For two weeks this May, a strength and conditioning coach from Howard University was on the field in burgundy and gold, working inside the Washington Commanders facility before dawn. Michelle Boateng is part of a small but growing group of Black women in the NFL, and the way she earned her way into that building says everything about how access actually works in football. She was not handed anything. She got into a room, and then she went and earned the rest.
That room exists because of Sam Rapoport, even if most fans have never heard her name. When Rapoport talks about the NFL Women’s Forum, the program she created, she keeps circling back to one word. Access. As she put it celebrating one of the Forum’s newest success stories, you cannot have a true meritocracy if everyone does not have access to the opportunity. The Forum was never about handing women jobs. It was about putting them in rooms where they could go earn those jobs themselves. Boateng is exactly what that looks like when the model works.
Rapoport spent more than two decades inside the NFL and built the Women’s Forum from an idea into a global standard. When she started, there were zero women coaching professional football. Zero. The invite only gathering she created identifies women already grinding in college football and connects them directly to the owners, general managers, coaches, and personnel staff who do the hiring. The results speak for themselves. The league went from no full time women coaches to fifteen, the most of any men’s professional sports league in the world, with women in scouting or player personnel roles across all thirty two teams. The majority of the women who have come through the Forum are women of color. Autumn Lockwood, an Eagles assistant and a Forum alum, became the first Black woman to coach on a team that won the Super Bowl. The blueprint has since been copied by Major League Baseball, the CFL, and the USTA.
Boateng walked through that door this year. She is a strength and conditioning coach at Howard University, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who, like a lot of foreign born parents, wanted their child on the safe path toward medicine or law. She chose football instead, and she earned every step of it. After James Madison, she cold emailed teams all over the DMV until Maryland gave her a shot, then came an internship at Colorado and a graduate assistant role at Hampton before Howard. When she did not get the football strength internship she wanted at JMU, she did not walk away. She pivoted into a recruiting and operations role, picked up a camera, and learned the inside of a football building by watching everything around her.
Then the timing lined up. Just a few months into the Howard job, Boateng got the email inviting her to the 2026 NFL Women’s Forum. During the program’s intentionally long lunch break, Kristina Hart pulled her aside and told her Sarah Hogan of the Washington Commanders, one of the most respected women working in the NFL, wanted to talk. That conversation became an application. By the end of March, out of a pool of more than a thousand applicants, Boateng learned she had been selected for the Commanders’ Bill Walsh Fellowship. Her words were simple. She was in shock.
For two weeks this May she worked the burgundy and gold inside the Commanders facility in Ashburn, days starting around five in the morning, setting and resetting the weight room, learning the lifting cards for every position group, and coaching movement hands on under head strength coach Chad Englehart and his staff. She did it alongside Chris Hicks, another Bill Walsh Fellow who, in a small world twist, grew up in the same Stafford, Virginia town and attended the same high school. Hicks chased his own NFL dream through Lock Haven, Florida, Austin Peay, and Buffalo, and landed the fellowship with the team his late mother loved, a promise kept.
What makes Boateng’s story land is that it is not a fluke. It is the system Rapoport designed doing precisely what it was built to do. The names Boateng lists as her role models tell you everything. Autumn Lockwood at the Eagles. Kaelyn Buskey at the Ravens. Genevieve Humphrey at the Panthers. Black women already on NFL sidelines because someone before them got in the room first. Boateng wants to be a full time NFL strength coach, and she is now walking the exact path those women cleared, the same path the Women’s Forum exists to widen for the women coming up behind her.
