Ashlea Klam won a world championship in flag football – and is in prime position to pursue an Olympic gold medal for the US – without ever having the chance to compete for a state title at her high school. And that is something the 20-year-old from Texas is striving to change with whatever time she can find away from her training and college classes.

“I think it is just absolutely crazy that I have been able to represent my country at this sport, but I was never able to represent my high school,” said Klam, who became a world-class player of a sport debuting at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics in large part thanks to a program founded by her parents. “When states don’t have flag football in their sanctioned varsity sports … it hurts. It hurts deeply because it’s taking away so many opportunities for younger girls to be able to play this sport.”

Three years out from the sport’s Olympic debut, perhaps no young woman has embraced those opportunities quite like Klam. She nearly won a national championship in flag football with Keiser University in May. And in August, while still aged 19, she helped the US women’s flag football national team capture a third consecutive world title.

She had a plethora of options growing up in Texas’ state capital, Austin. The gifted multi-sport athlete excelled in soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball, softball as well as track and field. At one point she even acted, including roles in the 2015 film Jack’s Apocalypse, the National Geographic production The Long Road Home, and a TV show based on the Sage Alexander young adult novel series.

But nothing quite piqued her interest like seeing her brother, Peyton, play flag football, the contactless cousin to the tackle version involving smaller teams, a reduced-sized field and pulling flags from players’ hips to stop opposing ball carriers. And after years of being dragged around to his games, Ashlea eventually approached her parents, Jason and Amber, and said, “Hey, no, it’s my turn,” her father recalled.

Supporting their daughter – then aged about seven – required Jason and Amber Klam to start a team in a local recreational league with Ashlea, a couple of other girls and several boys. Amber Klam recalled that the league technically was co-ed, but some squads had exclusively boy players. Nonetheless, as in her other sports, she stood out. And Klam later was recruited to select teams – including ones where she was the only girl – that would travel out of town and participate in regionals hosted by the National Football League.

The coaches at the time eventually moved on and asked whether the Klams wanted to inherit control of the budding program. The Klams said yes and ultimately built the girls-only Texas Fury, deriving the name from the mythological, vengeful Greek goddesses. The Fury has since expanded from a single, six-player squad to 10 teams in Austin and another two groups in the Dallas-Forth Worth area across several age divisions.

The Fury showcased Klam’s prodigious speed, knack for getting the ball into the end zone to score, and ability to command her teammates’ respect at a time when flag football’s popularity as an entertaining, less physically risky alternative to the tackle format was exploding. From 2014 to 2023, participation in the sport by children between the ages of 6 to 17 increased 38%, producing more than 1.6m participants in that range – growth that was reflected in the Texas Fury organization itself.

These days, “we are an 11-month program,” Amber Klam said.

Ashlea in the end narrowed her focus to flag at the expense of the other sports, along with acting. The wisdom of that decision became evident by the time she celebrated her 19th birthday in October 2023.

Keiser University by then had taken note of the 5ft 10in Klam’s exploits with the Fury – among other qualities – and given her a scholarship to study sports management as well as play for its women’s flag football team in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Olympics had also announced that the sport would be among five making their debuts at the 2028 LA Games. And the US women’s national flag football team – having already tried her out on one of its youth squads – had chosen Klam as part of the senior side that would be favored at the sport’s world championships in Finland in August.

“Taking that leap … was just amazing,” Klam said.

The ensuing results were equally so. She caught 79 passes for 1,1116 yards and 27 touchdowns as Keiser’s 18-win, two-loss Seahawks reached the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA)’s championship game in May.

Then, as the youngest member of the group, Klam caught the second-most passes (41) for Team USA while contributing 367 receiving yards and seven touchdowns in Finland. One of those scoring receptions came in the US’s 31-18 gold medal game victory over Mexico to secure the Americans’ third straight world championship – the kind of performancye that leaves her in striking distance of representing her country at the Olympics, when she will be 23.

In between those exploits, Klam got to serve as a sports envoy with the US state department, traveling to São Paulo, Brazil, to meet underprivileged youths there as the Super Bowl kicked off in February.

Yet Klam said she was bothered by the reality that her flag achievements of late came in spite of lacking varsity experience during her time at Austin’s Vandergrift high school.

Only 13 US states had sanctioned girls’ varsity high school flag football at the conclusion of Klam’s breakout year on the global stage. Texas, where football is something of a religion, is not among them.

The entire Klam family has been working with NFL organizations such as the Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys to increase the number of counties which are offering the game as a club sport. The effort mainly has involved meetings with – and presentations to – the University Interscholastic League, which governs high school sports in Texas. It had progressed a little beyond the halfway point after Ashlea returned from Finland, with optimism surrounding the Texans’ pledge of $1.4m toward the growth of girls’ flag football.

Team USA’s directors are doing what they can to build the widest possible pool of Olympic hopeful flag football players. In late November, they began hosting a series of talent identification camps running through the spring in about half of the NFL’s markets – from LA through Dallas to New England.

But in Klam’s view, as it stands, with so much of the US lacking a slate of varsity high school flag football, the proverbial pipeline does not extend far back enough. If it ever does, there is no telling how many other girls and women can emulate her path, which – beyond a viable Olympic shot – has let her travel internationally at a scale she could only dream about a few years earlier.

“This sport has given me so much more than a gold medal or wins and losses,” Klam said. “I want that … for every younger girl who has the passion for this sport.”