The 11th Annual Women’s Flag Football World Championships was held in Lahti, Finland, from August 27-30. Led by world-famous Super Bowl halftime commercial star quarterback, Diana Flores, who has been playing since she was a little girl, Mexico easily won their three games within their group with victories over Italy 45-6, South Korea 58-0 and Denmark 57-6.
The young Mexican women then beat Israel 42-6 in the opening round after group play, edged by Canada 35-20 during the one-game elimination round quarterfinals and were victorious against Japan 40-31 in the semi-final match up to advance into the Championship game versus their USA nemesis, in which they lost 31-18.
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The 25-year-old Diana Flores starred in a commercial that aired just after the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show in which 100 million Americans caught their first glimpse of the talented Mexican quarterback who played for the Mexican national team when she was 16 years old.
Flores grew up in Mexico City and began playing flag football when she was just eight years old. Due to a lack of age groups, she often found herself playing against 16- and 17-year-olds at just 8 years of age. In an interview with NFL en Espanol, she said: “My dad was the one that brought me to my first flag football practice. Flag football continues to develop and grow around the world and is set to make its debut at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028.
In the 2022 Final, Mexico got out to a scintillating start thanks to an opportunistic defence and never looked back, dominating on both sides of the ball as quarterback Diana Flores and her four touchdown passes highlighted its 39-6 win over the U.S.
American Football was first introduced in Mexico as far back as 1896 by Mexican students returning home from U.S. colleges. They brought back “an oval-shaped ball,” said Alejandro Morales, a local football historian and founder of Mexico’s Football Hall of Fame. He said the first official match was played that year in the city of Jalapa in the Gulf state of Veracruz, where the students and their friends faced a team of American sailors from a U.S. ship anchored in the nearby port.
Soon thereafter, several teams were created in Veracruz and the sport eventually spread to Mexico City and its local colleges. UNAM, the national state university with over 200,000 students, started playing in the 1920’s, and by the 1950s, most of the Mexican colleges were playing the game.
UNAM’s famed Estadio Olimpico, site of the 1968 Summer Olympics, was used mainly for American football in the first decade after its inauguration in 1950. “Back then, football used to share the spotlight with soccer,” Morales said. “Eventually that faded, because football was not seen as a business. It was played in college, and they just wanted to help the students, while soccer was run by professionals.”
“Now girls are getting more into sports that were created for boys,” said flag football player, Cora Castro. And indeed, women’s flag football leagues have been running rampant in every corner of Mexico. Girls have simply grown to love American flag football more than boys. And the locomotive of its popularity is moving full steam ahead. Living so close to its American neighbor has only added fuel to the women’s flag football fire.
Most recently, the CIF California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for sports in the Golden State have officially given the seal of approval for the high school girl’s competition that ends with an eventual state champion. Girls flag football is the fastest growing sport in the world and Mexico is a breeding ground for world champion players.
