Growing up in Texas with a deep-rooted love of football, Ashton Washington was regularly told a career in American Football was not a realistic option.
Now, she’s an NFL trailblazer as the first full-time female scout in the history of the storied Chicago Bears franchise. Her advice to those who share her big dreams is simple.
“Never let anybody talk you out of your dreams, your goals and what you truly want to do,” she declares. “Whether it sounds crazy to others, don’t let them talk you out of it.
“I’ve had a lot of people try to steer me away from football or tell me to get a more realistic job, or follow a more realistic career path.
“For me, this was a realistic career path. This is what I want to do, I had a passion for it and I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me no, I was going to figure out a way to make room for myself in an atmosphere that might not historically have been truly for me.
“I’d just say it’s nice to be different, so don’t let anybody else talk you out of what you truly want to do.”
For Washington, there was no escaping the game as she grew up in a football-mad family in the state of Texas.
“In Texas it’s pretty much bred into you!” She says. “It’s a tradition, it’s a religion, it’s all of those things - pretty much everyone just loves football!
“Growing up around it, my dad played, brother played, a lot of family members have been in the sport either coaching or playing, so just being around it was what led me into that passion and led me to love the game.”
But, around 5,000 miles away from her home, the Bears and the NFL are ensuring young girls in the UK are afforded similar exposure to the sport. The inaugural Chicago Bears and New York Jets NFL Girls Flag Football League held its Championship Event at Trailfinders Sports Club in Ealing, London last month.
It saw hundreds of girls from schools around the city competing in the sunshine in a competitive but fun-filled atmosphere to cap off a ground-breaking first season. The league is the fist UK all girls competition of its kind and Washington recognises from her own experiences how exposure to the sport can change lives.
“I think it's absolutely remarkable,” she says. “It gives the girls an opportunity to be a part of something that brings inclusion, it brings teamwork, it brings my favourite piece, that competitive drive.
“It’s a chance to do something whether, actually, you didn’t know if you liked football at first or if you really had that passion and there wasn’t an opportunity before, now you have it.
“It’s history right before our eyes, and I’m excited for the girls to keep going and just see the journey as it takes off. Once it starts, it’s going to keep going.”
Whilst Washington sees history unfolding across the pond, she is blazing her own trail over in the States. Her journey started by covering high school football recruiting in a bid to get involved and soon took her to college program Texas Tech.
She then received a call from the Chicago Bears offering her an internship during training camp, an opportunity that was too good to turn down.
“At that time, I have a full-time at Texas Tech, so I had to get permission from my head coach, who was Matt Wells at the time, and see if he was OK with me going,” she recalls.
“He looked at me and he was like, ‘hey, I wouldn’t see why you wouldn’t go!’, so he granted me the opportunity to go to the Chicago Bears for about two months in training camp and do the internship.”
She left behind Texas for the Windy City in the summer of 2021 with no expectations of being there more than a few months. Two years on, she has never looked back.
“While I was there I’d like to say I was just being me - just putting my head down, grinding,” she says. “I never really went to the internship looking for a job, I really just wanted to experience the opportunity with the Bears.
“While I was here, I got an offer for a job as a scouting assistant and, again, still had the full-time job at Texas Tech so had to call my head coach again, tell him what had happened, what had been offered to me and, again, get his insight on it.
“It was a really hard goodbye, because in football programs and working in football you build such strong relationships and such strong bonds. It becomes family at that point, because you’re around them so much.
“So talking to Coach Wells, it came down to him pretty much saying, ‘you have to do what you have to do to expand and grow in your career’, so I took the job with the Bears. I came here for training camp to do the internship and I never left, and here we are going into the third season.”
Making it to the NFL is the pinnacle for anyone involved in football, be it players, coaches, or those working behind the scenes. Washington is no different - and that simply gives her greater drive to prove she belongs amongst the best.
“For me, it was just more a case of working even harder,” she explains. “This is the 1%. This is the pinnacle of a player’s career, a coaches career. This is, ultimately, where you want to be if you’re in a sport. You want to be on the professional side of it. For me it was just, again, work harder and turn it up a notch.”
Washington’s official job title is player personnel coordinator, but she is “pretty much a jack of all trades” where no two days are the same. She describes her role as a “hub centre”. “That’s a good nickname for it,” she laughs.
“It’s basically keeping communication flowing, from top to bottom, left to right, just keeping everyone on the same page with everything which plays a big part on the scouting part when you’re looking at college players, looking at pro players.”
Whilst she is one of few women in a male-dominated setting, Washington insists she has not faced any real challenges in terms of fitting in and finding her place. Her biggest challenge was learning the lingo of a pro scout.
“For me, I haven’t necessarily had any challenges, I think it’s because of maybe how I come across,” she admits. “That confidence element of it, and then just knowing what you’re talking about or really knowing the game and understanding the different aspects of it.
“The best part of working with the Bears is them knowing what I can bring to the table. They didn’t look at me as a female hire or just another number, it was more they hired me because of what I could bring to the table with my work and the quality.
“I haven’t really faced any challenges on that side. For me personally, the biggest challenge was just learning the scouting language - how to talk like a scout and write like a scout. But that’s the same for both men and women.”
Nonetheless, Washington feels an aspect of pressure to ensure she is the first but not the last woman to work as a full-time scout with the Bears and make waves in the NFL.
“I think you feel a little bit of pressure, because you’re the first to do it and you want more to be behind you,” she says. “You don’t want to be the first and only then that’s it, you want to work harder than the rest so you can bring in more behind you.
“That’s when the pressure comes in. You can have your co-workers look at it and say, ‘hey, we had Ashton, she did this, she’s good here, she was an overachiever here, and if we hire another female they’ll bring the same thing to it’.
“But my thing is, when I talk to a lot of my mentees, especially women but men to, I say ‘be better than me, pass me up’. That brings that competitive spirit to it as well.”
