NEW YORK (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.
She’s 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 woman to do so in any capacity. She also was a line judge.