Melting cleats, walking dogs: Inside Lori Locust's journey from women's football to NFL, Tennessee Titans

Football is a toothless snarl. Football is a menacing glare through a full-cage facemask. It's grass stains and blood and broken bones and the chronically deranged mentality players have to possess to get back up and keep snarling in the face of all those grass stains and blood and broken bones.

To a young Lori Locust, football was Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Jack Lambert.

"There was just this intensity that he had when he played the game," Locust, the Tennessee Titans' first-year defensive quality control assistant and first female coach in franchise history, tells The Tennessean. "The whole toothless thing. To me, he was the epitome of '70s, hard-nosed, real football. It was brutal."

She pretended to be Lambert when she'd scrap her way through backyard pickup games growing up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That meant playing mean. Playing intense. Hitting people and enjoying it.

Decades later, as a 60-year-old mother of two, Locust still has that un-exorcised Lambertian spirit in her. That spirit earned her four knee surgeries, a bone graft from her hip, a plate and a cervical fusion in her neck and one shoulder ripped out of place in four seasons of semi-professional women's football. And even that wasn't enough to expel the football from her.

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Football is perseverance. Football is action. It's scars and limps and sacrifices and living every moment so that the scars and limps and sacrifices weren't in vain.

Lori Locust's story isn't that of a woman in a male-dominated field.

It's a football story.

Lori Locust's journey to NFL

Playing semi-professional women's football in the mid-2000s made you Jack Lambert about as much as singing "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia" at a karaoke dive makes you Reba McEntire. But Locust and her teammates on the Central PA Vipers didn't play in search of glory.

Locust found out about the team from a newspaper ad. Mary Pratt-Lauchle, the Vipers' center and Locust's close friend, tried out after hearing a radio commercial. Both were professionals and full-time mothers looking for connection, looking for an outlet. So they made time for passion.

Passion, unfortunately, didn't pay. It actually cost roughly $1,500 to be on the team. Players also paid their way to road games, carpooling up to 10 hours in minivans and staying eight to a hotel room. They rarely had locker rooms, often changing in cars or parking lots.

Field conditions were spotty. Some fields were overgrown, others were littered with trash. Pratt-Lauchle remembers an afternoon in Connecticut where temperatures were so hot and playing surfaces so questionable that the bottom of a teammate's cleat melted midgame. Squads in bigger cities like Philadelphia and Boston had relatively good coaching, but smaller markets like Harrisburg had to make do with whoever was around.

So Locust, from her defensive end spot, emerged as something of a player-coach. Pratt-Lauchle remembers players joking about Locust's deep, guttural "Lori coach voice." One of Locust's innovations was devising a numbered system with the defensive tackles and linebackers calling out stunts and blitzes.

Locust remembers in slow-motion her signature play, a blindside sack against Cleveland. She remembers the crunch of the quarterback's ribs. But memory is all she has. The game was a rare one where the Vipers had someone filming from the stands, but the videographer was focused on the scoreboard during her moment of glory.

Injuries eventually added up, so Locust turned to coaching. First with the Keystone Assault, a rebranded iteration of the Vipers co-owned by Pratt-Lauchle and several teammates. Then with local high school, semi-pro and arena league teams. None of those jobs paid the bills, of course.

"Obviously I love football. That’s at the heart of all of it," Locust says, explaining her decade of moonlight-coaching. "But there’s something about being able to translate something that you believe in and seeing that come to life. Seeing the lightbulbs go on and helping people get better at something they also love and have worked so hard to also get to . . .

"I’d rather still be playing. At the end of the day, I’d still like to have the helmet and shoulder pads on myself. But this just feels like a gift every day I get to walk in here."

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Lori Locust's big chance

Her break came in the form of a 2018 coaching internship with the Baltimore Ravens. It didn't last long, but it convinced Locust to abandon the half-measures and dive fully into football.

She was fired from her job in digital marketing sales two weeks before the internship and she made no effort to return to the corporate world. She was a house sitter for a friend's friend. She walked dogs. She worked in a Chewy warehouse. She found part-time work doing fire-restoration marketing. All in anticipation of the opportunity that finally came in 2019 — an assistant defensive line coach for the Birmingham Iron of the Alliance of American Football.

Naturally, that league folded after one season.

No matter. Within the year, Locust landed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, coached by fellow central Pennsylvania native Bruce Arians, who was the coach at Temple when Locust was a student there and her ex-husband played on the team. By Year 2, Locust was one of the first two women in NFL history to win a Super Bowl as a coach.

"She started at the bottom," Pratt-Lauchle says. "She was coaching high school and semi-pro and didn’t get paid. She coached indoor men’s and didn’t get paid. And worked in a factory and walked dogs and slept on couches. She went from having this six-figure career to only having enough to live on because she wanted to pursue her passion.

"She did that for years to get to where she is. She made connections and worked her way up. That’s the story people need to hear. It’s the journey it took for her to get there. It’s the perseverance that’s truly inspiring."

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Lori Locust: Tennessee Titans coach, not trailblazer

Pratt-Lauchle jokes about how teammates used to hate watching football with her and Locust. It was like watching a whodunit with Sherlock Holmes and Bruce Wayne. They saw everything coming before it came.

That anticipation and football savvy is essentially Locust's full-time gig now. On a Friday in early June, for example, Locust's job was to write a report on the Seattle Seahawks' 2023 offense to scout the tendencies of Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron and what he might have brought with him from Seattle as its former coordinator.

The Titans play the Bears in Week 1. In September.

Locust doesn't try explaining her job to people anymore. There's too much to explain. There's on-field coaching, advance scouting, analytics, administrative planning, teaching. And a knack for anticipation.

"If she’s like, ‘Are you going to take them into the indoor to walk them through something?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I think I might,’ she’s like, ‘OK. I’ll make sure to talk to equipment and get things set up,’ " says Ben Bloom, the Titans' outside linebackers coach who Locust works closely alongside. "There’s a lot of logistics of things that go on throughout the day. Sometimes they happen and you’ve got an extra 20 minutes of meeting time that you didn’t think you were going to have, so how are we going to use that?"

Locust distanced herself from women's football early in her coaching career. Making it in the men's game meant having to avoid being pigeonholed. But going back to assist at women's camps now, she realizes the advantage her past affords her. Locust says women want to know the "why" more. It's not enough to say "blitz the B gap." Everything has to click, so there has to be more of a holistic approach to teaching why blitzing the B gap makes everything on the defense work.

"Which really forces you to come down and be progressive in your coaching style, which I think is beneficial across the board," Locust says. "I think a lot of coaches that have been successful have been progressive and have built on the basics and the fundamentals as opposed to this exotic drill or this play or whatever."

Locust, obviously, has found success. The Super Bowl ring in her safe-deposit box in Tampa is proof. So is the display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame showcasing the sneakers she wore that night, little shreds of confetti still embedded inside.

Nevertheless, she doesn't like the phrases "role model" or "trailblazer." She thinks trailblazers set out with one specific objective and find what they're looking for, and she thinks being a role model infers the path you took is a road map to replicate.

Locust prefers "possibility model," if she has to have a label at all, hoping her story is proof that anyone can coach if they want it bad enough. She'd like to be a position coach, but knows those jobs are earned by succeeding in jobs like hers now. She says it'd be nice to see a woman head coach or coordinator someday, provided that woman was truly the right person for the job, but she's not holding her breath. She says it'll take time before a woman rises to coordinator, let alone head coach. But she views it as a "probability down the line."

Pratt-Lauchle, for what it's worth, does see Locust as a trailblazer and an inspiration. But she's not surprised her friend shies from those labels. Locust doesn't seek out the limelight and doesn't want to be reduced to her gender. She's a coach, not the woman coach.

Football is Locust's sanctuary. She can't put on a helmet and shoulder pads anymore, especially not after another knee surgery this spring. But she can put foam rollers on her arms and whack at edge rushers' helmets in individual drills. It's the closest she gets to living her passion again, and she relishes the opportunity.

Locust loves football, and loves football history. She met Lambert once at an autograph signing at a Delaware mall, marveling at how he still walked like a football player, still had the broad shoulders of a football player. Now she gets to count some of the best defensive linemen of their generation as students: Ndamukong Suh, Vita Vea, Jason Pierre-Paul, Jeffery Simmons, Denico Autry.

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Being a part of that history keeps Locust going.

"This is something that is, in my brief time, it still feels like rare air to me," she says. "Not just because of 'woman coach' or whatever. It’s because these kids have worked their entire lives, young or not, to be where they are right now. That’s special. The men that I get to be around, the other coaches I get to be around, the knowledge they have, it’s just something that is so motivating and fueling. You’re lucky enough to find that one job that gives you that type of passion, that type of feeling every day that you walk in the building. This has always been it for me."

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick atnsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.