Ashlea Klam is locked in — and she or he has the cellphone background to show it. On a Zoom name with the professional footballer in early August, she reveals me her lock display screen: a photograph of herself passionately screaming throughout a play. It serves as her reminder to at all times deliver her entire self to the sport.
Klam is the one of many high collegiate flag soccer gamers of her division, named the 2026 NAIA Ladies’s Flag Soccer Participant of the Yr and captain for Workforce USA. And she or he did not arrive right here by happenstance. Impressed by her older brother, Klam has performed flag soccer since she was 7 years previous on a group created by her personal mother and father.
“In Texas, at any time when a 7-year-old lady on the time with little pigtails says, ‘I wish to play soccer, majority of the mother and father would say, ‘Properly, what about this? What about this? Why do not we do this?'” Klam says, “However each of my mother and father have been like, “Oh heck yeah! If we won’t discover you a group, we’ll make you a group.'”
In highschool, Klam was already plotting out her future within the sport. “I had a intestine feeling that it could be capable of take me someplace,” she tells Popsugar in a dialog about her newest partnership with T-Cellular.
“One of many greatest misconceptions is that it’s only a leisure sport.”
Klam started her official flag soccer profession at Kaiser College and now she’s transferring over to Cal Poly College, a D1 faculty, to play the sport. That is additionally her fourth yr on the ladies’s US nationwide group, which she’s hoping will make headlines on the subsequent Olympics when flag soccer makes its debut. “One of many greatest misconceptions is that it’s only a leisure sport,” Klam says. “No, folks could make real careers out of this.”
It is a actuality Klam hopes to convey by her newest partnership with T-Cellular. The model not too long ago launched its Friday Night time 5G Lights program providing small-town excessive faculties the prospect to obtain funding of as much as $1 million to improve their soccer fields and athletic services, thereby serving to create a greater expertise for athletes and the whole group. (Klam joins NFL icons Rob Gronkowski and Patrick Mahomes in supporting the trouble.)
“When rising up, my mother and father created a group for me and in order that’s why that is such an genuine partnership for me as a result of they’re creating communities for small cities,” Klam says. In supporting these assets, she hopes different younger women will likely be inspired to play the sport. She desires to create as many “pathways” as potential for them to succeed in the highest.
Luckily, the trade is already recognizing the potential, Klam says, acknowledging the meteoric rise within the funding of ladies’s sports activities: a current Nielsen research confirmed a 120 p.c improve in promoting spent on the class since 2022. It additionally famous that 122 million People (greater than half the inhabitants) are concerned with girls’s sports activities.
“Persons are beginning to notice that supporting girls’s sports activities is not simply good to do,” Klam says. “Persons are beginning to notice that it really is sweet enterprise.”
Alexis Jones is the part lead of the well being and health verticals at Popsugar, overseeing protection throughout the web site, social media, and newsletters. In her seven-plus years of editorial expertise, Alexis has developed passions for and experience in psychological well being, girls’s well being and health, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and persistent circumstances. Previous to becoming a member of PS, she was the senior editor at Well being journal. Her different bylines might be discovered at Ladies’s Well being, Prevention, Marie Claire, and extra.
