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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hile the Harvard Crimson football team is seeing most of the spotlight thanks to its back-to-back Ivy League titles and its current 9-0 record, one person in particular is working hard in the background to keep the team running.

Katie Patton serves as the Crimson’s director of football operations, a role that is in charge of team travel, facility usage, and video. She also maintains close contact with the school’s athletics administration, equipment staff, and sports medicine team, keeping everything in order for one of the oldest programs in the nation.

While Patton is known internally to do everything in her role flawlessly, her path to where she is was extremely unorthodox. It all started with her background in a family of coaches and her college career at Michigan State University.

Patton began her career in collegiate football operations during her time as an undergraduate at Michigan State, where she graduated in the spring of 2024. Her father, James Patton, coached at the collegiate level for 30 years, and her mother and brother are also coaches, so she was quick to find her path into the world of college football.

“It’s always something that I’ve been around, and I was really excited to get involved myself,” Patton said. “Once I got started working in football operations and gaining a perspective of everything that goes on in the program was so cool to see.”

Her passion was clear, and her work ethic quickly caught the eyes of Harvard’s previous director of football operations, Jackson McSherry. Before McSherry left Harvard in the spring to join the football program at Boston College, he worked closely with Patton, and according to him, her abilities quickly showed promise.

“You honestly wouldn’t even know that she was a rookie in that first year the way that she just jumped in and handled the tasks that I gave to her,” McSherry said. “When the position came open — and I told Coach Aurich this — she might not be the most qualified person you can get for this position on paper, but her having a year of institutional knowledge and just the right attitude and the right type of person for the job, I thought that she’d do really well.”

With her promotion in April, Patton became the youngest director of football operations in all of Division I, which currently has 265 member schools. In addition, she is the first woman to hold the position at Harvard and is the only woman currently holding the role in the Ivy League.

“Growing up, some of my mentors or just people I looked up to growing up were women in football and in sports,” said Patton. “So just being here and being the first female DFO at Harvard is really cool.”

While this is her first major football operations role, it certainly won’t be her last.

When asked about her future, head coach Andrew Aurich says that he would love for her to stay, but he knows that more might be in store in the future.

“The sky is the limit, whatever she would want to do,” Aurich said. “I know people in these spots who have gone on to work in the NFL, whether it’s in scouting or it’s in operations, but I don’t think this is going to be her last stop because people are going to take notice of her and they’re going to try to take her away from us.”

—Staff writer Connor Castañeda can be reached at connor.castaneda@thecrimson.com.