Jennifer King, the former coach of the Johnson & Wales University women’s basketball team in Charlotte, worked as a coaching intern for Rivera with the Carolina Panthers the past two summers and has been working as an assistant coach on the Dartmouth College football team. Washington Redskins Coach Ron Rivera is working on hiring King, who would be the NFL’s first full-time female African American coach.

King, who played softball and basketball at Guilford College in North Carolina, also played in the Women’s Football Alliance, winning a national championship with the New York Sharks. As a basketball coach, she led Johnson & Wales to a U.S. Collegiate Athletic Association national championship in 2018. She told the Carolina Panthers’ website that during that year’s Pro Bowl she met Rivera at a forum meant for women to establish those types of connections with the league. He invited her to speak to the team and eventually invited her to be a coaching intern.

In 2018 she worked with the Panthers wide receivers. Last summer she assisted running backs coach Jake Peetz, even taking over the group for a brief time that summer when Peetz’s wife had a baby. King said she is friends with San Francisco 49ers assistant Katie Sowers, who last week, became the first full-time female assistant to coach in the Super Bowl.

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