It was late in a May practice on a steamy Florida afternoon, one of those moments when overheated players and coaches crave a break and football’s discipline often dissolves in a haze of perspiration and weariness.
Ndamukong Suh, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive lineman, a fearsome, 6-foot-4, 307-pounder whose peers once named him the NFL’s third-meanest player and five times voted him to the Pro Bowl, failed to pursue a running back who had slipped past him.
And in that instant, Lori Locust, a Philadelphia-born football fanatic who is in her early days as one of the NFL’s first full-time female assistant coaches, did what any of her colleagues might have done.