teams.

Fuller was recruited for the game by Vanderbilt’s coaches after every member of the Commodores’s kicking squad was forced to stop practicing when one of them came into contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. A week earlier, Fuller had helped Vanderbilt clinch its first SEC women’s soccer title since 1994 with a 3-1 victory over Arkansas.

And her history-making achievements didn’t stop with the Missouri game. Two weeks later, in a season-ending game against Tennessee, Fuller kicked an extra point after the Commodores scored a touchdown with one minute and 50 seconds left in the first quarter, making her the first woman to score points in a Power Five college football game. (She later kicked a second extra point in the game.)

As ESPN noted, other women have played and scored in college football games, but not at the level of a major college program. Liz Heaston became the first woman to score in college football with two extra points for Willamette of NAIA on October 18, 1997. Katie Hnida was the first woman to score at the Football Bowl Subdivision level with two extra points for New Mexico on August 30, 2003. April Goss was the second, with an extra point for Kent State in 2015. Tonya Butler was the first woman to kick a field goal in an NCAA game for Division II West Alabama on September 13, 2003.

Though Vanderbilt was blown out by Missouri by a score of 41-0 (and later lost to Tennessee by a score of 42-17, ending the season winless), Fuller, who wore a helmet emblazoned with the phrase Play like a girl, was happy to embrace the significance of her achievement. “It’s just so exciting that I can represent the little girls out there who want to do this or thought about playing football or any sport, really,” she said after the Missouri game.

And after the loss to Tennessee, she again reflected on what her presence on the field meant for sports equality. “This whole time has been if I can do it, if I’m good enough to do it,” Fuller told reporters. “It wasn’t if I was a girl or not. So that’s something I’ve really appreciated. At the end of the day, they treated me like an athlete, and that’s the best I could ask for.”

Katie Sowers

When the San Francisco 49ers played the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, Sowers—an offensive assistant coach with the 49ers who has been with the team for four years—became the first female assistant and first openly gay coach to work pro football’s biggest game.

Sowers attended Hesston College and then the Mennonite-affiliated Goshen College in Indiana, where she was a multisport athlete. After graduating in 2009, she asked about taking a position as a volunteer assistant coach on the Goshen women’s basketball team. She said she was turned down based on her sexual orientation.

Spurned, she turned instead to Women’s Football Alliance, where she played with her twin sister, Liz. Sowers played eight years in the WFA, first for the West Michigan Mayhem and then for the Kansas City Titans. She also coached girls basketball in Kansas City, where one of her players was a daughter of the noted football executive Scott Pioli. Later, when Pioli became the assistant general manager of the Atlanta Falcons, he helped Sowers get a Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship, part of which involved working with the Falcons during the off-season. There she met Kyle Shanahan, who later went on to coach the 49ers, where he recruited Sowers to join his staff in 2017. In 2019 she became the first full-time female coach in NFL history. 

In 2017, in an interview with Outsports, Sowers came out as the NFL’s first openly LGBTQ+ coach, male or female. “No matter what you do in life, one of the most important things is to be true to who you are,” Sowers told the site. “There are so many people who identify as LGBT in the NFL, as in any business, who do not feel comfortable being public about their sexual orientation.”

Though the 49ers lost the Super Bowl to the Chiefs (and will miss the playoffs this year), players have publicly expressed their belief in Sowers and the future of her coaching career, with defensive tackle DJ Jones telling ABC News, “She’s empowering to all women. I’m proud of her. She’s a superstar.”

In an interview with Hesston College in 2016, when she was with the Falcons, Sowers talked about her career goals. “My long-term goal is to be a head coach and then move on to executive management,” Sowers said. “It’s not a typical path, but then again, nothing about what I’m doing is typical.”

Kim Ng

When Ng was hired by team co-owner Derek Jeter in November to be the new general manager of the Miami Marlins, she not only became the first female general manager of a major North American men’s professional sports team, but also Major League Baseball’s first Asian American general manager.

It was an ascent three decades in the making. Ng, 51, started as an intern with the Chicago White Sox at 21; worked her way up to a job as the American League’s director of waivers and records; and then, at 29, became the youngest assistant general manager in MLB, working for Brian Cashman and the New York Yankees. She joined the Dodgers as vice president and assistant GM in 2001 and left to serve as senior vice president of baseball operations for MLB in 2011. According to ESPN, before being named GM for the Marlins, she had interviewed and been passed over for at least five open GM positions.

During a virtual press conference with reporters soon after the news of her hiring was announced, she reflected on that often frustrating journey. “Look, it’s a tribute to the idea that you just have to keep plowing through,” she said. “That’s what this is. It’s like what we tell the players—you can mope and sulk for a few days, but that’s it. You’ve got to come back, and that’s what I’ve been able to do. I’ve been defeated and deflated numerous times, but you keep hoping.”

Jeter, also the Marlins CEO, played for the Yankees when Ng worked for the team. “We look forward to Kim bringing a wealth of knowledge and championship-level experience to the Miami Marlins,” Jeter said in a statement. “Her leadership of our baseball operations team will play a major role on our path toward sustained success.”

Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre, who worked with Ng in both New York and Los Angeles, told The New York Times that Ng’s appointment was a long time coming. “Women were always looked at as intruders into a supposedly man’s sport,” the 80-year-old Torre told the paper. “That change evolved over the years when they started opening the clubhouse to female writers, which obviously was the right thing to do. I came from a family with two sisters, and they were such loyal baseball fans. The female could know as much about the game as the male fan, that’s for sure.”

Becky Hammon

Hammon joined the staff of the San Antonio Spurs in 2014 and is one of six women who hold an assistant coaching role in the NBA this season. She was promoted to the front of the Spurs’s bench entering the 2018–19 season, and last season became the senior assistant to Popovich, helping him on strategy, shot selection, and player substitutions. She had previously served as the head coach of the Spurs’s summer league team and taken over for Popovich in a preseason game in October 2017—but the December 30 contest against the Lakers marked the first time she had done so in a regular-season game. (The Lakers, the defending NBA champions, won the game, 121–107.)

Hammon, 43, was a celebrated college player for Colorado State, where she was twice the WAC Mountain Division player of the year as well as a first-team All-American, and later played for 16 years in the WNBA, where she was a six-time All-Star. After being passed over for the United States Olympic team, she represented Russia, where she had also played professionally, in the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.

According to The New York Times, on her flight home from the 2012 London Games, Hammon’s seatmate was Popovich, who raised the issue of her joining his staff. She said that he asked her, “So if you were an assistant for me and I asked you something, you’d tell me the truth?” She said she replied, “I don’t know why else you’d ask if you didn’t want me to tell the truth.” He answered, “Good, I don’t want a bunch of yes men.”

Hammon’s rising prominence in the NBA has prompted speculation that she will one day be a head coach in the league, and she has been reported to be a candidate for several top jobs in the past, most recently the Indiana Pacers.

“The future is bright for her,” said the Spurs’s Dejounte Murray to reporters after the game. “I hope she just sticks to it and doesn’t give up. One day it may happen, it may not happen, who knows, but she’s definitely on the right road.”