Fashion

Four Women Who Broke Through Sports’s Glass Ceiling in 2020

In 2020 Sarah Fuller, Katie Sowers, Becky Hammon, and Kim Ng broke long-standing gender barriers in college football, the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball….

Sowers attended Hesston College and then the Mennonite-affiliated Goshen College in Indiana, where she was a multisport athlete. After graduating in 2009, she asked about taking a position as a volunteer assistant coach on the Goshen women’s basketball team. She said she was turned down based on her sexual orientation.

Spurned, she turned instead to Women’s Football Alliance, where she played with her twin sister, Liz. Sowers played eight years in the WFA, first for the West Michigan Mayhem and then for the Kansas City Titans. She also coached girls basketball in Kansas City, where one of her players was a daughter of the noted football executive Scott Pioli. Later, when Pioli became the assistant general manager of the Atlanta Falcons, he helped Sowers get a Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship, part of which involved working with the Falcons during the off-season. There she met Kyle Shanahan, who later went on to coach the 49ers, where he recruited Sowers to join his staff in 2017. In 2019 she became the first full-time female coach in NFL history.

In 2017, in an interview with Outsports, Sowers came out as the NFL’s first openly LGBTQ+ coach, male or female. “No matter what you do in life, one of the most important things is to be true to who you are,” Sowers told the site. “There are so many people who identify as LGBT in the NFL, as in any business, who do not feel comfortable being public about their sexual orientation.”

Though the 49ers lost the Super Bowl to the Chiefs (and will miss the playoffs this year), players have publicly expressed their belief in Sowers and the future of her coaching career, with defensive tackle DJ Jones telling ABC News, “She’s empowering to all women. I’m proud of her. She’s a superstar.”

In an interview with Hesston College in 2016, when she was with the Falcons, Sowers talked about her career goals. “My long-term goal is to be a head coach and then move on to executive management,” Sowers said. “It’s not a typical path, but then again, nothing about what I’m doing is typical.”

Image may contain Human Person Clothing Suit Overcoat Apparel Coat and Home Decor — Kim Ng, the new general manager for the Miami Marlins. AP Photo
Advertisement

Kim Ng

When Ng was hired by team co-owner Derek Jeter in November to be the new general manager of the Miami Marlins, she not only became the first female general manager of a major North American men’s professional sports team, but also Major League Baseball’s first Asian American general manager.

Tweet LinkedIn PinShares0

Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

Tweet LinkedIn PinShares0

Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

Tweet LinkedIn PinShares0