NFL
Flag football has seen a rapid recent expansion. It’s even been approved to be included in both the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Naturally, this is all great news for the NFL as it strives to maximize football’s worldwide exposure.
To that end, the league has created a new executive position: vice president, head of flag football. On Tuesday, the NFL announced it has hired Stephanie Kwok, a Stanford alumnus and Harvard Business School graduate, to this new role overseeing flag football.
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“Stephanie brings a passion to exponentially expand the game that has taken the sports world by storm and provides opportunity for all girls, boys, men and women to experience the fun and values of football,” NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent said in a statement.
The league sees itself amid a prime opportunity to continue growing football beyond its traditional gridiron tackling form.
That much was clear at the recent NFL annual meeting, during which former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young — who recently helped coach his daughters’ first-year girls flag football team at Menlo School alongside his former 49ers teammate John Paye — headlined a panel discussion centered around the sport’s introduction at the 2028 Olympics.
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Now, it’s Kwok’s job to ensure flag football continues building momentum.
“Overall, it’s just about getting more people playing and getting more opportunities to everyone at every level, making sure it doesn’t stop at just kids,” Kwok said on a Zoom call Monday. “If girls want to continue playing competitively in high school, in college, and now the Olympics, too — that’s all of a sudden something you can see as a real aspiration. It’s about growing the game. There’s so much interest and enthusiasm for it.
“Because it’s such an accessible sport. It’s such an opportunity to be able to have more people deeply participate in it and connect with football. Watching a game with your family and friends is an amazing experience in and of itself. But what are other ways that people can participate? How can more people experience playing football in other countries? I think flag football provides a really amazing way for people to be able to do that.”
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Kwok, a 2008 graduate of Stanford, first developed a strong affinity for football when she was a student there and in three subsequent years living in nearby San Francisco. Her parents had both immigrated from Hong Kong. Her mother and father, Margaret and Daniel, attended Cal and Stanford, respectively.
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One of their first dates came at a Big Game, the annual meeting of those two archrivals.
Kwok was born and raised in New York City after her father moved the family there for work. Her return to the West Coast for college coincided with Stanford’s rise to national prominence under former coach Jim Harbaugh, who later took the 49ers job and then the Michigan job before recently returning to the NFL to head the Los Angeles Chargers.
Kwok vividly remembers Stanford’s 24-23 upset victory over USC in 2007, a game the Cardinal entered as 41-point underdogs.
“To me, that is a defining memory from college,” Kwok said. “Remembering that win, remembering everyone in the Quad celebrating afterward.”
But at that time, football wasn’t yet an option for Kwok — who was on Stanford’s varsity squash team — to play herself. Unlike now, colleges didn’t offer an organized version of the flag game (the NAIA began offering women’s flag football in 2021 with the NFL’s backing).
The closest Kwok got was through club rugby, which she played during her first year on campus.
“You could see that craving for something like football,” Kwok said. “Now, there are more opportunities to play flag football in college. If there were that opportunity, that’s hands down what I would have done.”
Once Kwok enrolled in Harvard Business School three years later, flag football was an official option. Kwok became the commissioner for the school’s intramural sports program, in which she played flag football, and she carried her passion for it to post-grad life in New York.
Outside work hours, Kwok managed to play recreationally for up to five teams at a time over the past decade. She held jobs with the New York Knicks and Rangers, FanDuel and then Reforge, a career development company.
Now, Kwok enters this opportunity with the NFL. It comes about 15 years after she first applied to the league’s Rotational Program as a Stanford undergrad.
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“I’ve had this hope about working in the NFL, so it’s really this full-circle moment,” Kwok said. “It wasn’t then (with the Rotational Program), but it’s now.
“And now, it’s an even better time because there’s an opportunity to grow flag football, to grow this game that I specifically have been able to play that’s opened a lot of community connections and doors for me. So working at the NFL is obviously amazing, but being able to work on flag football and grow access to flag football, which is something I wish I had had when I was growing up — when I was a little girl choosing what sports to play — that’s a really special opportunity.”
(Photo: Gary McCullough / Associated Press)
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David Lombardi is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the San Francisco 49ers. David joined The Athletic after three years with ESPN, where he primarily covered college football. Follow David on Twitter @LombardiHimself
