The New England Patriots have made history by appointing their first ever full-time female scout.
The Patriots are working in the early stages of the off-season to get ready for the start of the 2023 campaign which begins in September. The work began with the NFL Draft last month, and will now continue with the various training camps over the next couple of months before pre-season begins.
Off the field, the Patriots have now made history by appointing Maya Ana Callender as a full-time scout. In the process, Callender is believed to have become the first woman in that position in the Patriots’ 64-year history.
According to ESPN, there are currently 33 full-time female scouts employed by NFL teams, as of 2022.
Calendar had been the director of operations at Princeton University where she was earning plenty of respect with her work in New Jersey. She is a graduate of Utica College, and had a fellowship with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2021 – the aim of the programme was part of an NFL initiative to provide more opportunities for women in football.
Princeton head coach Bob Surace could not speak any higher of Callender. The 55-year-old, who has been head coach at Princeton since 2010, explained how Callender would have a major impact in the way the team performed, as well as doing the work behind the scenes.
“She (Callender) was able to carve out time almost every day to practice the craft of evaluating. She would look at NFL games, evaluate players and learn scout-speak -- the language of talking about somebody’s reach, length, production, how they use their hands. She would have a pad out at our practices, taking notes,” Surace told ESPN .
“She became our pro/NFL liaison, so every time a scout came in -- which was probably 50 times last year, every team came in at least once -- she set them up. She talked about the players, their injury histories, how she had evaluated their performances.
“Then, by the time the scouts got to me, they didn’t have a lot of questions. I was kind of irrelevant on that, which was a new thing for me. She was terrific.”
Surace continued: “Her whole background had been operations and she was really good at it, but they gave [fellows] different areas of the organization to work and one of them was the scouting piece. She called me from Philadelphia, and I could hear the joy in her voice.
“It’s almost like ‘You really like this [operations side], and that’s where you saw your career going, but you didn’t know this other possibility was there.’
“We’re not the NFL. We have a small staff, so they’re given lots of duties. For some of them like Maya, they rise to the top,” Surace added. “To her credit, she started from the ground up and really put herself in a great position to take this next step.”
