HomeSportsAmerican soccer star Ashlea Klam is aiming for Olympic gold by 2028...

American soccer star Ashlea Klam is aiming for Olympic gold by 2028 – and beyond

<span>Ashlea Klam receives a pass and plays for the U.S. National Flag Soccer team during last year’s World Cup. Klam is positioned to pursue Olympic gold in flag football, perhaps like no other young American player during the nation’s football boom.</span><span>Photo: Lester Barnes | American football</span>” src=”https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OFaXqpp16n0K10sKMU4kAQ–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk 2MDtoPTU3Ng–/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_guardian_765/a5848ae2862d9e2ea2cd63816a0a0760″ data-src=”https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OFaXqpp16n0K10sKMU4kAQ–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3P Tk2MDtoPTU3Ng–/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_guardian_765/a5848ae2862d9e2ea2cd63816a0a0760″/><button class=

Ashlea Klam catches a pass and runs for the U.S. National Flag Soccer Team at last year’s World Cup. Klam is positioned to pursue Olympic gold in flag football perhaps like no other young American player during the nation’s football boom.Photo: Lester Barnes | American football

Ashlea Klam won a flag football world championship — and is in prime position to pursue an Olympic gold medal for the U.S. — without ever having the chance to compete for a state title at her high school. And that’s something the 20-year-old from Texas is trying to change with whatever time she can find outside of training and classes.

“I think it’s just crazy that I was able to represent my country in this sport, but I never got to represent my high school,” said Klam, who became a world-class player in a sport that debuted at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles are largely thanks to a program set up by her parents. “When states don’t have flag football in their sanctioned varsity sports … it hurts. It hurts deeply because it deprives younger girls of so many opportunities to play this sport.”

Three years after the sport’s Olympic debut, perhaps no young woman has embraced these opportunities more than Klam. In May, she nearly won a national flag football championship with Keizer University. And in August, when she was just 19, she helped the U.S. women’s national soccer team capture a third consecutive world title.

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She had a plethora of options growing up in Austin, the capital of the state of Texas. The gifted multi-sport athlete excelled in football, volleyball, basketball, baseball, softball and track and field. At one point she even dabbled in acting, 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 series of young adult novels.

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

To support their daughter – then about seven years old – Jason and Amber Klam had to form a team in a local recreational league with Ashlea, a few other girls and some boys. Amber Klam recalled that the league was technically co-ed, but some teams had all-boy players. Nevertheless, as in her other sports, she stood out. And Klam was later recruited to select teams — including those on which she was the only girl — that would travel out of town and compete in regional games hosted by the National Football League.

The coaches at the time eventually went further and asked if the Klams wanted to inherit control of the nascent program. The Klams said yes and eventually built the girls-only Texas Fury, taking the name from the mythological, vengeful Greek goddesses. The Fury has since expanded from a six-player team to 10 teams in Austin and two more groups in the Dallas-Forth Worth area across different age categories.

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

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

Ashlea eventually narrowed her focus to marking at the expense of the other sports, along with acting. The wisdom of that decision became clear when she celebrated her 19th birthday in October 2023.

By then, Keizer University had taken note of Klam’s exploits with the Fury – among other qualities – and awarded her a scholarship to study sports management and play for the women’s flag football team in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Olympics had also announced that the sport would be one of five to debut at the 2028 Games in LA. And the U.S. women’s soccer team — having already tried her out on one of its youth teams — had selected Klam as part of the senior squad that would be favored at the sport’s world championships in Finland in August.

“Making that jump… was just amazing,” Klam said.

The resulting results were the same. She caught 79 passes for 1,1116 yards and 27 touchdowns as Keizer’s Seahawks reached the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) championship game with 18 wins and two losses 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 successes was the USA’s gold medal victory over Mexico (31-18), securing its third consecutive World Cup – the kind of performance that leaves her within striking distance of representing her country at the Olympics Play, when she will be. 23.

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In between these exploits, Klam was able to serve as a sports envoy to the U.S. Department of State, traveling to São Paulo, Brazil, to meet with underprivileged youth as the Super Bowl kicked off in February.

Still, Klam said she was troubled by the reality that her flag performance of late came despite the lack of varsity experience during her time at Austin’s Vandergrift high school.

Only thirteen US states had imposed sanctions on girls’ high school flag football at the end of Klam’s breakthrough on the world stage. Texas, where football is a kind of religion, is not one of them.

The entire Klam family has worked with NFL organizations such as the Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys to increase the number of counties that offer the game as a club sport. The effort primarily involved meetings with – and presentations to – the University Interscholastic League, which governs high school sports in Texas. It had gotten a little more than halfway done after Ashlea returned from Finland, with optimism surrounding the Texans’ promise of $1.4 million to grow girls soccer.

The directors of Team USA are doing what they can to build the broadest possible pool of Olympic flag football hopefuls. In late November, they began hosting a series of talent identification camps that ran throughout the spring in about half of the NFL’s markets — from LA to Dallas to New England.

But according to Klam, as it stands now, with much of the U.S. without varsity high school flag football, the proverbial pipeline doesn’t go back far enough. If that ever happens, there’s no telling how many other girls and women might follow her path, which — barring a viable Olympic opportunity — has allowed her to travel internationally on a scale she could only dream of 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 a passion for this sport.”

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