Rochester woman makes history as NFL’s first Black female official

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Three-year-old Maia Chaka was determined to learn how to ride a bicycle on her own terms, even if it meant throwing caution to the wind and incurring a bunch of bumps and bruises.

“We brought the bike out, and when she saw the training wheels she immediately shouted, ‘Take those off!’” her mother, Terry Chaka, recalled recently, chuckling at a memory made on the sidewalks of Rochester 35 years ago. “We tried telling her she was going to fall and get hurt if we didn’t leave the training wheels on, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, we took them off, and she fell about a hundred times, and she cried each time she did. But wouldn’t you know it? By the end of the day, there was our little girl riding that bike without training wheels.”

As the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius once opined, “Our great glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Maia fell and rose numerous times that spring day in the 19th  ward, and those hard-knock lessons would serve the Edison Tech graduate well as she went from learning how to ride a bike to learning how to blaze a trail. Last Friday, her stick-to-itiveness and fierce self-confidence paid off once more when she became the first Black woman to be named a National Football League official.

That she had earned her NFL “zebra” stripes did not surprise her mom.

“Maia’s always been a pioneer,” she said, “ever since she was little.”

The significance of the achievement is not lost on Maia. In a glass-ceiling shattering time when Kamala Harris has become the first Black female vice president of the United States and Kim Ng of the Miami Marlins the first female general manager of a North American major league sports franchise, Maia, too, has accomplished something that resonates and reverberates.

“I think it’s a testament to the skills, hard work and resilience of all women, especially women from my community and women from my culture,” Maia told me Monday night in an exclusive interview. “For the longest time, women have been underrepresented in (so many fields) … It’s taken so long for these barriers to be broken, but at least it’s finally happening.”

As the bicycle anecdote illustrates, Maia has long been stubbornly determined and supremely confident. And those attributes were nurtured each step of the way by her parents. Gerald and Terry Chaka were all for her playing sandlot football against the neighborhood boys and sparring with them in Taekwondo matches at the local Boys and Girls Club, where Maia spent many an hour sating her competitive appetite.

“I was always encouraged to try whatever I wanted, and I wouldn’t be judged about it,” she said. “If my parents saw that I had a knack and an enthusiasm for something, they fed into that. They didn’t try to change me, regardless if it went against gender norms.”

They also instilled in her an indefatigable work ethic. By age 12, the industrious Maia had formed her own babysitting business, and added to her savings account by mowing lawns, raking leaves and shoveling driveways.

“I learned that if you wanted something, you have to work for it,” she said. “It wasn’t going to be given to you. You had to earn it.”

Maia’s willingness to put in the time and effort helped her excel in the classroom and on the basketball court — she made the Edison varsity as a freshman and played a year at Finger Lakes Community College. Football had been a passion since her sandlot days, but she never envisioned having anything more than a rooting interest in the sport once those neighborhood games ceased. That all changed, however, after she started teaching health and physical education at a Virginia high school following her graduation from Norfolk State University in 2006. A male colleague suggested she look into officiating high school football games, pointing out that many male referees had never played the game. She decided to give it a shot and was hooked immediately.

Maia immersed herself in learning the rule book, and made a quick climb up the officiating ladder, eventually jumping from high school games to major college games in Conference USA and the Pac-12. In 2014, she joined Sarah Thomas as the first women chosen for the NFL officials development program. Last season, Thomas became the first female to work NFL games, and she made more history last month when she served as a down judge in Super Bowl 55 in Tampa.

This fall, she’ll reunite with Maia, who’s raring to get started with upcoming study groups in preparation for the 2021 season.

“I can’t wait to begin to show people why I was hired and how I know my stuff and deserve to be there,” Maia said. “Officiating is all about preparing thoroughly. If you do your homework, the game should be a piece of cake.”

Unlearning will be part of her learning. For nearly a decade, she’s worked college games, with a totally different set of rules.

“There are so many differences,” Maia said. “NFL receivers need to have two feet inbounds, not one. In college, if your knee hits the ground, you’re down, even if no one touched you. In the NFL, you’re only down by contact. So much stuff that was second nature to me, I now have to guard against because the rules aren’t the same.”

In some respects, it’s funny Maia would become an official because she admits to not having much use for refs during her basketball-playing days.

“I hated them,” she said, laughing. “Absolutely hated them because they were always cheating when they made calls against me or my teammates.”

She’s obviously had a change of heart.

Asked which NFL team she rooted for in her youth, Maia hemmed and hawed, fully realizing that divulging such information might compromise her impartiality and call into question her integrity.

“Let’s just say I grew up a fan of the referees,” she said, laughing some more. “I root for referees. That’s my squad.”

She said she’s been fortunate not to have encountered many instances of misogyny from players, coaches and officials during her journey. There was one time, though, before an XFL game, when she and her crew were heading to the officials’ locker room and she was stopped by a security guard.

“Excuse me,” he said. “But no wives or girlfriends are allowed back there.”

Maia explained she was part of the officiating crew.

“He looked me up and down, and said, ‘Sorry. They usually don’t look like you,’” she recalled. “I took it as a compliment more than being sexist because, at the time, it really wasn’t normal for women to be officials.”

Maia longs for the day when the presence of women in boardrooms and on football fields are considered the norm not the exception. She hopes the hiring of her and Thomas will open doors for others. In her full-time job, teaching at-risk students at Renaissance Academy in Virginia Beach, Maia talks often about “following your dreams.” She was fortunate to have parents who encouraged her to do just that and pay no heed to naysayers.

“It’s good for my students to see a success story up-close and personal,” she said. “They saw me take this on awhile ago and when I finally got to this level, they were cheering the loudest. Their posts are going crazy all over social media. They’re writing things like, ‘She said she was going to do it, and she did it,’ and that’s given them motivation. Teaching is all about inspiring kids and showing them you can achieve something if you work hard, day in and day out.”

Maia is living proof of that. She knows all about the power of perseverance. About falling and rising. About climbing back onto that bike until you master it. About blazing trails.

Best-selling author and nationally honored journalist Scott Pitoniak is the Rochester Business Journal sports columnist.