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For the KC Swifties, girls empowerment and fun win flag football games

March 23, 2026

The girls danced and sang to Taylor Swift blaring through speakers, their ponytails tied up with red sparkly ribbons and their small hands waving shiny pom-poms as their giggles filled the football field.

Then, it was game time — and the KC Swifties came to win.

Mila Lochhead, 8, right, of the âKC Swiftiesâ outpaces the...

Mila Lochhead, 8, right, of the “KC Swifties” outpaces the Patriots defense to score a touchdown in a flag football game at Jack R. Hammett Sports Complex in Costa Mesa on Friday, March 20, 2026. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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“Our whole team is so strong and fast,” said quarterback Hayden Maher. “We’re strong and we’re smart and we can do anything. If we make a mistake, we don’t give up.”

Hayden’s jersey has Karma in glittery gold letters instead of the traditional last name. All her teammates’ nicknames pay homage to their favorite pop star’s songs: Love Song, Gold Rush, Mastermind, Fearless, Shake It Off, Bad Blood, Enchanted, Starlight, Ready For It and End Game.

Krystn Maher, the KC Swifties team manager and proud mom of 7-year-old “Karma,” recalled how her daughter would watch the Kansas City Chiefs play with her dad, Aaron. Originally, she wanted to get a glimpse of her favorite singer — dating the team’s tight end — but then she started showing interest in what was happening on the field.

Her teammate and friend, James Twiggs, aka Love Story, was also intrigued while watching games with her dad. When they heard they could do an all-girls team, they got a few friends together last fall, with Aaron Maher signing up as coach.

Their division had mostly older girls in the second grade, Krystn Maher was warned. As a younger team, they could be losing a lot of games, so everyone figured: Why not make it fun?

They’ve made competing a whole vibe. The players make friendship bracelets for the opposing team. They blast confetti when they earn a touchdown. They run through a big banner, lyrics painted across, before each game.

“It’s become this little spectacle, it’s so cute and endearing and fun and silly and all the things you want sports to be for your kids so they can remember,” Krystn Maher said.

And most games, they win.

“To our surprise, they all started being really, really good,” Maher said. “Not only are they fantastic athletes and win a ton of games, but the girls just have as much fun on the sidelines as they do playing.”

Milan Robinson, aka Mastermind, is one of the newbies this season; her mom, Reed, calling her “super lucky” to get a spot on the team, which now has a waitlist.

“They have such amazing synergy and camaraderie, and they’re all just so festive,” she said. “They all bring their individual piece of flair.”

They aren’t just cute, they’re fierce.

“That’s what’s so great, that juxtaposition, how adorable and sassy they are, and then how they just go out there and kill it,” Robinson said just before the team won their Friday night game 28-8.

Last season, the KC Swifties ended up in the championships, coming up just short against a team coached by former NFL quarterback and Super Bowl Champion Nick Foles, whose daughter plays.

This season, which just kicked off a few weeks ago, Hayden Maher is optimistic at her team’s chances.

The flag football matches Friday on that Costa Mesa field are just a small glimpse into the surging growth of girls’ flag football across not just Orange County and Southern California, but across the country and world, a sport historically for the boys, but now just as much for the girls.

When the Matt Leinhart Flag Football League started in 2012, a few girls wanted to join the action that first year, including CEO Ryan Bertoni’s daughter, said Frank Albers, president and COO of Females in Flag.

Then more joined, and soon full teams of girls were going up against the boys.

And they were winning.

With the growing interest, they decided to do a free all-girls camp in 2019 and, to their surprise, a few hundred players showed up. In 2021, just as the pandemic restrictions were lifted, they decided to create a league called Females in Flag.

“When they realized they could play only girls, it really just exploded,” Albers said.

Most girls would quit at about sixth grade, with no pathway to keep playing, he said. Then a few years ago, they started several high school club teams, showing there was a demand to make it a CIF sport.

In 2023, girls flag football became an official CIF-sanctioned sport in California. Colleges, too, began adding teams.

Makena Cook, an Orange Lutheran High junior quarterback who came through the ranks with the Conquer club team, made history in January as the first female athlete to receive a Power Four flag football scholarship offer from the University of Nebraska.

“I think it’s going to become a full Division 1 sport at most colleges,” Albers said. “I think it’s going to just continue to explode.”

Cook, who Albers called the best young quarterback in the country, just made the women’s U17 national team, along with J Serra High’s Kate Meier, who also came up the ranks with Conquer.

The next generation of girl football enthusiasts, like the girls who filled the field Friday night, will have much more opportunity to showcase their skills. There are 3,000 girls currently in the Females in Flag program, a figure catching up quickly to the boys’ program, which has about 4,000.

They have everything from kindergarten teams to a club team called Conquer So Cal that plays regularly throughout Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and South Orange County. The high-level teams compete at tournaments locally, some even traveling across the country.

And there are club teams and rec programs happening throughout Southern California, with thousands more girls learning the game of football.

It’s all leading up to the LA28 Olympics, where there will be — for the first time — a female flag football competition during the summer games, with millions of viewers around the world tuning in. Also on the horizon is the creation of a flag football pro league by 2028, with the NFL already committing to six teams with $1 million buy-ins from each NFL team.

The KC Swifties got a surprise visit Friday night from four members of the US National team who will be competing at the upcoming Olympics. Meeting Madison Fulford, Deliah Autry-Jones, Izzy Geraci and Laneah Bryan, the wide-eyed young girls filled with excitement as they surrounded the elite players.

The "KC Swifties" flag football team does a team-hand stack with members of the U.S. Women's Flag National Team, from left, Laneah Bryan, Isabella Geraci, Madison Fulford, and Deliah Autry-Jones before a game against the Patriots at Jack R. Hammett Sports Complex in Costa Mesa on Friday, March 20, 2026. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG) — The “KC Swifties” flag football team does a team-hand stack with members of the U.S. Women’s Flag National Team, from left, Laneah Bryan, Isabella Geraci, Madison Fulford, and Deliah Autry-Jones before a game against the Patriots at Jack R. Hammett Sports Complex in Costa Mesa on Friday, March 20, 2026. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

“I love the glitter,” Geraci told the players looking up at the four.

Bryan talked about growing up playing basketball because there were no football teams for girls.

“So this is super cool you guys are doing this,” she said.

Fulford talked about running track growing up, skills that now translate to football, adding, “I make my money by running far and catching the ball.”

“Me too!” one of the girls exclaimed.

And like the young girls throwing touchdown passes, pulling flags and running into the endzone, their success all started as a dream.

Geraci said she played tackle football with the boys while growing up in Ohio, first falling in love with the sport watching NFL on TV. When she asked if she could play when she was 7, her parents looked up the rule book and there wasn’t anything about girls not being allowed.

“So I played in my local league,” she said, joining a boys’ tackle team at age 9 and through her teen years.

“My coaches were great. My teammates were great, super accepting of me, never treated me any different,” Geraci said. “It was an awesome team.”

Now 25, she’ll be with the women during the LA28 Olympics, the first-ever showcase of flag football in the games.

She looked around at the hundreds of little girls on the football field Friday night, marveling at the sight.

“This is literally the craziest thing,” Geraci said. “Growing up and not having this and seeing it now is so awesome.”

Autry-Jones played basketball and volleyball before finding her passion for football.

“I’m sure a lot of people would love to be in our position, so that makes us very grateful and honored, but I think even more than that, it’s exciting to see these kids, girls, get exposed to sports so early on, because a lot of us didn’t have that growing up,” Autry-Jones said. “So that feels like hope. To reach these dreams, and you’re reaching them a lot earlier than we did.”

The ultimate goal is teaching their daughters that they can do anything and feel empowered, Krysn Maher said, even win at a sport that not long ago didn’t have opportunities for them to play.

Their story is inspiring others, picked up and going viral on the Kelce Brothers fan page, and then featured on the “Today Show.”

Their dream, other than clinching the championship this season, is that Taylor Swift will simply know about them.

“She’s strong and she’s always on my side,” Hayden Maher said of Swift. “I think of her, she’s literally my soulmate.”

Because they are too young for phones, they keep asking their moms about their KC Swifties Instagram page: “Has she liked it yet!??”

Krystn Maher chuckles, not wanting to discourage them. But who knows, maybe their dream one day will come true.

“They just want a heart,” she said, knowing it’s unlikely but hoping somehow Swift will hear about the little girl football players playing in her honor, inspired by her songs. “I want them to keep aiming big.”

For the KC Swifties, girls empowerment and fun win flag football games Orange County Register

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