Key West The Newspaper

by Anna Costello…….

Picture a diner in New York City, late night bleeds into early morning. 1970’s. Nighthawks. A group of young women having breakfast after a night out clubbing. Diane, 18 years old, blonde, tall, and slender asks the woman next to her at the counter if she’d like to play flag football. Women’s flag football.

“Yes”.

One by one the young women at the counter pop up…Can I play?

Can I play?

Can I play?

And so began the first women’s flag football team that was to blossom into the International Women’s Flag Football Association (IWFFA). What founder and president of the IWFFA Diane Beruldsen discovered was that women want to play flag football. And that flag football was more than a game. It was a path of discovery…finding the core strength of women joined in a common goal. A way for women and girls to learn teamwork and organizational skills that would stay with them to enhance whatever life journey they chose to take. A way to empower girls and women. “Hell yeah, we want to play”.

Diane recruits teams everywhere she goes and from places where most girls don’t have the opportunities they have in the USA. She’s started clinics from Scandinavia to Honduras and lot’s and lot’s of countries in between. In Honduras she traveled dirt roads to find feisty girls eager to have an outlet for their energy. In poor countries with a machismo attitude girls need strong female role models and opportunities in order to blossom. The IWFFA sponsors the teams there, giving them the equipment and uniforms for free. Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland were other successful destinations.

This October and November she’ll be in Guatemala and Cuba to train girls and women and form teams ready to compete in tournaments, uniting under one umbrella. For her trip to Cuba, she hopes to find sponsors who want to help link up with this island nation that is so close yet has been kept so far from the USA. As we loosen up the embargo left over from the cold war, sports teams are a great way to open up lines of understanding and communication.

How hard is it to go into a country where you only speak a bit of their language and start forming up teams? Diane makes it sound easy. Maybe it is for her as she’s been doing it since the 1980’s. That’s before social media made linking up with like minds pretty simple. In 1990 Diane moved to Key West and started a flag football league like she had in NYC. But there was no competition down here. So she initiated a tournament.

That tournament became the largest flag football tournament in the world.

She found a perfect match in sponsor Kelly McGillis. Throughout her career, Kelly has used her talent as an actor to do more than entertain. Her projects show a concern for women, for community, for reaching out and sharing. This coming year’s Kelly McGillis classic will be a very special celebration, with Kelly herself as grand marshal. Players will have a chance to meet her and hear her story. Kelly’s a strong, intelligent role model for young women today. She never got caught up in the Hollywood scene, although her movie Top Gun could have been the ticket to one blockbuster after another. She is a celebrated artist today, not fodder for celebrity gossip columns.

When the flag football teams converge from Europe and the Americas, it’s heavenly chaos in Key West. Women from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, as well as Germany and Belgium, from all across the USA, Canada and Mexico play and enjoy all that Key West has to offer with it’s unique natural habitats, clean public beaches, and tantalizing nightlife. It’s an amazing opportunity for girls and women to meet and play with other flag football players from different cultures.

Diane is now offering free training for girls in the Keys who want to play flag football and get in on the adventure.
They also need sponsors to keep this going. If you want this fabulous fun and healthy sport to continue, be a sponsor.

Call Diane at (305) 896-8678 / Email: [email protected] / for more information. www.iwffa.com