Arvada West High School’s quarterback Saylor Swanson (18) holds the ball during the championship game at Centura Health Training Center on Saturday, October 14, 2023 in Englewood, Colorado. The Denver Broncos hosted the Broncos Girls High School Flag Football tournament bringing together Denver Public Schools, Cherry Creek Schools and Jeffco High Schools to compete for the championship title. (Rebecca Slezak/ Special to The Denver Post)
Patrick Simpson saw the progress and the possibility unfolding right in front of him.
The Jeffco Public Schools executive director for athletics was watching the first year of the state’s girls flag football pilot program conclude in late 2022 and it looked unrecognizable. In a good way.
When the first pilot season started, he said, many games resembled the old playground game “500,” where one kid throws the ball up and a group of others jostle to catch it.
Only weeks later, Simpson marveled at the budding intricacy with which teams operated.
“There’s audibles at the line of scrimmage,” he said. “Defenses are stemming and showing one thing and then backing out of it right before the play. Arvada West, their coach was sending in multiple plays to the quarterback, who was then making the decision about what play to run.
“Just unbelievable, in six weeks, what it turned into. Seeing that all unfold is something I’ll never forget.”
The past two years have been full of that sense of acceleration, excitement and wonder for those involved with bringing girls flag football from brainchild through a two-year pilot program to Colorado High School Activities Association-sanctioned varsity sport.
Here’s another realization Simpson shares with many involved in the process: It’s difficult to know how it would have gone had it not been for the support of the Denver Broncos. In particular, the far-from-the-spotlight work of director of youth and high school football Bobby Mestas and vice president of community impact Allie Engelken. Both played instrumental roles in setting the stage for 65 girls teams to take the field this fall for the sport’s inaugural official season.
“I would say it to anybody: Without Bobby and Allie, I don’t know if this happens,” Simpson said. “It definitely doesn’t happen in the time it did.”
Building and flying the plane
Girls flag football didn’t get to this point overnight, of course.
It’s now been nearly three years since Mestas first reached out to Simpson and a small group of athletic directors in the area, including Larry Bull at Cherry Creek and Kevin Bendjy at Denver Public Schools. Even longer since he and Engelken began talking in 2018 and ’19 about what might be possible with support from the NFL and others.
“But then it really didn’t really start to pick up steam until late 2021,” Mestas told The Post. “That’s when we finally had a pretty detailed, deep conversation with some athletic directors.”
Since then, the group has been off and running.
The Broncos Foundation has contributed more than $700,000 to the cause since 2022. It’s organized and funded partners for coaches training, uniforms, referees and other guidance. The pilot program started with 25 teams in 2022 and doubled in 2023.
“I feel like (the schools) did a lot of high-level support and understanding how it works, but once the parameters were in place, Bobby and the team just took it,” Simpson said. “I was blown away with the passion for it and the time and the energy was super impressive. But Bobby’s communication was off the charts. We were connecting a lot of dots on the fly with a lot of new players and we were truly building the plane as we were flying it.
“To make it so seamless, honestly, was a byproduct of how great a communicator and listener Bobby is.”
Together they developed a rulebook on the fly. They adjusted it week-by-week, sometimes not that long before games started. The freedom to experiment, fail and adjust, Engelken said, is part of what allowed the pilot program to jump so far from Year 1 to Year 2.
“The thing that surprised me the most is even during the piloting process the majority of our schools always treated girls flag like a varsity, top-level sport,” Mestas said. “I think that’s why they had so much success from start to finish is it was never treated like a secondary, intramural pilot sport.”
New ground
All the while, the Broncos broke new ground, too. The Denver Broncos Foundation fully funded the pilot program but also set out to gather data and research, too.
Engelken, who is the foundation’s executive director, said the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group was interested in the project from the time they arrived in August 2022.
“I don’t think we could have done what we did in the sanctioning process without the support of the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group,” she said. “We were committed to the 2022 season before the ownership transition. Carrie (Walton-Penner) serving as the foundation’s board chair and Greg Penner and Rob Walton also serving on the board of directors for the foundation, girls flag football was one of the first things we talked about. It was one of (president) Damani Leech’s first community appearances was driving out to a jamboree at Cherry Creek to see everything in action.
“Knowing it was a priority from the very beginning from ownership allowed us to have the resources and support needed to grow it even in its second year.”
The foundation partnered with Children’s Hospital Colorado on an extensive research project, too, sensing an opportunity to follow a new sport and measure its impact among youth in the state. Some of the top-line numbers are staggering and speak to the potential for girls flag.
“Forty percent of teen girls are not actively participating in a sport, and we know that when girls reach 14 they’re more likely to drop out of athletics overall across the board,” Engelken said, noting also that 51% of girls who played flag in the 2023 pilot season weren’t going to play another sport. “So if we can engage girls in a high school sport that’s new and exciting and they can be part of building something in the state, we really feel like that gave us the momentum to have the success we had.”
Simpson said the ability to harness that kind of data — and more still being analyzed — helps schools understand the benefits, pain points and potential paths forward in a way that intuition doesn’t always fully capture.
“That was pretty powerful to really see it,” Simpson said.
Bronco of the Year
Mestas prefers sports talk radio over podcasts or audiobooks in the car.
He’s almost certainly heard too many hot takes over the past three years.
“We did our best to put this together and … it was just over 2,200 miles,” Mestas said of his flag football quest. “That includes dropping equipment off at jamborees, it’s driving to different meetings, visiting schools to drop equipment and uniforms, traveling to the jamborees itself, driving to Pueblo for a district athletic director outreach meeting.
“We’re probably missing some out there, but that was our rough penciled-in tally at the end of the day.”
That only begins to illustrate how thoroughly flag football has dominated Mestas’ professional life.
“In 2023 alone, Bobby scheduled and coordinated 680 girls flag football games,” Engelken said. “That includes — I’m not exaggerating — the field reservation and rentals. That includes lining the fields and coning the fields. Coordinating athletic directors and officials. Sending out the schedules to all of the teams. Reminding the teams to show up and being on-site at every single one of them.
“That’s like a zillion hours of flag football.”
And countless hours in conference rooms and on Zoom calls, too. Mestas, Engelken and company have also presented at meetings, rallied athletic directors, helped guide the schools — and took guidance from them, too — through what Mestas described as “a long and daunting and arduous process” toward sanctioning. That all culminated in April with a 57-9 vote of CHSAA’s Legislative Council to make Colorado the 11th state with girls flag as a varsity sport.
“Allie and I have talked over the past couple of months about how, from a work perspective, this is really a once-in-a-lifetime project,” Mestas said. “It’s by far the most rewarding thing I’ve ever had the chance to work on. By a mile. And this doesn’t happen without the support of so many others and the buy-in from so many others.
“Such a big, team group effort that I was just lucky to be a part of.”
Not long after the sanctioning became official, Mestas, who has worked for the club since 2002, was named Bronco of the Year at the organization’s annual spring honors event.
“Bobby has been great, particularly in two things: I think one the operation of it as a pilot program,” Leech told The Post. “The first flag jamboree that I went to was at Cherry Creek High School on a Saturday morning, and Bobby’s out there running it. So it’s the hours and also he’s helping write the rulebook and putting together all of these jamborees and tournaments operationally and putting in a lot of sweat equity.”
Mestas, a Denver and Highlands Ranch native, reflexively downplays any credit he gets, first joking that the award was “a nasty rumor” and then talking only about anybody else’s contribution.
Those people, though, always point back to him.
“I’ve had a lot of respect for Bobby for a long time, but getting the chance to really work with him, I truly enjoyed that and learned a ton,” Simpson said. “Equally significant is Allie. Her ability to listen, to connect dots and learn more about the foundation. How impactful the Broncos Foundation is. I don’t know if our community understands — I know I didn’t, for sure — how vast that impact is.”
Bright future
Simpson has a 6-year-old daughter who loves throwing the football around.
Starting this fall, she’s got a pathway to playing flag all the way through high school.
By the time she gets there, it’ll be easy to imagine a generation that grows up wanting to play. That maybe fell in love with the game watching it in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Or watching Arvada West or Cherry Creek girls play in the coming years.
Girls flag football is here. Just as exciting, though, is the possibility on the horizon.
“In 14 seasons in the NFL, this is hands down one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences that I’ve been a part of,” said Engelken, a former lacrosse player at the University of Ohio. “As a former student-athlete, working in a professional sports environment that is predominantly male-dominated, having an opportunity for girls is special to be a part of today. And 10 years from now, sitting in the stands at a state championship game and knowing that we had a hand in that is very fulfilling.”
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