Sunday’s 2024 CFL Gray Cup: Catherine Hickman is the Browns’ key Canadian connection

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League (CFL) will compete in their fifth straight Gray Cup this Sunday, November 17, 2024 when they face the Toronto Argonauts in the league championship game with kickoff at 7 p.m. 18:00 (Eastern) . The title game is 111^th and will be broadcast on the CBS Sports Network as well as CFL+, CTV, TSN, the RDS network and Sirius XM radio.

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Two seasons ago, the same two clubs played in the Gray Cup as Toronto went 24-23 to capture their 18th.^th CFL crown. The Blue Bombers won the Cup in 2019 and 2021, then lost to the Argos in 2022 and the Montreal Alouettes last season. The 2020 schedule was canceled due to COVID.

This year, Winnipeg won the West Division with an 11-7-0 record, while Toronto finished second to Montreal (12-5-1) in the East Division with a 10-8-0 record and earned a Wild Card berth. The Argonauts then defeated the Alouettes 30-28 in the playoffs.

The venue is BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia with a capacity of 65,061, while the halftime show for this year’s Gray Cup is the Jonas Brothers. The stadium is the largest cable-supported retractable roof in the world. It features a center-hung high-definition scoreboard measuring 68 by 38 feet, plus installed around the building is a 51-inch electronic tape board with a 2,200-foot circumference.

With the game on everyone’s mind, the Cleveland Browns have a connection to the CFL.

In the list of Browns team managers under the “Football Operations” category, the first name you see is Catherine Hickman. She is the Assistant GM & Vice President of Football Operations. Under her job title, football administration, football information systems, training and medicine, player engagement, security, equipment and video all fall under her responsibility, with 36 people employed by the team to carry out these duties.

Hickman is the highest-ranking female executive in the NFL. She was born in Canada. She began her journey in an internship at CFL.

Catherine Hickman (formerly Raiche) was born in 1989 in Montreal. At the age of seven, she fell in love with football. She had a brother who played offensive tackle and she was the water girl. In high school, Catherine played for the girl’s flag football team.

Her father was an accountant with a master’s degree in taxation. Her mother was a nurse (who now heads HR) and worked with nurses for a private company.

Catherine then attended University of Sherbrooke located in Quebec with a second campus at South Shore of Montreal. She completed a law degree and was admitted to the Quebec Bar Association in 2012. She then went back to night school and earned her master’s degree in tax law while practicing during the day. Her forte focused on corporate and tax law, but she always wanted to be involved in the world of sports. She looked into the agency side of the business, but had the organization and front office aspects of teams in mind. She spent three years at the law firm Gascon & Associates in Montreal.

Catherine heard about a football conference in Indianapolis which can become the door to jobs in the industry. She booked a hotel, flew to Indiana and introduced herself despite not knowing anyone there.

She was hired as an unpaid intern over the weekend with the front office of the Alouettes of the CFL. That meant she was in court during the day, went to class at night and worked for the Alouettes on her two days off.

Eventually, a position opened up with Montreal as coordinator of football administration under GM Jim Popp, who was in charge when she got the internship. She was interviewed and hired for the paid position. Then in 2017, she was named Assistant GM, becoming the second woman in the CFL to have the words “General Manager” in her job title. Jo-Anne Polak wrote history with Ottawa Rough Riders 30 years ago as the league’s first woman to be named GM.

Catherine was responsible for day-to-day operations, managing the salary cap, determining player value and handling contractual obligations for the Alouettes.

When Popp was hired as GM of the Argonauts, he brought Catherine with him as his director of football administration.

In 2019, Catherine took a front office position at Tampa Bay Vipers for the restart of the XFL. As a league, the XFL employed quite a few women in key front-office positions. The move reunited her with former Argos head coach Marc Trestman. Catherine was appointed Director of Football Administration.

After a successful stint with the Vipers, Catherine was hired as the Football Operations Coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles. The hiring made her the second-highest-ranking woman in Eagles history involved with a football staff.

In 2022, the Minnesota Vikings requested the Eagles to interview her for their vacant GM position but did not hire her. With that process, she became the first woman to interview for a GM position in the NFL.

While in Philadelphia, she had worked with Andrew Berry, currently the Browns GM, working as the Eagles Vice President of Football Operations. Berry was hired as Browns GM in January 2020.

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The Browns named the then-33-year-old Montreal native their assistant GM and vice president of football operations in June 2022.

There have been several women who have – and are – listed as the owner of an NFL club. The highest-ranking woman in the NFL was Susan Tose Spencer, who became vice president of the Eagles in 1982. One day, Hickman will become the first female GM in the league. Her journey will have come from Canada and the CFL then through Cleveland.