Emily Baustert grew up around the sport of football, watching the sport with her father Matt — a Notre Dame football fan as well as the NFL's Raiders franchise — and growing up around sports in general.
She played every sport possible growing up before settling on golf, which allowed her an opportunity to play collegiately at Davenport University for a couple of seasons. Her love of football led her to join the university's football program as a student assistant, which she didn't realize at the time would lead her to her current career.
"I just wanted to be around, every practice, every game," Baustert said. "I was a ball girl, I was setting up equipment, helping with photo shoots — just everything."
Baustert didn't really realize there was a future for women in football at the time, but McEwen did as his wife Christie had been the first general manager of the Arena Football League's Oklahoma City Yard Dawgs. Christie became a mentor for Baustert, who was in school at the time for accounting, but realized that may not be something she wanted to do long term.
So she continued to hang around the Davenport program, becoming the school's director of football operations and learning about recruiting, compliance, all the things surrounding the administrative portion of the sport. She graduated in 2020 and spent two more years at the school obtaining her master's degree.
In April of 2022 she was hired as the director of football operations at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the first woman to hold the title at UTC. Less than two years later she paid it forward by helping in the hiring of Hannah Braxton as the football program's recruiting coordinator and NFL liaison.
UTC is the only school at the Football Championship Subdivision level that officially employs women at both positions, though Houston Christian has a woman, Callie Cameron, that appears to do both but isn't listed with the official titles.
More and more schools employ at least one or the other (at least 25% of the 128 schools have one woman listed as either an administrative assistant, director of football operations, executive assistant to the head coach or director of on-campus recruiting). Brown University's Heather Marini is an assistant quarterback coach.
"They are go-getters, task-oriented people," UTC head coach Rusty Wright said recently of the UTC hires. "They get things done. Half the time, I'll walk in there with Emily and ask what we have to do today and she's already done it. Those kind of people, you want to be around them, and both of them are going to be rock stars in this profession when it's all said and done.
"We tried to hire the best person — it doesn't really matter if they're male or female in this case — and they were the two best we found and I don't think there's any doubt that they're two of the best around."
Baustert has a big white board when you walk in the office she shares with Wright, with schedules, tasks and reminders that she can easily access.
"I'm a very visual person," she said. "I love my lists, so I have a planner, I have a notebook, I have notes on my phone, I have notes on my computer, and then I write everything down. I'm very visual."
Wright had some indirect familiarity with Braxton, with both having spent time recently at Georgia State. Wright was there in 2017 and 2018 as an assistant coach, while Braxton started there in March of 2020 as a recruiting/operations assistant. She had worked for Ginny Thompson, who Wright still knew from his time at the Atlanta school and served as a mentor to Braxton.
A Georgia native, Braxton grew up an Atlanta Braves fan and loves the game of baseball, but saw that there were more opportunities for support staffers in football.
She started off as an undergraduate assistant at West Georgia, working on the sports medicine staff before deciding she wanted to go the administrative route. That led to the opportunity at Georgia State before now landing at UTC, where she runs all aspects of recruiting operations and manages all on-campus recruiting visits (official and unofficial) and summer camp coordination.
"I think this is awesome," Braxton said. "I think that football being a male-dominant sport, it's very rare that you see women working in football, but it's becoming a lot more common nowadays. It's awesome to see women having that impact, because years ago you would have never seen that. You would have had all men in the office and very few women and it's just completely taken a turn to where it's primarily girls.
"It's really big to see all these women do big things that people probably thought women weren't going to do."
Added Baustert: "It's really cool to see the sport grow. I think we bring a different, more organized feel to it. That's not saying that men can't be organized or detailed, but it's more of the nurturing, the organization, the little small details that you might not think of that we try and think of.
"Even though I'm like three, four years older than these guys, I still feel like a big sister, like a motherly figure. I want them to be taken care of while they are here."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.