Tim Benz: Pittsburgh's Janice Masters aims to elevate Women's National Football Conference as new commissioner

For Pittsburgh’s Janice Masters, the workload can sometimes be like a second full-time job.

Except she’s not getting paid for this one.

Roger Goodell gets between $50 million to $60 million per year to be commissioner of the National Football League. What Masters gets to be commissioner of the Women’s National Football Conference is simply a sense of hope that she’s growing a game she loves.

“You could pay me a million dollars to do it. You could pay me nothing to do it. For me, it’s exciting,” Masters said Thursday. “I think of my niece who came to me at 10 or 11 years old and said, ‘I want to play football.’ There are women out there who want to play this game who don’t know how or don’t have the resources to do it. … I have not doubted for one second that this is something I want to do. It’s pushing things forward.”

Masters turns 40 in July. She’s a resident of Pittsburgh’s North Side and was named commissioner of the WNFC on Feb. 7. The league was founded in 2018, and Masters became involved in October 2020.

Using NCAA tackle football rules, it’s a 17-team league with franchises in large markets nationwide. Riddell and Adidas are some of the major sponsors. Games are distributed globally on Vyre Network. Close to 900 women participated as players last year, with home venues generally at large high schools or small college stadiums.

For the most part, players practice two or three times a week in advance of games. Usually, that’s two on-field days and one film study day.

This year’s season begins on April 2 and will culminate with the IX Cup championship weekend at Dallas’ The Star complex June 24-26.

“We want to be a full-blown entertainment company who leads the world in women’s tackle football. Just exist to help women and girls reach that potential of playing in our league,” Masters said.

Playing 11-on-11 tackle football wasn’t necessarily a goal of Masters while growing up in Lansing, Ohio. She was a softball player while in college at Bethany, then tried out for the Pittsburgh Passion of the Women’s Football Alliance in 2006. She played for and was an assistant coach with that team for 11 years.

Having fallen in love with the game, Masters now wants to advance its profile on the women’s front and streamline its structure as a destination sport for female athletes. One plan to make that happen is to perhaps cultivate a strong flag football league for girls and young women to play as a potential recruiting base.

“Young boys grow up playing tackle football. Then they have that transition into high school or college,” Masters said. “We don’t have that for women. Our athletes, the majority of us, have played softball, basketball, soccer. We don’t have that feeder system. It’s inevitable that flag football is going to be a huge part of the upcoming theme in general. … There were some high school athletes at our last showcase who, yeah. I don’t belong on the field with them anymore.”

Growing the league is no small undertaking. Like Masters, a partner at C-leveled, a marketing agency located in Bloomfield, the rest of the WNFC’s front office works on a volunteer basis, fitting tasks around a regular workday. Much of the league’s other executives are on the West Coast. So Masters often finds herself on conference calls in the late evening hours, with the primary task of finding sponsors who have the same goals of expanding the horizons of what women’s tackle football could become.

“We’re not asking for outrageous numbers. We aren’t asking for NFL numbers. We’re asking for what funds us and what keeps everything moving,” Masters said.

For now, there is no Pittsburgh team in the WNFC. The Passion are now in their 20th season, currently playing home games at West Allegheny. But Masters insists the Western Pennsylvania market is strong enough to support a second team someday.

“That’s one of the things that attracted me to stay in Pittsburgh,” Masters said. “Since I started playing (with the Passion) in 2006, the amount of women who play sports in Pittsburgh — from the Pittsburgh Sports League to Gaelic football — I can’t imagine how that number has grown. It’s just continuous.”

Masters says you can trace the history of women’s tackle football back for decades.

“Women want to do this. Women want to play this sport,” Masters said.

Now as commissioner of the WNFC, it’s her job — even if it is a second job — to create the biggest stage possible for that to happen.