Interview with Coach Ashley Cornwell
Interview with Coach Ashley Cornwell on the NFL’s International Player Pathway program
—Alex de Wild
Your chances of competing in the NFL are vanishingly small even if you’ve been preparing your whole life. Imagine, then, that you’ve only been playing American football for 10 weeks. That’s the case for the small but accomplished group of athletes selected each year for the NFL’s International Player Pathway (IPP) program, a crash course in American football. Established in 2017, the program’s self-described mission is “to provide elite athletes from around the world the opportunity to earn a spot on an NFL roster and increase the number of international players in the league.”
The athletes—historically a mix of rugby players, Gaelic football players, and Olympic track and field athletes—aspire to follow in the sizeable footsteps of Jordan Mailata, the program’s biggest success story so far, both figuratively and literally. Standing at 6 foot 8 and tipping the scales at 165 kg, Mailata was told he was too big for rugby, the sport he grew up playing. Fortunately for him, there’s no such thing as too big for football. Since completing the IPP program in 2018, his rise has been nothing short of meteoric. Just three years after being picked by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2018 NFL Draft, he was named in their starting squad, signing a four-year, $64-million contract. And last season he captained the team to Super Bowl glory.
Other graduates of the IPP program haven’t reached the lofty heights that Mailata has, however. Take for example Welsh rugby star Louis Rees-Zammit: known for his speed and acceleration, Rees-Zammit quit rugby in 2024 to pursue his long-held dream of playing in the NFL, but after spending several months in the so-called ‘practice squads’ of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs—where he was consigned to practising and not playing—he returned to rugby, joining the Bristol Bears at the start of this season. His is a common story among IPP players.
To better understand the challenge faced by athletes trying to switch to American football, I spoke with coach Ashley Cornwell. Prior to joining the staff of the NCAA Division 1 team Bucknell Bisons, Cornwell coached the 2023 and 2024 IPP cohorts. As a woman and at 5 foot 4, she’s hardly the stereotype of an American football coach—more than once, she tells me, she’s been mistaken for a fan. (Female football coaches, though their number is on the rise, remain scarce at both the collegiate and professional levels: last season, there were just 15 in full-time positions in the League.) It is perhaps this understanding of what it’s like to be an outsider that made her such an effective coach and mentor to the IPP players.
Sacred in football—and according to Cornwell the most challenging aspect of the game for IPP athletes—is the playbook, a closely guarded, constantly changing repository of set plays and tactics. At first, Mailata admitted, he “thought it was an instruction manual to build a spaceship,” while Gloucester winger and one-time England player Christian Wade, who spent three years in the practice squad of the Buffalo Bills, compared its size to that of “two encyclopaedias.” No amount of physical prowess or talent can compensate for a weak handle on the playbook.
Rugby, the sport from which a majority of IPP athletes are recruited, is “not as scripted or planned out as football is,” says Cornwell. In football, “you have to know so much more, and you have to remember so much more”—she’s careful to emphasize, however, that she does not mean to suggest rugby is any less difficult, a clarification that makes for a welcome contrast with the age-old but misguided tendency to pit the two sports against one another in terms of toughness (see for example this episode of the Kelce brothers’ podcast).
One of the consequent challenges for coaches, Cornwell tells me, is figuring out “how to make things simple,” particularly as “we only have two and a half months to get these guys NFL-ready.” She credits her background coaching youth football as an asset in this regard. That background is evident in coaching footage she shares with me in which she can be seen patiently drilling the players in surprisingly simple movements. As I watch, I cannot help but be reminded of those iconic scenes in The Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi instructs Daniel, his young neighbour and protégé, to “show me sand the floor”; “show me wax on, wax off”; “show me paint the fence, up down”; “show me paint the house, side, side.”
Just as Cornwell would draw on her own past experience, so she would look to tap into that of her apprentices. Wrestling, she found, “translates really well to being a defensive lineman”—the player responsible for pressuring the quarterback on passing plays and stopping the ball carrier on running plays—“because of how wrestlers use their hands, the kind of strength wrestling requires, and even the footwork that goes into it.” “Basketball players”, for their part, “make good offensive linemen”—the players responsible for protecting the quarterback and creating space for the running back—“thanks to the coordination of hands and feet that they have learned.”
Of all the positions on the field, “the ones where I can see things translating a little bit quicker are wide receiver, tight end, and running back.” To be sure, the learning curve is extremely steep regardless of position; in all cases, the would-be American footballer must unlearn techniques and habits inculcated over years and even decades of practice and competition. Rugby players, for instance, are accustomed to going into collisions with a view to offloading the ball at the moment of impact; in football, on the other hand, you hold on to the ball for dear life no matter what. And when it comes to tackling, Cornwell explains, the “point of contact [in rugby] is not as violent as it is in football,” making it necessary for the likes of Rees-Zammit and other rugby players to learn to run much lower into tackles.
Some positions, notably quarterback, simply don’t lend themselves to the skills and habits the athletes bring with them from their previous sports. Quarterback is the trickiest one of all, Cornwell says, because “it relies a lot on knowledge,” thus epitomising the highly choreographed nature of football. It has no real equivalent in any other sport, and 10 weeks is just not enough time for anyone—even an elite athlete—to acquire the encyclopaedic knowledge, never mind throwing skills, necessary to play quarterback at the highest level of American football. For reference, Aaron Rodgers, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished quarterbacks in the history of the sport, is considered an unlikely success story for not having taken up football until the age of 13. Zach Helfand, writing in The New Yorker, calls Rodgers “a classic Underdog,” describing the fact he didn’t play on his high school varsity team until junior year as “unthinkably late for a quarterback with any professional future.”
No less difficult than the physical and technical demands of professional football is the emotional toll the game can take. “It’s not just what you can do on the field”, Cornwell stresses—“it’s also your character and your mindset, because, one, you’re bringing these guys away from their families—is that doable and can you handle that?—and, two, this is a business you’re getting into, it’s not gonna be nice to you.” (A business the NFL certainly is: worth $20 billion in the 2023 season according to Statista, it’s the most valuable sports league in the world by some margin.)
A 2018 Harvard study found that, for all the gratitude players feel for their careers, they are also prone to experiencing isolation and loneliness. Such feelings are potentially heightened in the case of international players, whose families are more likely to reside outside of the US, and who are all but certain to start out in a practice squad, where life can be especially fraught and precarious. Released as they can be at any time, practice squad players routinely find themselves without a team and without an income, just waiting to be picked up by a new team. They have to be ready to pack their things, leave behind any family, and travel at a moment’s notice to a new place, where they must quickly arrange accommodation—hence their nickname, “journeymen.”
Accounts from IPP players certainly seem to bear out the picture painted by the study. Of Rees-Zammit’s transition, Wade remarked: “I know how lonely it is going to get so I wish him the best of luck.” And ‘lonely’ is also the word used by Patrick Murtagh, a graduate of the 2024 cohort, to describe his emotional state when no sooner had he signed for the Jaguars than he failed a medical and had to fly home to Australia.
That, then, is what the IPP players are getting themselves in for. Theirs is an extremely difficult task, as Cornwell’s insight reveals, but one that Mailata has shown can be achieved. If you’re one to watch the Superbowl, which this season will take place on 8th February 2026, spare a thought for the IPP players trying to beat the odds and make it to the big time.