Top of Her Game: Maya Ana Callender '16

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Top of Her Game: Maya Ana Callender '16

Maya Ana Callender on the field with the New England Patriots.

Maya Ana Callender’s remarkable football journey from the Pioneers to the Patriots

In a word, it was big – her surroundings, the opportunity, the moment.

Maya Ana Callender ’16 gazed fixedly at the massiveness and luster of Gillette Stadium. The shine of the six championship rings inside the team facility could not escape her eyes.

It’s been more than a year since Callender showed up to One Patriot Place for her first day of work, and the thrill – a feeling of equal parts achievement and appreciation – has not receded. She can’t help but be reminded every day of where she is.

Maya Ana Callender is in the National Football League, working for one of its most storied and successful franchises.

“Every morning when I walk in the building, it’s so cool just to see the stadium – big, bright,” she says. “That’s still very cool to me, and I don’t see that ever changing.”

The Utica University graduate made history in May 2023 when she was hired by the New England Patriots as a full-time member of the team’s scouting department.

Going into college, Callender knew she wanted to work in professional football in some way. “I thought I wanted to be the next Pam Oliver,” she says of the award-winning Fox Sports NFL commentator and sideline reporter. At Utica, she wasted no time setting out to find her path to a career in football. She hadn’t even yet settled into her residence hall when she opened her laptop, visited the student employment website, and searched ‘football.’ To her excitement, she discovered a student office assistant position with the football program. She immediately applied, and followed up with an e-mail to head football coach Blaise Faggiano. Impressed with the first-year student’s determination and professionalism, Faggiano hired the eager study following an in-person meeting.

Callender dove into the opportunity. Her responsibilities quickly grew. By the middle of her first season, she was named team manager and assisting head coach Blaise Faggiano and his staff on the sidelines on gamedays.

“Coach Faggiano let me do a little bit of everything. I helped out at recruiting events. I traveled with the team. I handled equipment. I set up practice. I broke down practice,” she says. “He gave me a lot of responsibility, which allowed me to learn a lot more about the game, so by the time I was a senior, I was able to pinpoint and say, ‘I really like operations. I really like recruiting. I want to do more of this.’”

Following graduation, Callender accepted a football operations graduate assistant position at Bellhaven University in Jackson, MS. When the school’s full-time director of football operations went on maternity leave, Callender was unexpectedly elevated to interim director for the 2016 season. After one season at Belhaven, she was hired at Princeton University, a Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) program, where she spent six years, first as an operations intern, then assistant director of football operations, and then ultimately becoming the first female director of football operations in the Ivy League.

I’m where I am because the Patriots saw my dedication, my hard work, and my knowledge of the game.

It was at Princeton where she had the opportunity to interact with NFL scouts who would visit campus to evaluate the school’s professional prospects. Through those connections, she landed an internship in the Philadelphia Eagles scouting department during Princeton’s offseason. There, she worked under the Eagles former vice president for football operations Catherine Raîche, one of the highest-ranking female front office executives in the NFL. Callender saw in Raîche, who rose from an unpaid intern in the Canadian Football League to now assistant general manager with the Cleveland Browns, both a role model and a trailblazer.

“I was hooked,” Callender says. “I knew I wanted to be a scout in the NFL.”

Her career ambitions were, to say the least, lofty. There are fewer than 500 full-time scouting positions in the National Football League, only a small, albeit growing, fraction of which are filled by women.

Callender did not need a hammer to break through the glass ceiling of football. She credits Utica University for giving her the opportunities and opening her eyes to the possibility of seriously pursuing her passion as a career. In particular, it was Faggiano, whose mentorship extended far beyond knowledge of football operations and Xs and Os, who gave her the tools to break into the male-dominated professional football industry.

“He allowed me to gain not only a deeper knowledge about the game, but gain confidence and gain a voice. He welcomed me in, and he didn’t just make me feel comfortable, he made me feel like it was my place – like I belong here,” she says. “After four years on his staff, I could walk into any place, any situation, knowing, ‘I can do this.’”

In the fall of 2022, Callender participated in a virtual Women’s Summit for Careers in Football hosted by the Tampa Buccaneers. One of the speakers during the sessions was Buccaneers assistant general manager John Spytek. Afterwards, she e-mailed Spytek to introduce herself and let him know that she had applied for a highly competitive Nunn-Wooten Scouting Fellowship. The fellowship was founded by the NFL in 2015 to expose qualified candidates to a career in professional scouting and increase the pool of diverse talent in the scouting ranks. Callender was selected by the Buccaneers.

Following the fellowship experience in Tampa, Callender attended the 2023 NFL Combine in Indianapolis to volunteer with the Kansas Chiefs, at the invitation of several of the team’s scouting personnel whom she met during the course of her internships with the Eagles and Buccaneers. While in Indianapolis, she met with members of the Patriots personnel department, and had the first of several interviews for a full-time scouting assistant position of their staff.

Callender was standing on practice field at Princeton in April 2023, getting ready for the Tigers’ annual spring game, when she got a phone call from Patriots Director of College Scouting Camren Williams offering her the position. “When I got (the call),” she recalls, “it was just like, ‘You’ve been dreaming of something for so long, and it’s actually happening.”

It was a far cry from her football beginnings at the Bronx, NY park where a teenage Callender ran operations for her younger brother Malcolm’s flag football team. At the time, that meant filming practices and setting up the post-practice snacks. Today, Callender is earning a living identifying and evaluating potential players for a six-time Super Bowl-winning franchise.

“There are four (scouting assistants) altogether. We like to joke that we keep the program afloat,” she says. “We’re in-house scouts, which means we assist both the college and pro scouts. We’re really the back end, doing research on prospects, watching game film, and charting strengths and weaknesses. Basically, making sure we’re doing everything necessary to make sure we have evaluations on all the players in the NFL and in college. It’s important we know the type of person we are bringing into our building, and how they will help our team.”

Callender has also kept a watchful eye on the vanguard of women breaking barriers and rising up the ranks throughout the NFL as well as other professional sports leagues. Raîche, according to many reports, projects as a strong bet to soon become the NFL’s first female general manager.

“It’s definitely nice to see that people are more open-minded, knowing you don’t need to have played the sport or have a certain background to be in this position,” Callender says. “I’m where I am because the Patriots saw my dedication, my hard work, and my knowledge of the game. I think as more people and teams start looking at women and other potential employees in that way more opportunities will come, and it looks like that’s the direction it’s going, and so it’s very nice to see.”

Callender is careful not to see too far ahead, but looks forward to more opportunities in the future.

“I’ve always been someone who if I have a goal, I’m going to keep working hard and doing whatever I need to do to reach that goal,” she says. “Even though I’m with the Patriots, I still have a long way to go.

“(Ultimately) I want to be in a role where I work directly with the head coach, watching the daily needs of the team, watching film, scouting college football, knowing how to improve our roster. Ideally, a vice president for player personnel. I definitely want to be in that type of role.”

Maybe a general manager one day?

“Yeah, maybe a general manager or president of football operations,” she says of her end goal, sounding like when the moment comes, it will not be too big.