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Alumni enjoying homecoming parade
Every football season, you’ll see them on the sidelines, in the stands, and now, going viral on social media: Black mothers cheering, coaching, and carrying their sons through one of America’s most brutal sports. But behind the highlight reels and heartwarming Mother’s Day tributes, their everyday labor — physical, emotional, financial — remains largely invisible.
Take Terricca Williams, the Florida mom who captured national attention last year for running football drills with her young son, Czar, in their front yard. Sure, the media swooped in to tell her story, and the NFL rewarded her commitment with Super Bowl tickets. But what about the thousands of other Black mothers doing this work, day in and day out, with no cameras watching? What about the collective sacrifices they make to protect and propel their sons in a sport that both glorifies and endangers Black male bodies?
This is their story, too.
During the 2024 football season, various media outlets featured Williams and her 9-year-old son, Czar. This Florida mother and son pair had gone viral for practicing football drills together in their front yard. The interest, it seemed, was in Williams as a mom who was coaching her son in a sport like football. After what appeared to be a whirlwind media tour, the National Football League (NFL) rewarded them for their hard work with tickets to the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans.
Moms like Williams populate the football landscape, but are recognized over and over again in the same way: individually, at specific times of the year, in media packages that highlight an extraordinary case. But what about mothers as a whole? In a sport where at least half the players are Black, no matter the level of play, how do Black mothers specifically factor in?
What about the everyday, not-so-spectacular ways these Black women support their football-playing sons?
Black football mothers are referenced across genres, usually credited as loving parents without much knowledge of the game, but with very close relationships with their sons. They’ve been popularized on television shows through Grace James on the CW’s All-American and Corrina Williams on NBC’s Friday Night Lights. Football programs and coaches, like NFL retiree and Colorado head coach Deion Sanders, exploit, mobilize, and manipulate this relationship during recruiting. There was even a Verizon commercial a few years ago that picked up on this theme of a Black mother’s investment in her son’s athletic pursuits.
A media-ready holiday like Mother’s Day is the perfect opportunity for teams to put these women on display and valorize them. In fact, administrators, the media, and players themselves consistently highlight mothers’ centrality in the lives of their football-playing sons. However, their own experiences and labor have largely been unrecognized in serious discussions of how the college football system functions.
Fathers, and coaches as pseudo-fathers, often figure prominently in popular conceptions of sport, but if you ask me, without mothers, football couldn’t exist at all.
Mothers give birth to those who participate in the sport. These women give bodies to football before their sons can give their bodies for football. Without mothers, there would be no players to participate.
Black football mothers raise, protect, and care for sons who play an inherently violent sport. Not only is there risk of injury on the playing field, but this sport purposely and tactically builds playing bodies that are bigger, taller, and stronger than the norm. Their sons’ bodies are simultaneously privileged within the space of football and stereotyped as more mature, dangerous, and threatening in the real world outside of sport.
Black mothers engage in a kind of care work that is reflective of their understanding of the challenges that arise for young Black men tackling anti-Black social worlds.
Despite the key role these women play, they are seemingly invisible from conversations about their impact on their football-playing sons’ sporting lives. I was interested in this dynamic while I was conducting research with Black college football players, and I write about it in my new book, Tackling the Everyday. Contrary to the ways that football programs are concerned with how these young Black athletes can help them gain wins on the field, Black mothers embody a holistic concern for their sons, recognizing their humanity and the fullness of their experiences beyond just their value as productive athletes. These women are attuned to players’ full experiences as young Black men who both play football and live lives beyond the field.
Through a unique frame of mothering, care work, and labor, Black mothers protect, support, and advocate for these athletes. This relationship is not new to Black feminist writers. When Audre Lorde discusses the need to raise her son and daughter differently, when Jesmyn Ward worries about bringing a Black son into the world, and when Imani Perry dreams of her sons’ ability to find freedom and flight, they are all responding to the desire to protect their Black sons from white supremacist violence that constantly threatens them.
Football mothers have the added worry of harm from play. Andscape senior writer Lonnae O’Neal and HuffPost contributor Sage Howard are just two of those who have spoken out about their concerns. They are particularly challenged with the risk of and almost guarantee of injury that their sons will experience.
This health concern explains why throughout the 2010s, the NFL hosted Moms Football Safety Clinics. The league deliberately marketed to their target audience, given the understanding that mothers are often the ones who sign off on a player’s participation in the sport. After all, Dr. Bennett Omalu, the pathologist who first spoke out about the detrimental effects of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in football players, has said that, “If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football.”
But once they are on board, Black mothers are often fully committed, playing irreplaceable roles in their sons’ football careers. For example, in 2023, Lamar Jackson, the quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, signed a huge $260 million contract over a 5-year period. While the athletic labor required to secure this contract was all his, Jackson himself acknowledged the emotional labor, financial prowess, and business savvy of his manager and mother, Felicia Jones. She was brought up in almost every interview he gave about the historic agreement.
On this Mother’s Day, my wish is that we move beyond just the image of the loving parent to write Black mothers into a narrative about football at every level of play, from little league to the NFL. Often, they are just as invested as the dads, but not given nearly the same credit.
Terricca Williams, and other mothers like her, deserve acknowledgement for the various forms of labor they contribute to the football system. At least by their sons, as Tupac rapped, these Black mothers are always being appreciated.
But it’s time the entire system — from leagues to fans to media — steps up to honor their essential role, not just on Mother’s Day, but every day.
Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025) and the founder and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab. Her work has also been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, TIME, The Guardian, and Scientific American.
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