By Tashan Reed / The Athletic
All Joe Headen could hear was yelling. The football coach at Susquehanna Township High School in Pennsylvania was walking out of a practice in 2010 when the sound of two adults going at it lured him back to the field. Once there, Headen found veteran defensive line coach Rick Pierce and first-year assistant defensive line coach Lori Locust in each other’s faces in a heated argument.
Pierce and Locust had a strong relationship, but Locust thought Pierce was taking it too easy on a star defensive lineman. Although Pierce vehemently disagreed, Locust did not back down. Headen let it play out without interrupting.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Coach, aren’t you going to do something?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, she’s got to earn her stripes,’” Headen said. “And, honestly, that was the moment I knew she was going to be all right.”
Locust grew up nearby as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, and she pretended to be the Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert in backyard pickup games as a child. But her connection to organized football was limited to fandom until the National Women’s Football Association, a professional women’s tackle football league, brought the Harrisburg Angels to her hometown in 2006. She tried out and made the team.
“I was like, ‘Wow, I get a chance to play football,’” Locust said. “And that translated a love of the game to a different love, right?”
In Locust’s fourth season, a torn ACL ended her playing career. She had grown up with Headen, and their sons played youth football together. Shortly after her injury, while they were sitting together at one of their practices, Locust told Headen of her desire to stay connected to the game. That is when he offered her the opportunity to transition to coaching.
“At that time, there were no female coaches in our area,” Headen said. “And it was one of those things where she just fit right in. She knew what she was doing. She knew what she was talking about. The respect factor was there. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, that’s Coach Locust or Coach Lo, my female coach.’ It was just straight Coach Lo.
“I didn’t realize how intense she was and how far she wanted to take it until we got to about the third year,” Headen said. “She really got bitten by the bug, and that’s when she just started putting her nose to the ground and grinding like crazy.”
That tenaciousness drove Locust to pursue any coaching opportunity she could find. Over the next decade, she held nine coaching positions — including coaching at the high school, college and men’s and women’s professional levels.
In 2019, that near-decade of work culminated in Locust’s becoming the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ assistant defensive line coach, the first female position coach in NFL history. The number of women coaching full time in the NFL has now grown to 15, the most ever.
Though Locust is part of the push for more female coaches, she has made it clear that she and her colleagues are not looking for any handouts.
“You have to be the right fit,” said the 60-year-old Locust, now a defensive quality control coach for the Tennessee Titans. “I’ve never been one to be like, ‘Because I’m in, all women should be in.’ You still have to earn it.”
The track Locust took to get to where she is — and put herself on course for what she is still hoping to achieve — was filled with obstacles, ranging from unemployment to sleeping in her car to selling off most of her belongings. Navigating that has required unwavering perseverance.
“I never put parameters on how far I could go,” Locust said, “and I still don’t.”
Locust’s first role coaching men came in 2013 when she was hired as the tight ends coach for the Central Penn Piranha, a now-defunct semipro team. When team owner Ron Kerr initially brought her on, he received pushback from staff members and players alike.
There were times during practice when she dug in over mistakes. But there were also moments during games when she would take time on the sideline to calmly explain how to adjust hand placement while blocking. The players appreciated the balanced coaching style. They listened to her and respected her.
“She was better than some of our male coaches,” Kerr said. “I was like, ‘She’s not going to quit until she makes it.’”
Three years later, Locust was hired as the defensive line coach of the Central Penn Capitals of the American Indoor Football league. After she helped the Capitals knock the Lehigh Valley Steelhawks out of the playoffs, the Steelhawks hired her in 2017 as their defensive line/linebackers coach and co-special teams coordinator.
Locust often roamed among the offensive, defensive and special teams meetings to expand her football knowledge. Growth wasn’t something she viewed as optional.
“She had this thirst to learn,” said Mike Clarke, the former Steelhawks executive vice president and general manager. “She just always wanted more.”
Locust received validation in 2017 when she was invited to the inaugural NFL Women’s Forum focused on increasing the number of women in football operations positions. The connections she made there helped earn her a spot with the league’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship.
She was on another trip, this time to Philadelphia to coach in the Globe Bowl, an annual international all-star game featuring college players and professional free agents, when she received a call from the Baltimore Ravens offering her a position as a defensive line coaching intern.
Two weeks before her Ravens internship began, the insurance company for which Locust worked told her they would not accommodate her temporary relocation to Baltimore. She was essentially forced to choose between making ends meet and chasing her dream. Though it meant being fired from her full-time job, she took a chance on football.
“It was extremely difficult,” Locust said. “I went to Baltimore with no job and no benefits and no income other than the internship.”
The experience strengthened Locust’s desire to coach, but the Ravens did not hire her to a full-time job afterward. After training camp ended that August, she returned to Pennsylvania with no plan for what would come next.
In December 2018, Locust received a call from the Birmingham Iron of the Alliance of American Football with an offer to become their assistant defensive line coach.
Not long after Locust started, there were rumors that the league’s future was in jeopardy. Concerned, Locust reached out to Katie Sowers, then an offensive assistant for the San Francisco 49ers, to inquire about opportunities. Sowers had attended the NFL Women’s Forum that year and heard that Bruce Arians, who was the coach of the Buccaneers, had committed to hiring a woman for a full-time role on his coaching staff.
Locust was hired as the Buccaneers’ assistant defensive line coach in 2019. In 2021, Locust and Maral Javadifar, the assistant strength and conditioning coach, became the first female coaches to win a Super Bowl when the Bucs beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV. It was a drastic reversal of fortunes that Locust described as “divine intervention.”
“I benefited from relationships,” Locust said. “I was around great male mentors that taught me like they would teach any other coach and treated me like they would treat any other coach. So it set the tone for me with the other coaches on staff and it set the tone with the players.”
The Buccaneers fired Locust after the 2022 season. “A lot of guys called me afterward and said, ‘Now you’re a real coach.’” Locust joked. “You’re not a real coach until you get fired and then hired back.”
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