In high school, Sam Rapoport skipped her prom for a football game. She drove two hours, ran around a football field, then went to her grandparent’s house and said she had just played in a tournament that didn’t exist. In reality, she just didn’t want to go to prom with a boy. “Football was always my alibi,” she says. “It always allowed me to hide who I was.”
It also helped her tap into the strongest parts of herself. Playing touch football as a kid in Ottawa, Ontario, she had a blast catching the ball as a wide receiver. But a coach convinced her she was meant to be a quarterback, a position that requires split-second decisiveness and impeccable instinct. Sam thrived. “Being really good at something probably saved my life,” she says. “I want to give that to everyone.”
Sam’s Biggest Career Goal: "To ensure that every North Star is available for girls and women in flag football."
Sam played quarterback even into adulthood, captaining the women’s professional tackle team the Montreal Blitz. Seeing women play football was the norm in Canada, and she was surprised that wasn’t the case in the U.S., where the National Football League reigns supreme. “They were playing powder-puff football, which should be abolished,” she says, because of the way it mocks women who play the game. “So I looked around, and I’m like, ‘Well, I might as well try to do it.’ ”
Sam’s greatest play may have been when she mailed a football to the NFL league office in 2003 with her résumé and a note attached that read, “What other quarterback could accurately deliver a pass 386 miles?” She was hired as an intern, and six years later, she’d worked her way up to start the NFL Girls’ Flag Football Leadership program. (The program is now sanctioned in 17 states.)
Her efforts at the NFL didn’t stop with the players on the field. She began the league’s Women’s Forum at the 2017 Pro Bowl to help connect women working in football with the NFL’s top names and teams. This past February’s iteration was the 10th annual; in 2025, a record 15 women held full-time coaching positions in the league, whose hiring pool is dominated by all-male coaching trees. “I’m a risk-taker at heart,” Sam says. “I just feel like people always say, ‘What if you fail?’ And I really resonate with ‘What if you don’t?’”
That’s not to say she hasn’t felt fear in her role. Coming out as gay while working in the league office was, as Sam saw it, a risk to the reputation she’d built there. She took a leap of faith and brought her then girlfriend to NFL Honors in 2009, grasping her hand backstage in front of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in a scene that Sam says was straight out of Heated Rivalry. He gave her “the biggest bear hug,” she says, which in turn gave her the confidence to be her true self at work. “And I am way better as my true self than I was in high heels.”
Sam is now married to Emmy-winning director Rebecca Gitlitz-Rapoport, who’s made countless women’s sports documentaries. “We joke all the time that so much of what has happened in our lives and in women’s sports and with the NFL has happened from our living room couch,” Sam says. The couch, called Big Blue, has been with them from their first Brooklyn apartment and now sits in Sam’s home office in New Jersey. “We ideate like hell together. I mean, like crazy. That’s where we shine.”
Last year, Sam stepped away from her full-time job as senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the NFL to move into a consulting role and apply the work she’s done there more broadly. “I want other sports that want women in coaching to start from a 10-year mark and not the zero-year mark,” she says. “I want them to avoid all of our land mines. I want to fast-track where they are.”
She’s worked with the United States Tennis Association to develop a new coaching program and has spoken to senior leadership groups in the Premier League. And her message is not as simple as telling them to hire more women, because the future is not necessarily female. “It sounds like we’re taking over and men need to go away. That’s not what I’m about,” she says. “What I’m about is the future is everyone, and the future is every room looks like almost everyone, and it’s the best people.”
But her biggest passion still lies with young Sam playing touch football in Ottawa, and ensuring that women and girls have every opportunity possible to play football at the highest level. She was involved in the NFL’s successful bid to include flag football in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. “Girls and women started this sport,” she says. “They’ve led this sport. They’re the faces of it, and I want to make sure that that continues.”
Shoot Your Shot: “If I take a big swing and I try something that’s ridiculous and it doesn’t work out, who cares? I really do have that mentality. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I wish more women felt empowered to take big swings. It’s fun.”
Amanda Lucci is the director of special projects at Women’s Health, where she works on multi-platform brand initiatives and social media strategy. She also leads the sports and athletes vertical, traveling to cover the Paris Olympics, Women’s World Cup, WNBA Finals, and NCAA Final Four for WH. She has nearly 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media for national and international publications and is also a NASM-certified personal trainer. A proud native of Pittsburgh, PA, she is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Follow her on Instagram @alucci.
