How Ameena Soliman and Autumn Lockwood helped the Eagles in a Super Bowl-winning season

INDIANAPOLIS — Howie Roseman has a secret to the Eagles’ success. The players he identifies to make up the team’s Super Bowl-winning roster are only one part of that equation.

More broadly, the secret to success is people. More specifically, it’s the right people. Roseman said he views his role as general manager as the person responsible to “pick people” who can help the organization achieve its goal of winning a championship, whether they’re in the front office or on the football field.

“Anyone who can help us, no matter where they came from, no matter what they look like, we’re into that,” Roseman said Wednesday at the NFL Women’s Forum.

Ameena Soliman and Autumn Lockwood are two of those people whose behind-the-scenes contributions helped the Eagles succeed in 2024. Soliman, the director of football operations and a pro scout, and Lockwood, an associate performance coach, joined Roseman and coach Nick Sirianni for an Eagles panel at the ninth annual event held at the scouting combine.

The quartet offered insight into the franchise’s winning season and career advice to the 40 college-age women of the 2025 class aspiring to break into the NFL. Lockwood, who hails from Media, once sat in their seats as a participant in 2020 and 2021. She made stops at East Tennessee State as its assistant director of basketball sports performance and Houston as its director of sports performance before becoming a strength and conditioning associate for the Eagles in 2022.

Three years in with the Eagles, Lockwood shared wisdom that has guided her along her career, from Women’s Forum participant to NFL performance coach.

“I always go back to this, because this is what I live by, too, but you’re placed where you’re placed for a reason, so be the light in that place,” Lockwood said. “And I think if you carry on with that and you have your own individual gift that is placed inside of you, you just let that be shared and you go on about your day and you just are there to serve those around you and become one and when you do that, special things happen.”

Those special things manifested in the Eagles’ health during their pair of Super Bowl runs over the last three seasons. Roseman noted that 43 of 44 Week 1 starters participated in those championship games, which is a feat by the performance and medical staff that he called “unbelievable.”

Sirianni pointed to Saquon Barkley as the prime example of durability. The 28-year-old star running back racked up a career-high 378 touches in his seventh NFL season, paving the way to his franchise-best 2,005 rushing yards that he accumulated over 16 regular-season games. Sirianni attributed his health in part to the time invested by Lockwood and her colleagues in the players’ hourlong “pre-hab” between walk-through and practice every day.

“That is coming from Autumn,” Sirianni said. “That is coming from our strength and conditioning program. Our trainers. Of just that constant commitment to helping the players get better physically.”

» READ MORE: Eagles’ Autumn Lockwood, a Chester native, becomes first Black woman to win Super Bowl as a coach

Lockwood made her way back to the Philadelphia area. Soliman, a Yardley native, never left. Roseman called her path a “Philly story,” which began at Temple as a football operations and recruiting graduate assistant. She started out with the Eagles in 2018 as a player personnel intern, earning her present title as director of football operations seven years later.

As she worked her way up the ranks from college to pro and transitioned into a scouting role, Soliman was willing to do any task required of her. She encouraged the Women’s Forum participants to take a similar approach and attack each responsibility, big or small, at an elite level.

“Whether it’s proofreading something, you are doing an elite job proofreading that document,” Soliman said. “If you’re watching a player, which is the fun stuff about scouting, that’s what everybody wants to do, if you’re picking somebody up from the airport, you’re 10 minutes early.

“All those types of things are really important, and even though it might not feel like the coolest task associated with your job, that’s going to matter more than anything else does and just being incredibly detailed, incredibly making sure that you’re doing those things at a high level, I think, honestly, is super important.”

Those details matter to Sirianni, whose “tough, detailed, together” mantra defined the organization’s mentality throughout its Super Bowl-winning season. One particular detail unearthed by Soliman impacted Sirianni’s messaging in the lead-up to a game against an unspecified opponent this year.

Sirianni recalled that Soliman shared a turnover-related statistic about that opponent with him early in the week, altering the plan for his messaging to the team in the days that followed. He called that bit of information “critical” to a successful outcome from the game.

“I’m like, you know what?” Sirianni said. “I’m just going to sit and talk about that stat all week. And I don’t really think about stats that much. But in this case, she found me this unbelievable nugget on these guys. And we attacked that thing all week long.”

To be the best team, Roseman has had to cast a wide net to find the best individuals. From Roseman’s perspective, the staff that constructs and supports the roster is an extension of the diverse makeup of an NFL roster.

“When you go inside an NFL locker room, it’s so diverse and the backgrounds that people are coming from, and to put them together and then see them do incredible things, some people [come from] lower income, some people had more opportunities in life. Some people went to big schools in the SEC. Some people went to small schools.

“And all these guys are coming together to win a world championship. And it’s the same off the field.”