INDIANAPOLIS — Kasia Omilian always knew she wanted to be around sports.
A daughter of Polish immigrants, Omilian played soccer while she was growing up in Atlanta and watched her brother, Arthur, on the gridiron. Her brother mainly played soccer, but he was working towards a walk-on spot as a placekicker for Northwestern in 2011. And Omilian, five years his junior, was always around to shake footballs for him.
“When I stopped playing soccer, I just knew whenever I went to school, I wanted to be involved with the football team,” Omilian said. “It was consistently kind of showing up in my life, and it was something I was really excited about.”
Omilian never played football herself — girls playing football were basically taboo while she was growing up, she said. But she still found a passion for the sport.
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Her family moved to Washington state for her father’s job in her freshman year of high school, and that led to a visit to the University of Washington, a four-year job with the Huskies football program, internships with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and an eventual job with the Indianapolis Colts.
Now, at 25 and an NFS Scout for the Colts, she loves what she does.
“Football is my passion, and what I’m doing is my passion,” Omilian said. “… I still wake up really excited for what I’m doing.”
Starting from the bottom
Right away, she gravitated towards the University of Washington. But even more importantly, she wanted to make sure she could work for the football team.
“It was important to me, wherever I attended, that I worked for the team,” Omilian said. “I wasn’t quite sure how, and that’s why my approach was, ‘Hey, can I come in and learn a little bit about your operation?’ … But it’s never been me at any step of the process to be demanding things.”
Omilian took every chance she got with the Huskies program. Her first internship at UW was in operations — she was shoveling ice into a cooler, writing postcards to potential donors and recruits, making cut-ups, and other small tasks that no one else wanted to do.
But Omilian wanted to do them — she cherished her role starting from the bottom.
“There’s this great appreciation for everything in the process and understanding, like, how does this Powerade jug get on the table so that we can go play Alabama,” Omilian said. “… I was the person shoveling the ice, I was the person going to the airport at 1 in the morning, right. There is just this understanding and this respect for our players getting onto the field and the journey that they go on, so the same has happened for me. I will never underestimate the journey or what it takes to win games, it’s a huge operation.”
Omilian loved working with the Huskies — their brand was something she knew she could buy into, and in turn, sell to recruits. Throughout her years in college, she worked her way up to the recruiting room, helping to splice tape of potential recruits and current players.
At the same time, too, she was getting experience at the next level. Starting just after her freshman year at UW, she spent two summers as an operations intern with the Steelers. While Omilian knew she wanted to get NFL experience early, she didn’t expect it to be right after her first year of college. But at UW’s pro day that season, everything fell into place.
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Omilian’s job at UW’s pro day in 2017, a year where many Huskies were on draft boards, was to wrangle all of the professional scouts and make sure none of them left the team room.
“I’m like, I’m 18, you know, I’m a little intimidated,” Omilian said. “I’m gonna tell these grown men, ‘Don’t leave this room,’ I don’t know.”
But her presence in the team led her to connect with Mark Bruener, a former UW tight end that was drafted to the Steelers in 1995. After his playing career, he turned to the scouting room for the Steelers, focusing on the West Coast — leading him back to his alma mater.
While waiting for the pro day, Bruener and Omilian talked about her plans for the summer — she was talking to the Cleveland Browns about an internship at the time, but nothing was set in stone. But if it didn’t work out with the Browns, Bruener told her, she could reach out to him.
“Long story short, the (internship) with the Browns didn’t work out,” Omilian said. “I went to Pittsburgh, and did it again for another summer, and I’m super grateful for that organization.”
Starting as early as she did in the NFL sphere, Omilian said she didn’t want to hop around to different teams each summer. So, she spent two summers with the Steelers as an operations assistant, helping with cut-outs, ice, and airport drives again.
Now, seven years later, she still credits Bruener for jumpstarting her career in the NFL.
“I still send a letter to Mark every draft to say thank you,” Omilian said. “He’s like, ‘I didn’t do anything,’ and I’m like, ‘Sure, okay.'”
Getting an opportunity with the Colts
After two summers working with the Steelers, Omilian was ready to take a step up in the NFL industry. But she almost didn’t take up her first opportunity with the Colts.
She first connected with the Colts staff — specifically Jeff Brown, Indianapolis’ director of operations at the time — at the NFL Women’s Forum in winter 2018. While she talked to Brown, they went back and forth about a potential internship for her in Indianapolis. Only it wasn’t just going to be for the summer.
“He called me, and he was like, ‘What do you think about six months? What do you think about the whole offseason?'” Omilian said. “I’m like, ‘OK, let me go talk to my advisor.’ But again, here it is, how are you going to differentiate yourself? People take quarters off school, but how many people take quarters off school to go work for an NFL team?”
Omilian was ahead enough in her classes at UW that she could take the time off and still graduate on time. So, she left Washington in the second semester of her junior year to make her way to Indianapolis as an operations intern, and she was with the Colts from the pre-draft visits to the preseason roster cuts.
“It was very scary because I was honestly leaving school, and I knew that I was risking being away from my classmates and not having that full college experience or whatever,” Omilian said. “But it was like, I can’t say no to this, this is an opportunity that’s just not going to present itself again.”
And that gamble paid off. After she left Indianapolis and returned to Seattle for her senior year, she got a call from the Colts — did she want to come back after she graduated?
It was a resounding, ‘Yes.’
Breaking barriers
The Colts brought Omilian back as a training camp operations assistant. Then, she wanted to make her desire to work in personnel known, so she asked to be in the scouting room.
“She’s unique in the sense that she worked in a Power Five school in Washington, and she worked in recruiting,” Colts director of college scouting Matt Terpening said. “So she was way ahead of the game when she came to us, and she just knows the process.”
She excelled in her seat at the table in the Colts scouting room, providing valuable insight on potential draftees and other recruits. Omilian turned enough heads in the scouting room that they promoted her to be a National Football Scouting (NFS) scout in June 2022 — a move she thought was still a year or two away.
“She’s a pioneer,” Terpening said. “She’s breaking barriers.” To be a scout, I mean, there’s just not many female scouts … she’s the only one in NFS as a female, so her path and her journey of how she got to us, she just bet on herself and said, ‘I can do this.’”
Omilian’s main responsibilities shifted from assisting the Colts’ scouting team to making her own schedule and taking charge of her own recruits. She contributes to the National Football Scouting service, something that 21 NFL teams use, and travels around to different colleges in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan to identify and talk to potential prospects.
Usually, she goes to take their measurements, review their tape, and talk to coaches. Omilian has identified prospects anywhere from Power Five programs like Michigan, Notre Dame, and Ohio State to smaller Division II and III schools like Ashland University and University of Mount Union.
“For a young scout with not a lot of experience, she’s way ahead of the game,” Terpening said.
But sometimes, she said, players are shocked when she walks through the door.
“It might be the first or second time they’ve seen a woman walk into their school and say, ‘Hey, can I ask you about your times?'” Omilian said. “Some are great, some it’s a little more obvious, but to me I’ve gotten a lot better about not feeling exhausted by the interaction and more being like, ‘I have the chance to change the dialogue a little bit with this person. ‘”
As a woman in a male-dominated field, Omilian knows she can’t change the minds of everyone in her field. But she has a feeling of empowerment when she starts seeing someone change their tune on women in football.
And she wants to pass on that empowerment to other women hoping to break into the NFL scouting world.
“People will reach out, and it’s so important to me, but every time I’m shocked at how fulfilling it is and how important it is,” Omilian said. “It makes me really happy when people update me on what’s going on — ‘Hey, I did this,’ or, ‘This is where I’m at.’ … It’s empowering to me, and it really helps a lot when I’m in the middle of Ohio to know there are other women busting their tail.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Women in NFL: Indianapolis Colts’ Kasia Omilian only female NFS scout