Sarah Thomas Becomes NFL's First Permanent Female Official
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- The NFL has its first full-time female game official.
Sarah Thomas, who has worked exhibition games, will be a line judge for the 2015 season, the league announced Wednesday. The 41-year-old Thomas was in the league's officiating development program in 2013 and '14 and worked some team minicamps last year.
Eight others -- including the son of longtime referee Walt Coleman -- were also hired from the program, the league said.
"Our incoming officials have all demonstrated that they are among the best in college football," NFL vice president of officiating Dean Blandino said in a statement. "We are excited about having them join us."
Thomas has already broken ground in the officiating field as the first woman to work college games in 2007. She was the first female official on the FBS level and the first to officiate a bowl game, the 2009 Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in Detroit.
"I am a female, but I don't look at myself as just a female," Thomas said last June while working a Cleveland Browns minicamp. "I look at myself as an official."
Shannon Eastin worked regular-season NFL games in 2012 as a replacement official, making her the first female to do so in any capacity. She also was a line judge.
Thomas, a former college basketball player, was inspired to become an official in the 1990s when she attended a meeting with her brother, Lea. In 1996, Thomas became the first female to officiate in a Division 1-A high school football game in Mississippi.
Just under a decade later, she began officiating college games when she was hired by Conference USA, working as a line judge and head linesman. She also has worked the Senior Bowl, the Fight Hunger Bowl, the Medal of Honor Bowl, and the Conference USA Championship game in 2010 and 2014.
"I know a lot of females are maybe inspired that there's a gender-barrier about to be broken," Thomas told CBS News after emerging as a candidate for the NFL in 2013. "But I never set out to shatter the glass ceiling."
Thomas officiated two seasons in the United Football League, which is now out of business.
Off the field, she's a pharmaceutical representative. She said last June her two sons and one daughter see nothing extraordinary about her football job.
"They just know mom officiates and it's nothing foreign to them or pioneering or anything," she said. "I do this."
Walt Coleman IV, Kevin Codey, Hugo Cruz, Bart Longson, Clay Martin, Aaron Santi, Shawn Smith and Jabir Walker were hired as the other first-year officials.
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