Sarah Hogan's journey from Long Island to the Washington Commanders

Sarah Hogan was an eighth-grader at Merrick Avenue Middle School in the fall of 1995 when she and her best friend, Jessamyn McIntyre, came up with an idea. Their track season had just been postponed until the spring and they didn’t have a sport to play, so they decided to try out for a new pursuit.

Football.

This was long before flag football was an option for girls, and a little before it became more common for females to participate in boys sports. Still, the coaches said they could give it a try.

“But the guys didn’t want us to play,” she said of her would-be teammates. “They didn’t want to tackle us. So we decided to run cross-country instead.

“That stinks,” she added, still miffed by the lost opportunity.

She may not have played, but that experience did not stop her from a lifetime spent in the sport. And on Sunday, Hogan will get yet another opportunity to scoff at that three-decade-old slight. She’ll spend her day on the sideline and in the booth at the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia as the coaching chief of staff for the Commanders — the right-hand person for head coach Dan Quinn — one win away from reaching the Super Bowl.

“It’s incredible,” she told Newsday this week of being so close to football’s biggest stage. “It’s been a really incredible season with a lot of amazing people. Don’t make me cry. But it’s been awesome, it really has been. And it’s not over yet.”

Hogan’s job is to make sure all the other coaches and departments are in line with Quinn’s goals and expectations. Given that he's a first-year head coach in an organization with a lot of newness, from ownership to management to quarterback, that’s a really important job . . .  even if Hogan downplays it.

“It was not hard for everybody to buy into what DQ was doing,” she said. “He is just such a good person and he has such a great vision, I think it was kind of a shock to everyone to have that sort of a leader come in no matter if you were new or already here. The players especially, to see this person bring everyone together and have this mentality of brotherhood, everybody bought in so quickly, and it helped. There were no outliers pushing against the grain. Everybody wants to be on the same track moving all together and all living it together.”

Did she think it would happen as quickly as it has?

“Nothing is out of the question with this group, man,” Hogan said.

'Closest-knit group' at Hofstra

Football was in Hogan’s blood long before she took this job. Her father is Greg Gigantino, the long-time college coach who was the defensive coordinator at Hofstra from 1990-97 and then returned from 2001-05. That’s where she met Quinn, who was a defensive line coach on those staffs. It’s also where she found her love for the sport.

“She grew up with it,” said Gigantino, who still coaches and is the defensive coordinator at Division III Massachusetts Maritime. “She always said all her uncles were all the guys I coached with and all the players that I coached.”

Quinn isn’t the only familiar face from those days along for this ride with the Commanders. Dave Gardi, who grew up in Sayville and whose father, Joe, was the head coach at Hofstra, also is on the team’s staff. Gardi serves as the senior vice president of football initiatives, which is a fancy title for being Quinn’s consigliere. He is on the headsets and talks Quinn through strategies and rule interpretations during the games.

“There were probably many times in that tenure when DQ was the defensive coordinator [at Hofstra] and I was on the headset with him back then,” Gardi said of often wearing the apparatus while his father was coaching. “Fast-forward to 2024 and I think we just have a rapport and a calmness to our back-and-forth that helps both of us during the game. We just kind of manage the game together. I help him with decision-making, clock management, challenges, etc. But it’s his show. I’m just there to provide some resources and walk him through some things during the game.”

Hogan has been working with and for teams since she began helping out in the football office at James Madison as an undergraduate. For Gardi, this season is a new adventure. He spent the previous 21 seasons in the NFL office, the last 10 as senior vice president of football operations. His jobs ranged from embedding with teams during their Super Bowl runs (he was with the Giants when they won Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis) to most recently working with officials and editing the NFL’s rulebook.

“I probably could have been a lifer at the NFL,” he said. “That was where my career was headed. And then [Quinn] presented this unique opportunity to be involved and wear a lot of hats, too. I believe in him as a leader. I was sold. I was ready for something to energize me, and this certainly has.”

The fact that it could serve as a sort of Hofstra outpost in the NFL was significant, too. While Hofstra shuttered its football team in 2009, it still has plenty of alumni and former coaches in high-profile positions in the business, from Quinn to Falcons head coach Raheem Morris to Texas offensive coordinator Kyle Flood.

The team may be gone, but the legacy of the program lives.

“That staff at Hofstra, all those years in the 1990s, we were the closest-knit group,” Hogan said. “I can still remember almost every person on every single year of the staff. DQ was one of those guys in that big Hofstra football family. We still, all of us, stay in touch with each other. It’s incredible the family that still exists within a program that doesn’t exist.”

“I wish my dad was still alive,” Gardi said (Joe died in June 2010). “I miss not being able to talk to him about this stuff, me coming here and the craziness of how that all happened, but I know he’d be really proud of the whole group.”

All in the family

Hogan and Gardi still have links to Long Island. Hogan went to Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead for two years of high school before her family moved to Ithaca when her father took a job at Cornell in 1998, but her sister, Laura Siddons, lives in Islip and her brother, Charles Gigantino, lives in Freeport. Gardi’s mother, Audrey, lives in Sayville and his mother-in-law lives in Garden City.

“Mom watches our games,” Gardi said. “She claims I’m going to give her cardiac arrest because of the way we are winning some of these games. I’m like, ‘Mom, you don’t have to watch.’ But she’s all in on us right now and enjoying it.”

So is Hogan’s family.

“She’s picking up the pieces for me,” Greg Gigantino said. “She’s where I always wanted to go. I always wanted to coach in the NFL, but it never happened. So this is exciting. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’ll see if we can get one more game and see what happens.”

The two with Long Island roots also have thought about what it might be like to win Sunday’s game and get to the Super Bowl with a first-year staff, first-year front office, first-year quarterback, first-year just about everything.

Hogan was on Quinn’s staff in Atlanta when the Falcons went to Super Bowl LI and lost to the Patriots.

For Gardi, it could be a familiar setting, too, but one seen from a different perspective. He’s worked about 20 previous Super Bowls as a league employee.

“I feel like I know how the sausage is made when it comes to how the Super Bowl operates,” he said. “I’ve seen them from every angle. But this thing is kind of surreal right now, and to possibly have that experience and be involved in it that way? It’s gonna be pretty damn cool.”

When Hogan was still working with the Falcons before she took the job with the Commanders last offseason, the team came back to the area to play the Jets in a 2022 preseason game. During that night, the Jets honored local championship girls flag football teams from the region. One of them was the Bellmore-Merrick team, the same school district in which Hogan had wanted to play but didn’t.

“I was crying seeing that,” she said. “What could have been if they had had that back in the 1990s.”

Now, all these years later, Hogan could be just a few weeks away from  earning a championship for the Commanders, for Long Island, for a dormant Hofstra program and for the eighth-grade girl who just wanted to play football.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.