After perusing through the list of the 133 newly minted NFLPA Contract Advisors, I realized an unsurprising lack of female certifications. In fact, by my count, less than 10 of the 133 individuals who successfully passed the NFLPA certification exam and paid the required dues to become fully certified are women.
One of the few females who can show off her new NFLPA Contract Advisor card is Ashley Millerick, who is listed by the NFLPA as being associated with agency Willis & Woy Sports. The 25-year-old freshly minted attorney who is the first NFLPA Contract Advisor hired by Willis & Woy was already the focus of an article written by Andrew Marton of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Millerick graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in communications and then received her law degree from Texas Tech. She has many of the attributes agencies look for in a hire: experience (she formerly interned with Willis & Woy), connections (former athlete at TCU with a lot of athlete connections) and her looks won’t hurt in this business.
Millerick has been alive for 25 years; her boss (Jordan Woy) has been in the business of representing football players for that long. But Millerick can quickly become tough competition for agents who have many years of experience, and she seems to have a good grasp of the business. She had the following to say to Marton for his article:
“I try to use the fact that I’m an energetic woman to actually open up more channels of communication, because I’m finding that as a woman, more of my clients feel a greater ease and trust in talking with me. In fact, as a woman agent, some of the players carry less of the stereotype of male agents in their head, and I try to use that to my advantage.
I’m not naïve at all about how most of the men in that conference room might be thinking of me, this young, 25-year-old chick-agent, and they are thinking, what does she know? As a woman, I know that I have to be more on my game than a male agent. A male agent can say something stupid and it won’t be held against him. But that’s not necessarily the case if you’re a woman.”
