Las Vegas Raiders: Legend Amy Trask belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame

Canton Awaits

Someday when Amy Trask is inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, I will be there. Not just as a Raiders fan, but also as a sports businessperson. I’ve worked on the revenue side of professional sports for 12 years; her career is a blueprint I follow, and her accomplishments are benchmarks I strive toward. I’ll bring my daughter, so she can witness first-hand that the greatest team executive in NFL history is a female like her.

Trask always echoes the mantra “without regard to gender”. But one cannot ignore the doors she has opened. She was the first female CEO in the history of the NFL. Female employment in the NFL has increased throughout various positions since Trask’s career. Women are impacting the sport at all levels (my cousin Monica Ricci is an Archival Producer for NFL Films). Just last summer, the Raiders named Sandra Douglass Morgan as President.

As pointed out by ProFootballTalk.com, Trask left the league as the only high-level female management figure in the NFL who didn't have a familial tie to ownership. (other than Dolphins Vice President of Football Administration Dawn Aponte)

"I think we would all be lying if we weren't aware of it," Al Davis told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001. "Of the 31 teams, there are only three women representing their franchises and she has the highest title by far. But whatever she's done, she's earned."

"I work for a man who is gender-blind, he's color-blind, age-blind," Trask said in that same piece. "He walks the walk of equality of opportunity. In this organization, your race, your gender and your age are irrelevant. Either you are a Raider or you are not."

In an interview with Inc. Magazine in 2018, Trask talked about working on a “critical transaction” for the Raiders, where a frustrated Al Davis spewed at her “you negotiate like a girl!” (which would end up being the perfect title of her book in 2016)

Trask laughed at him and told him to negotiate it himself. He didn’t, because he knew she was their best chance – and she got the deal done. He trusted her, without regard to gender.

The first league meeting she ever attended, she went with Davis. Another owner thought she was the hotel staff and asked her for coffee. She was the only woman in room other than the catering staff. Trask, without missing a beat, brought him coffee. She then walked to her seat, saw his embarrassment and the two laughed.

She also remembered a time where a male counterpart said to her, in front of a group of people, that he never swears in front of women. Al Davis quickly and protectively intruded, “I swear at Amy, but I don’t consider her a woman.”

When you look at the 29 men in the Hall of Fame as contributors, you see the best of the best – from owners to scouts to commissioners to GMs to referees – but what’s missing is the best of the best CEOs. Amy Trask is missing. Contributors make the Hall of Fame because they contribute in a way that grew the sport without wearing a uniform and helmet. And growing the sport isn’t just for those impacting on-the-field performance, but the sport also grows thanks to those off-the-field efforts. The business of the sport progressed because of Trask.

There are no women in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. She’s a pioneer because she broke a gender barrier, but she’s a Hall of Famer because she dominated the business side of football for a quarter-century spanning four different decades.

Last summer, Trask was named as a semifinalist for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2023, as a contributor to the sport. This alone is an incredible honor. Old male billionaire owners who bought their way into football have been enshrined, meanwhile Trask had as much control of her team as most owners and impacted football as much as any of them. It’s time that the “Princess of Darkness” becomes the “Queen of Canton”.