On the Mount Vernon field, Callie Brownson was well known.
Mount Vernon High School alumna Callie Brownson became the first female coach in the National Football League, taking over.
year as chief of staff of the Cleveland Browns.
“It’s a different landscape this year,” she said on the Cleveland Browns’ “Coaches Corner,” a local show in Cleveland. She’s new at the job with Kevin Stefansky, the new head coach, and she says they both work well under pressure, which might explain why the Browns have a winning record so far this season.
“Attitude is everything,” she said on the show.
Brownson brought that positive attitude with her from Mount Vernon where she grew up in the 1990s, playing for the Mount Vernon Majors softball team and then coaching the football team after graduating in 2007.
Nardos King was his manager and could see Brownson’s determination, even pushing the boundaries of the sports world as a teenager.
“She was an active student,” King said. “She was always a huge football fan,” she added. King is now the FCPS Region Three superintendent.
After Mount Vernon, Brownson played for the DC Divas in the Women’s Football Alliance from 2010 to 2017. On that team, she was a free safety and running back, helping them win two national championships. She also won two gold medals while playing with the United States women’s national football team. S
he returned to Mount Vernon High School after the Divas and served as an assistant to head football coach Barry Wells and coached softball in the spring.
She joined the New York Jets as a scouting intern in 2017 and was hired by Dartmouth as a quality control coach from 2018 to 2019. In 2020, she became the first woman to coach a position group of the NFL during a regular season game when she was replaced by the Cleveland Browns when one of their wide receivers coaches was absent.
Over the summer, she was promoted to chief of staff and is enjoying a winning season this year. The Browns sit in second place in the AFC North, just behind the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Browns came to Washington last September and beat the Washington Football Team, which must have been an experience for Brownson, beating his hometown team.
