Texas State graduate assistant Jada Gipson has been around football her whole life and has dreamed of working in the game since she was 12. 

The 2018 Mexia High School graduate hadn’t seen many women in football until she saw Jen Welter, who coached for the Arizona Cardinals in 2015. She also recalled seeing only three other female NFL coaches during her first year of college at Texas State, where she graduated in May 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in general studies. 

“I was an athletic training major at first, but then I saw that, and I was like, ‘Nah, I wanna be a coach,” said Gipson, whose older brother, Jaylen Gipson, played quarterback at Texas State, and her father Jeffery Gipson played basketball at Baylor.

Gipson started as the equipment manager for Texas State’s football team where she progressed into working under former Bobcats Inside Linebacker Coach Archie McDaniel before she became a student assistant and made the transition to coaching. 

Gipson said it was a struggle to learn defense because she was always on the offensive side of the ball. 

“Defense, it’s just the unknown,” she said. “After watching the offense, you kind of know what their tendencies are, but you don’t actually know what they’re going to do.”

She said you have to be tough mentally and physically in defense. As a defensive coach, she stressed the importance of preparing and watching film to figure out offensive tendencies.

Gipson recalls her first year of coaching as the most difficult because she was transitioning to defense and didn’t know much about the positions and schemes. 

“I struggled that year because guys would come up to me and ask stuff, and I didn’t know the full grasp of it yet. So mentally, I struggled with that,” Gipson said. 

Luckily, McDaniel and former GAs Zachary McCarthy and Adrian McDonald helped Gipson overcome that challenge by sitting with her in the afternoons to go through different things. 

“I would try to memorize stuff and not learn it and only learn what my guys had to do. But once you see the bigger picture, that’s when you’re going to learn it faster,” she  said. 

Gipson said she admired McDaniel’s coaching style and wants her coaching style to be similar. 

“It was cool to see that you don’t have to yell and be as aggressive to coach, you can just be who you are, and the guys will buy into you if they know that you know what you’re doing and they trust you,” Gipson said. “They’re going to play hard for anybody that they trust and love, regardless.”

Gipson’s day-to-day operations include attending defense staff meetings around 6 a.m. After, she’ll go to the position meetings around 7:30 a.m., where she pulls up things the team needs to go over for the week. Then they’ll go onto the field for practice, where Gipson helps to oversee part of the Bobcat scout team receivers. She also assists with drills and ensures the players are doing what they’re supposed to do; otherwise, she’ll correct them. 

Her favorite part of the week is Thursday because of Bobcat Ball, a mini scrimmage between the offense and developmental defense players where the GAs can call their players and coach them. 

“It’s a cool learning experience,” Gipson said. “You get to call a play, and you’ve got to know why you’re calling it,” she said. 

Gipson said working under defensive coordinator Zack Spavital’s been great.

“He’s a big believer in developing younger coaches to learn,” she said. “People think it’s easy to coach football, but it’s not. There’s a lot that goes into it, you can’t expect everyone to know everything, so I think he does a great job of breaking down stuff.”

In 2021, Gipson was excited to learn that she was one of 40 women invited to attend the NFL Women’s Careers in Football Forum.

“It didn’t feel real at the time,” Gipson said. 

The forum was on Zoom due to COVID-19, but Gipson thought it was good because more coaches could attend than in the in-person forum. She and 39  other women got to talk to NFL coaches Bill Belichick, Mike Vrabel, Ron Rivera, Son McDermott and Bruce Arians, Brian Daboll and Kevin Stefanski. 

After the NFL forum, Gipson was selected to be a part of the Bill Walsh Fellowship with the Cleveland Browns, where she got to work with defensive backs and sit in on team and position meetings.  

“If you can attend the NFL Career Forum, you know you got a shot at making it to the NFL because you're just around a bunch of coaches, GMs and wherever your focus is,” she said. “So you know, if you can get your name out there, which I think is the biggest thing, especially with women trying to get into sports, is people think you can't do it too, they don't know you or know enough about you to know if you can so if you get on there with them and impress them then you have a shot.” 

Gipson wants to continue to coach college football in the future, but if the NFL calls, she’ll answer. 

Although Gipson hasn’t faced much discrimination being a Black woman in sports thus far in her career, she has read a few nasty Twitter comments.

“People were just like, ‘These are not real coaches,’ ‘They don't know what they're doing,’ and stuff, just rude people on Twitter, but I don't let it phase me,” she said. “I obviously have the job because I'm good at what I do.”

Gipson advises younger women who want to pursue a career in football or sports to trust themselves. 

“If this is what you want to do, just jump into it,” she said.” “It’s going to be hard days but just keep grinding it out and you’ll eventually see the good days.”