Getty General manager Ryan Pace of the Chicago Bears has hired the team's first female scout.
In a history-making hire, the Chicago Bears have added Ashton Washington to their scouting department, per Sam Rapoport. Washington is the first female to fill a full-time scouting role with the Bears. She will also be assigned other titles, including NFL senior director of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Big, big news.
The @ChicagoBears hire @NFL Women’s Careers in Football Forum 2021 participant, @aawashington_3 in a full-time scouting role after she spent the summer as a scouting intern.
Ashton is the first woman to hold a scouting role with the Bears.
Forward. Progress.
Washington also attended the NFL Women’s Careers in Football Forum in February, where several head coaches, including Bill Belichick, Bruce Arians and Ron Rivera, met and networked with approximately 40 young women interested in careers in professional football.
“I’ve always been the only woman in the room or on the sideline of a football event,” she told The Chicago Tribune in June 2020. “The mindset when I’m walking onto those fields is: ‘I’m supposed to be here. If you don’t like it, oh, well, I’m going to keep going.’”
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Ashton Washington Background: What Led Her to Chicago?
Washington earned her bachelor’s degree in mass communications from Huston-Tillotson University in 2019. She went on to start her career as the head of social media and as Director of Operations/Recruiting for The Old Coach, a Texas media outlet that covers all high school sports in the state.
She was named Game Day Operations Specialist for the XFL’s Houston Roughnecks in 2020 before getting hired by the University of Illinois for the 2020 season to be the Director of High School Relations. With the Fighting Illini, Washington worked with former Bears head coach Lovie Smith, who said this about her in 2020:
“Ashton brings a unique skill set to the Smith Center, really something that no one else in the building has at this time,’’ Smith said about Washington in 2020. “She is high energy, extremely organized and brings a different perspective in how we engage recruits.”
Washington was named Director of Recruiting Operations and Creative Content at Texas Tech in 2021, and the Bears came calling shortly after that. She attended Bears training camp on The Nunn Wooten Scouting Fellowship this year, and she, as Rapoport noted, worked as a scouting intern for the Bears this summer.
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Washignton Was Mentored By Another Groundbreaking Female
Washington, whose cousin, Joshua Dobbs, plays quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, has known what path she has wanted to take for years.
When then-Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians hired Jen Welter as an assistant coaching intern in 2015, Welter became the first-ever female coach in the league, which inspired Washington. A Texas native, Washington saw that Welter was close by in Houston hosting a clinic for girls a few years later, and Washington called to see if she could offer any assistance.
“Her genuine love to learn is so clear,” Welter said in 2019 about Washington’s phone call, per The Chicago Tribune. “We had a fantastic conversation that day. I could see love for the game. I could see myself in her if we had opportunity back when I was at that age. There was no place for women. Now you see someone with that passion when the world is opening its eyes and (providing more) opportunities for women and girls in football. This is what it’s all about.”
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