Strong women raised Kassandra Garcia.
There is her mother, Sylvia Garcia, who taught her the value of family, the value of sacrifice and showed her that determination creates opportunity – that Sylvia, too, could open her own restaurant and send her daughter to private school starting in the sixth grade with the money they made.
There is her Nana, Teresa Matías, who taught her what it means to work and what it means to fail, how failing is an opportunity to try once more. Who taught her how to build a business from nothing when Matías opened a restaurant, Teresa’s Mosaic Café, that became a Tucson institution.
There is her mother, Sylvia Garcia, who taught her the value of family, the value of sacrifice and showed her that determination creates opportunity — that Sylvia, too, could open her own restaurant and send her daughter to private school starting in the sixth grade with the money they made.
And while Garcia, a first-generation Mexican-American who is an NFL executive, watched these women give her “every opportunity in the world,” it wasn’t lost on her that they were also shattering gender norms in a culture that often resists change.
“Not to generalize, but there’s such a machismo, there’s such a focus on the men in our culture,” Garcia told USA TODAY Sports. “But I grew up so differently. The men are served first, always, because we revolve around food. The men sit down, the women serve them. My Nana doesn’t even eat until the men get their second plate. But for some reason, my Nana didn’t treat me like that. She’d serve me along with the men.
“As much as we focus on the patriarchs, we all know who’s really running the whole family, and it’s my Nana. Then, after her, it’s my mom.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Garcia is excelling in a space dominated by men, a space where someone like her has never been. The football administration analyst for the Los Angeles Rams, Garcia is the highest-ranking Latina in any of the 32 NFL front offices.
Her ascension to this role is noteworthy, because if it has been a challenge for Latino men to find a foothold in pro football, the task for Latinas has proven to be nearly insurmountable.
According to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the DeVos Sports Management Program at UCF, which publishes annual report cards on racial and gender hiring, women occupied just 32.3% of professional administration roles in the NFL in 2020.
Within that, just 7% were women of color.
“Change in all levels, including sport – change here meaning replacing white men – doesn’t come because white men in general say, ‘I would be happy to give up my role here so that there’s an opportunity for a Black woman or a Latina,’ ” Dr. Richard Lapchick, the director at TIDES, told USA TODAY Sports.
“They generally protect those positions. So until there are Black people and Latinas in significant positions within the organizations, the chances of hiring patterns changing is slim. This is an important story because this is a discussion we need to have, and I haven’t seen it, ever.”
Garcia’s story is unique in the NFL because there are so few people like her in the sport.
Garcia first worked in sports as a recruiting intern for the football program at the University of Arizona, where she went to college. She even tossed free T-shirts between innings at baseball and softball games. But with her accounting degree and Excel wizardry, she became an analyst.
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After she graduated, she worked for the Triple-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres for one year. Then she took a one-year role entirely out of sports in Cleveland. But she realized she wanted to be in football.
She attended the Women’s Careers in Football Forum in 2018 and landed back in Tucson, working for the Wildcats under then-coach Kevin Sumlin in the football ops department.
Then Tony Pastoors, the vice president of football and business administration for the Rams, called her.
When she first arrived in L.A., Garcia helped Pastoors examine contracts and paperwork to confirm that players, agents and executives all signed where they needed to, ensuring compliance with the league. She also helped players arrange payroll documents. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Garcia shifted to operations and helped make sure the Rams were abiding by the league’s health and safety protocols.
Pastoors, chief operating officer Kevin Demoff and general manager Les Sneed then entrusted Garcia to work up the undrafted and practice-squad player contracts. She also assisted with the exclusive rights tenders and restricted free-agent contracts.
When she excelled there, the Rams pushed her further. Garcia helped write the structure of the contract extensions for receiver Cooper Kupp, Pro Bowl cornerback Jalen Ramsey and the restructure of three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year Aaron Donald.
“I’m stubborn as hell,” Garcia said. “When someone tells me I can’t do something, it’s game-over. This fire inside me burns to prove them wrong. I don’t know if that’s being stubborn, narcissism, ego – and I think about this all the time – but it has driven me here.
“I have failed so much in this life. All I’ve done is just be brave enough to step into the arena and fail.”
Next up, the Rams asked her to handle contract proposals. She has already written two.
While Garcia is a trailblazer, the question becomes, how will the NFL bring in more women of color like her?
The Women’s Careers in Football Forum, which had its fifth annual meeting in February, has been instrumental in establishing a pipeline of qualified women for NFL clubs. The forum invites women working in college athletics and offers networking opportunities with NFL coaches, general managers and franchise owners.
NFL senior director of diversity, equity and inclusion Sam Rapoport told USA TODAY Sports that 75% of the program’s participants in February identified as women of color and that 20% identified as Hispanic. She added that, through the forum, more than 115 job opportunities have been filled by women.
“If Latinx women and little girls who are growing up in this country can see it, they can go for it,” Rapoport told USA TODAY Sports. “Many of the challenges with women, in general, is that they weren’t seeing themselves in these positions, so they weren’t even applying for them. That is what we want to change. We’re starting to see, at a very slow pace, Black women and women who identify in the LGBTQ+ community, but we haven’t seen that yet from the Latinx community at the level we should be at.”
But that slowly might be changing.
‘Embrace who you are’
Natalia Dorantes, who is also the daughter of Mexican immigrants, attended Arizona State, where she completed social media internships with the athletic department.
After graduation, she got a full-time internship with the Arizona Cardinals in 2015 and 2016. There, Dorantes understood she could forge a career in football. She then worked at Texas A&M as a recruiting communications coordinator. But attending the Women’s Careers in Football Forum got her to the NFL.
During the forum, Dorantes sent a Zoom message to Washington Football Team head coach Ron Rivera to introduce herself and thank him for supporting Hispanic people in football. They started corresponding regularly.
At the time, Rivera had been mulling the addition of a new, chief-of-staff-like role. After a series of interviews, Rivera offered Dorantes the job and in April, she became the first Latina in NFL history to serve as a team’s coordinator of football programs.
Dorantes, 26, helps craft the team’s schedule, organizes meetings, handles requests for Rivera, serves as a liaison between the coach and other department heads and sets up logistics for tentpole events like training camp.
As she’s started her first full season in the role, she vows to remember the sacrifices her family made: How they lived amontonados – crowded into small apartments – how her grandmother went door-to-door selling Avon products to get by, how her father went to college when she was born because she was the motivation he needed.
“We’re here,” Dorantes said. “Latina women are here. We’re qualified. We’re fully able and capable to do the jobs that we’re asked and expected to do, just like anybody else in the building. The biggest part is to just embrace your journey. Embrace who you are. That’s what I did. You have to because if not, then it’s a little bit harder.”
More in this series
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Latina women fight for representation in the NFL