Kevin Maxen, Jaguars assistant strength and conditioning coach, is the first male coach in a major U.S. men’s professional sports league to come out as gay.
Kevin Maxen is gay.
No NFL coach had ever publicly come out as gay, so Maxen, an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars, kept quiet about his sexual orientation.
And that made him angry — at himself.
“It was an anger and hatred of myself because I put myself in a life where I was living by other people’s rules and not by my own,” Maxen told Outsports. “And I was right to be angry at myself for thinking that I had to live in the image of anyone else.”
When the Outsports article was published online Thursday, Maxen became the first male coach in a major U.S. men’s professional sports league to come out as gay. Former San Francisco 49ers offensive assistant Katie Sowers became the NFL’s first coach to come out as gay in 2017. First-year Sparks coach Curt Miller, who coached the Connecticut Sun for seven years before that, has been out for decades.
