Heather Marini will never forget the first NFL game day she was a part of.

It was the first preseason game of the 2018 season, and Marini, then a scouting intern for the Jets, couldn’t wait to see all the hard work from the past few weeks culminate on the field. She remembers feeling as if she were part of the team, like she belonged.

Only she just might not have looked like it as she and three other interns struggled to navigate MetLife Stadium before kickoff.

“The security guards were giving us a bit of a look like, ‘You don’t really seem to know where you’re going, are you sure you’re supposed to be here?’ ” Marini said, giggling, in a recent phone interview.

But Marini was already halfway through a six-week internship with the Jets’ scouting department, which began at the start of training camp and was set to conclude after the final preseason game.

She was exactly where she was supposed to be and doing what ultimately led to the next phase of her career. In April, Marini became the first female positions coach in Division I football when she was promoted from quality control coach to quarterbacks coach at Brown.

“What I’ve definitely learned is that you never know which handshake is going to be your job interview, which interaction is going to lead to the next job or lead to the next recommendation, which leads to the next job,” Marini, 30, said. “I definitely think that getting the job with the Jets was a big step for me, given that I was from Australia, being hired in the U.S. in football was a big step for me for sure.”

The Jets found Marini through the NFL’s Women’s Careers in Football Forum, which was founded by the Samantha Rapoport, the NFL’s senior director of football development. Marini was part of the second wave of interviews and, according to the Jets, stood out because of her well-rounded history in football.

Her first gig in football was as the strength coach for the Monash Warriors Gridiron Club in Melbourne, Australia in 2008. After a sports performance internship at Oregon State in 2010, Marini went on to be the Monash Warriors’ quarterbacks coach before stepping up as the Under-19 affiliate’s head coach.

Marini served in four different coaching roles despite having never played a single down of football competitively.

That changed in 2016, when the Monash Warriors established a women’s team, and Marini became starting quarterback. She also remained the team’s offensive coordinator and was able to call her own plays.

Marini was doing what she refers to as a “DIY internship” before she heard from the Jets: attending a lot of clinics, accepting all invitations from coaches to sit in on practices, meetings and film and essentially doing anything to get her foot in the door.

While volunteering at summer football camp at the University of California, Berkley in 2018, Marini received a call from the Jets offering her the internship position she had been working for.

Dan Zbojovsky was the coordinator of college scouting for the Jets when he reached out to Marini. It was the second year the Jets had been working with the NFL’s Women’s Careers in Football Forum and Marini’s résumé, according to Zbojovsky, showed she had more experience than a majority of the interns who preceded her.

“She’s a really good people person,” Zbojovsky, now the Jets’ director of player personnel, said. “She goes out of her way to make connections with people, which in our world, the scouting world, is a huge asset. Really, just how hard she worked. We’ve had a lot of interns that come through our building and she wanted to learn the entire time that she was there.

“She wanted to have as much instruction as possible, she wanted to soak everything in, whether it be pro scouting, college scouting, different aspects of football administration. She had an open mind about the process and wanted to make sure she used it to the fullest.”

While her day-to-day mostly revolved around college scouting, because of the time of year Marini was involved with professional personnel work as well. After being around the team for walk-throughs and practices, Marini realized how much she missed interacting with players and the coaching side of the game.

She said she’d try to pick then-head coach Todd Bowles’ brain whenever she had the chance, adding the usually stoic Bowles, now the Buccaneers defensive coordinator, was always “really generous with his time.”

As much as she longed to be doing more coaching work, Marini considers the things she learned while with the Jets’ scouting department to be invaluable.

“It was really awesome insight into a completely different world that I really didn’t know much about,” she said. “Scouting is a completely different language and it really helped me look at players differently and now as a college coach, that’s what I’m doing with high school players when I’m recruiting.

“The way that I’m looking at players has a lot to do with what I learned during the scouting internship with the Jets.”

Marini made sure to pass along all she had been doing and learning from the Jets to Brown football head coach James Perry, who was coaching at Bryant when he first met Marini. Rapoport connected Perry with women who were interested in coaching, and Perry said Marini was hard to ignore.

“What I remember most about meeting Heather is actually just the persistence that she showed in following up,” Perry said in a recent phone call.

“Because it was mostly follow-up phone calls, follow-up emails, over the course of two years, that I kind of got to know her and developed a relationship with her. She was very determined, knowing that I had a woman on my staff [already]. The next opportunity she wanted to make sure I knew that she wanted it. And when I did go from Bryant to Brown, I had an opportunity and she was all over me about it.”

Perry knew Marini was coming off of an internship with the Jets. And considering his brother, John, serves as the wide receivers coach for the Texans, Perry was familiar with the grueling commitment that comes with working an NFL preseason.

“I knew this is someone who’s really serious about her pursuit of coaching,” he said. “And she was working with some of the best, having a chance to do that [internship with the Jets]. Even for periods of time, that’s a great learning experience.”

It was ultimately Marini’s unequivocal dedication to the football program at Brown that got her to where she is today, according to Perry.

Initially, Marini said she didn’t think much about stepping into positions that women had never occupied before. But over time, she realized how lucky she was to have grown up in an environment that encouraged her to do whatever she wanted to do and how being a role model can do that for others who don’t have that kind of support.

“It just so happens to be that I was the first and I’m sure because I’m the first, there will be a next. And there will be a second and a third,” she said.

Marini doesn’t know if the NFL will be the next step for her, but believes that every football coach should take the next opportunity that is the best for him or her. She does know that her time with the Jets opened endless doors for her and created opportunities that may not have existed without it.

“You see it all the time now, coaches going from college to NFL and back again and back again. What we’re starting to see is the game, when you step onto the field, is still football,” Marini said. “That’s the case for countries that play football all over the world and the Pee Wee football down the street, it’s the complexities and the nuances that are specific to each program that really makes each program special.

“When you can go between them, you become a much better coach.”