I've worked in sports for over 20 years. Bowl games, major college events, startup sports ventures. I've seen what world-class infrastructure looks like - the kind that gets built around sports that have institutional backing, television deals and decades of organizational investment.
Girls flag football has none of that history. What it has is momentum - and a generation of young women who showed up to play a sport before anyone built the road for them.
That pattern isn't unique to flag football. It's the story of women's sports broadly.
Female athletes consistently receive less recruiting infrastructure, less media coverage, less data infrastructure and fewer pathways to institutional support than their male counterparts - not because they're less talented or less committed, but because the systems were built around a different athlete first.
The families I've talked to while building Flag Prospect Series describe a recruiting process that is exhausting, opaque and inequitable in a very specific way: the athletes who get seen aren't always the best athletes. They're the athletes whose families have the time, money and connections to navigate a broken system.
That's not a meritocracy. That's a network effect masquerading as one.
What young female athletes deserve - what they have always deserved - is the same thing their male counterparts have had for decades: a standardized evaluation system, verified performance data and a platform that puts their talent in front of decision-makers regardless of where they live or who their parents know.
That's what I'm building with Flag Prospect Series. Not because it's a good business opportunity (though it is) but because I was one of those athletes. I played on one of the first sanctioned girls flag football teams in Florida history. I know what it feels like to show up for a sport that the infrastructure hadn't caught up to yet.
The infrastructure is catching up now.
If you work in youth sports, collegiate athletics or girls sports advocacy - I'd love to connect. This is a conversation worth having.
