Diana Flores reflects on how the Olympics will change flag football
As we prepare for the 2028 Summer Olympics, Mexican captain and QB Diana Flores is also preparing, and she explains why this will change flag football.
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- Flag football will make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
- USA Football holds talent identification camps across the country to identify potential Olympians.
- Current national team members and interested NFL players must go through an eligibility process to make the Olympic roster.
- Flag football is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States, with significant increases in participation among women and girls, but lacks an established pipeline of elite athletes.
SPRING, Texas — Callie Brownson tugged on the brim of her black USA Football hat and looked out at the dozens of Olympic hopefuls kneeling at her feet on the grass field of a suburban recreational sports complex.
Brownson explained that over the next few hours, she and other coaches will closely monitor players’ performance in practice and interactions with teammates to determine who has a chance to represent the United States when flag football makes its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
“We’re also looking for people who embrace those three words,” Brownson said.
Flag football, colloquially known as “flag,” is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States, gaining traction primarily among women and girls. But Flag still doesn’t have an established athlete pathway to rival the long-standing Olympic sport, which boasts a vast network of youth clubs, college teams and powerful professional leagues.
In the run-up to the Los Angeles Games, officials with USA Football, the national governing body for tackle and flag football, are tapping the country’s untapped potential by holding regional talent camps for adults and children ages 11 to 17.
Brownson is leading these efforts in his role as senior director of high performance and national team operations for USA Football. She is no stranger to breaking new ground.
Brownson, a former wide receivers assistant coach for the Cleveland Browns, is the first woman to coach an NFL position group in a regular season game and the first woman to coach full-time in NCAA Division I college football at Dartmouth. She also coached the U.S. women’s tackle football team to the 2022 World Championship, and as a player won two world gold medals with the national tackle team in 2013 and 2017.
“I never imagined when I was coaching as a player, but I still can’t imagine that the word ‘football’ would be used at the Olympics,” Brownson said. “I think it’s a really great moment.”
USA Football reaches Olympic moment and looks to the future
USA Football’s mission is to ensure that flag football lives on beyond the moment. The talent search camp, to be held Dec. 7 in Spring, about an hour north of Houston, is the fourth of 12 camps scheduled through next spring. During the afternoon adult session, 80 players, 60 women and 20 men, showed up to lace up their cleats and perform combine tests, one-on-one drills, five-on-five drills and scrimmages.
Before camp began, Brownson asked the group a question. “Who has ever dreamed of standing on the medal podium?” Every athlete raised their hand.
Although the Olympic flag football 10-man roster will not be determined until 2028, the 2026 calendar year is critical to USA Football’s preparations. Athletes participating in the talent search camp are competing for an invitation to the trials in March. A series of national team training camps are then scheduled for next spring and summer.
From there, USA Football will select two players to compete in the 12-man men’s and women’s national teams for the 2026 International Federation of American Football (IFAF) World Championships in Germany next August, with the top three teams automatically qualifying for the Olympics.
USA Football doesn’t start from scratch. Both the American men’s and women’s national flag teams are world-class powerhouses. The men have won five consecutive world championships, and the women have won the past three world championships. In the 2025 IFAF World Rankings, the U.S. men’s team ranks first, and the U.S. women’s team ranks second after Mexico.
However, Brownson believes that expanding the roster to bring in new blood is paramount to the program’s success and longevity.
“We’ve put together an Olympic-worthy program, not just to survive 2026, so instead of waiting until we pick a team in 2028, we start that process now and say, ‘Okay, we need to get into that mindset now,'” Brownson said. “Everyone needs to prepare as if it were the Olympics right now.”
NFL teams voted in May to allow NFL players to participate in flag football in the Olympics, and while Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill and Green Bay Packers defensive end Micah Parsons have expressed interest, there is no guarantee they will make the team. USA Football has full authority over roster selection, and NFL players must go through an eligibility process, but Brownson said both organizations are still working out the details of that process, which she thought is “constantly evolving.”
And what about the current members of the reigning world champion U.S. men’s and women’s national teams? They also need to earn a spot on the Olympic roster, which is perfectly fine, said Amber Clark-Robinson, a two-time gold medalist who plays as a defensive back and wide receiver.
“You have to get the best no matter what,” Clark-Robinson said. “Who knows, I might not be there. At the end of the day, the goal is the gold medal. And if you don’t fit that mold, there’s no need for hard emotions. Especially as a competitor, you have to understand that sometimes it’s not your time. So I think that might sway you a little bit, but at the end of the day you have to respect the process.”
Building an Olympic pipeline for flag football
Fans watching the battle for the Olympic flag will be watching a game indistinguishable from the NFL games that regularly grace their screens, although there are important differences.
Flag football is a non-contact 5-on-5 game played on a field half the size of a tackle football field. As a result, flagging is much faster than tackling and is more about technique than physicality.
Other unique features: Flag has no special teams, only offense and defense. The quarterback cannot run without first being handed off, but he can receive a pass. That means there could be multiple quarterbacks depending on the play. Seven yards from the ball is also the designated blitzer with an unobstructed path to the quarterback. Lateral passes are allowed, but blocking and screening are not.
Clark-Robinson played three seasons as a tackle football with the Atlanta Steam of the Legends Football League before pivoting to flag after the league was shut down due to the pandemic. The transition wasn’t as smooth as she expected.
“It was tough,” Clark Robinson said. “I couldn’t pull the flag to save my life. I was making so much contact. A lot of people called me a ‘wrecking ball’ (because I wasn’t trying to hit it), but I was just being physical. So I definitely had to flip a switch to get back on track.”
Sunday’s camp in Texas drew athletes from as far away as Illinois, and included athletes with experience in football, track and field, soccer, basketball and lacrosse.
While experience is thought to be a plus when evaluating players, USA Football also targets what it calls “elite athlete talent transfer,” or players who have played other sports at the collegiate level or above. Clark Robinson was a state champion in high school basketball and a collegiate track and field athlete. Brownson said basketball players adapt well to flag football because of the similar physicality and pace.
The testing portion of the Talent ID camp included drills designed to emphasize translatable skills, such as the 5-10-5 shuttle drill, which forces athletes to change direction within short distances, and exercises such as the 20-yard dash and broad jump to measure athleticism.
They then moved on to individual flag-specific drills that assess a player’s ability to avoid flag pulls, run routes, and throw accurate passes. The final component was a scrimmage to see how the athletes perform in a game setting.
“How we assess and evaluate them is crawling, walking, running,” Brownson said.
Participation in flag football increases rapidly with support from women and girls
On an adjacent field, boys and girls as young as kindergarteners in colorful uniforms were playing flag football in a local league. USA Football wants organizations like this to be the foundation for the continued development of the sport.
From 2015 to 2024, Flag participation among children ages 6 to 17 increased by 37%, according to USA Football’s analysis of the Physical Activity Council’s Annual Participation Survey data.
Women and girls are driving growth at the high school and college levels. Sixteen states have recognized flag football for high school girls as a varsity sport, and 17 other states and the District of Columbia have their own pilot programs. At the collegiate level, the NAIA offers women’s flag football scholarships and eligibility for invitations to the sport. The NCAA is scheduled to vote next month on whether to add flags to emerging sports programs for women in all three divisions as a step toward eventual championship status.
“I think there was always interest, but they just didn’t have the space to do it,” Clark-Robinson said. “I think more girls are attracted to it because they’re like, ‘Hey, there are girls like me here. I thought I was the only one, but no, there are 100 other girls in my area.'”
USA Football wants to capitalize on that interest and continue to provide opportunities. National Team Development Program Director Darrell “DK” Taylor said USA Football works with local club teams, NFL flag programs and universities to find players and coaches to be part of the national team feeder system. Top performers at the Youth Talent Identification Camp will earn invitations to USA Football’s annual Select Bowl, a precursor to Junior National Team selection.
“Our goal is to discover every possible way to identify talented players in order to have them as part of the national team development program, so we can make sure we keep an eye on them so they can continue to develop to one day become part of the national team,” Taylor said.
Taylor said NFL markets generally have the most robust flag football infrastructure, and each USA Football recruiting camp is co-hosted with a local NFL team.
The Houston Texans expanded their girls flag football program to more than 80 high schools across Texas this year. Earlier this month, the New York Jets donated $1 million to the Eastern College Athletic Conference to help launch a 15-team women’s collegiate flag league in 2026.
High youth participation rates have a trickle-up effect, and athletes who have increased access to the flag at a younger age may perform at a higher level, enriching the sport’s talent pool.
Clark-Robinson is in her fourth year as head coach of the women’s flag team at Saint Mary’s University, an NAIA school in Leavenworth, Kansas. She said she is only now starting to see the college athletes who competed in flag events in high school. As far as she’s concerned, the sooner she starts, the better.
“You can tell the difference between these 14-year-olds and 13-year-olds because they’ve been playing for four or five years now,” Clark-Robinson said, pointing to the field where a youth talent camp had just concluded. “And when they get to college, they’ll have 10 years of experience there before they step on the football field.”
If USA Football’s efforts to expand its reach are successful, the Los Angeles tournament could be just the beginning for the flag.
“Winning in 2028 is important, but unless we create a structured pathway and provide as many opportunities as possible, there is no future beyond 2028,” Brownson said.
Clark-Robinson said the Olympics were a great opportunity for the flag to be widely exposed and to rewire misconceptions about the sport.
“I’m excited that people are actually taking it seriously and understanding that this flag is competitive and exciting to watch. This isn’t just a ‘powderpuff’ sport,” Clark-Robinson said. “Come on, get on. Don’t wait.”
