The future (of football) in Panama is female

By Eamonn Ryan

PANAMA CITY, Panama – As the Brader Raiders move from their tent to the near sideline of CopaAmerica Field, a multipurpose football and soccer pitch tucked between towering high rises and shopping plazas, the stands behind their bench begin to fill with parents, friends and children. This is just another Saturday for the girls as they warm up by tossing a football back and forth, running routes and preparing for 40 minutes of sun-soaked play. 

The team of 28 high school girls takes on other private schools in the Costa del Este area – which is just north of the central section of Panama City – as well as a team of all Panama City public schools. The parents support the league through sponsorships and former football players like head coach Dennis Allen come back to help coach.

“The women and kids really like American flag football … just look at [the stands]; all the parents. Friends come, it’s a family trip for the weekends,” says Romeo Coronado, who has been the commissioner of the 22-team league for the past three years. 

In their matchup with rival Academia Interamericana de Panama, the Raiders lined up with one of the most talented offenses in the league, boasting last year’s most valuable player, Ana Patricia Vincensini, at wide receiver and defensive back. Also there is quarterback Claudia Medina, who ranks first in passing yards with 872 in five games, and receiver Natalia Hernández, who is tall, muscular and second on the team in receiving yards. With athletes this impressive, Allen understands his team is special and could send players to the next level of flag football – which for some means fully funded collegiate play in the U.S.

“The thing with varsity is, like, they feel right now, they have the best team in the league,” he says. “Like they have a really good team in every position. They have really good stars.” 

In Panama, flag football is booming. There are leagues for students, leagues for adults and even leagues for mothers who must prove they have children. A combination of impressive wins on the world stage, a community that centers around superstar players and a possible future for student-athletics in the United States has created a perfect environment for the growth of flag football as a viable sport in the country. 

“For the girls, the benefits of it are a new way to do sports, especially because before this it was only soccer or basketball,” says Wilfredo Smith, the community manager of the Kiwanis Football League and commissioner of the men’s league.

The league’s top team is the Raiders, who took on rivals the Fighting Owls on May 21. With a deep lineup of talented players, a long list of impressive stats and even an MVP race, it’s easy for superstars like Vincensini to become the face of the league, similar to how U.S.-based high school basketball players are scouted and gain a following.

Vincensini was inspired by the Panamanian player Leslie Del Cid, who won the 2016 International Flag Football Championship for Panama.

“She’s like the top player here in Panama. She plays defense, she plays offense,” Vincensini says. “So, in the world championship in 2018 in Panama, I came with my mom and I was like, ‘Mom, I want to be like her.’  So she was my inspiration.”

Now, she’s the one all the kids look up to.

“They admire her,” Allen says with a smile. “These girls see all of [the stars], but especially Vincensini, because she’s in that school; they see them like idols.” 

With superstars, a competitive balance and national sponsors like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Banco Nacional and Gatorade, the league is a serious part of the community surrounding CopaAirlines Field and the friends and family who gather to take in the efforts of the girls on the gridiron.

“The schools support maybe soccer and maybe basketball and flag football. And that’s it. So they don’t have this spectrum of sports they can choose from,” Allen says. “So in flag, we have a lot of support. They stream the games either on YouTube or on the TV.”

Their rules, their game

Flies start to swarm around the turf at CopaAirlines Field and as dusk quickly settles in, Allen watches his team run a trick play. Vincensini, a 5-foot-10 high school senior who is quick and uses her size to gain an advantage on smaller opponents, is lined up next to Medina and takes a lateral toss from her quarterback before firing a pass downfield to Hernández.

It’s incomplete and Allen frustratedly exclaims “¡Natalia!,” but quickly loses his snappiness and tells the team to run it again. He’s not too concerned about problems in practice. His team is first in the varsity division and has the best shot since their founding to win the championship.

After the United States brought American football to the Panama Canal zone in the 1970s, it began spreading across the country. Smith played in the 1990s for the Panamanian national team, traveling to the United States to compete in tournaments. 

Women’s leagues began in the ‘90s in Panama and incorporated flag football into the national sports landscape before men did. Leagues for youth began in 2003, and the Kiwanis rolled out their first-ever women’s flag youth league at the junior varsity level in 2015, adding varsity and mini levels the year after.

“In Panama, too many people follow the NFL and yeah and you know everybody wants to play,” Coronado says.

Smith has been the community manager of the league for the past six seasons, posting to the @kiwanisfootball account with score updates, as well as responding to inquiries and updating the league’s website, which keeps standings and statistics for the teams. 

“Since they already had the contact football teams, they started with the same teams from contact football,” Smith says. “So, many girls already played flag but they didn’t have like a school team to play for.”

Allen has seen the rise of the game from the point of a coach. According to the former Panamanian national team player who placed third at the 2021 Flag Football World Championships this past December, the rise of “taquillados” – people who post on social media in an influencer-like fashion – has contributed to an increase in women’s flag football teams.

“They started playing because they wanted to have the uniform and the flags and whatever,” Allen says. “There were a lot of girls that didn’t have a sport. They just wanted to play something, and they started with that.”

Two key moments in Panamanian women’s flag football history help to define the explosion in the sport. In 2016, the Panama women’s national team won the International Federation of American Football Flag World Championships, beating Austria 34-22, and in 2018 the Panamanians hosted the IFAF Flag World Championships, broadcasting every game and playing at both CopaAirlines Field and the Estadio de Marácana in Panama City.

The latter event, which Vincensini attended, heavily influenced her drive to be a better football player and eventually play for her country.

“I want to be in the women’s national team events, and I want to go to college and play for my country,” she says.

In February 2022, she was able to. She was selected for the Panamanian National U17 Flag team to travel to the United States and play against some of the best youth competition in the world at the NFL’s Pro Bowl in Las Vegas. In a hard-fought final game, Panama came out on top, taking down a Texas-based team in Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

“We were so happy because we felt like we did what we had to do and everyone in our country was going to be happy about it,” Vincensini said.

Fast forward a few months and Vincensini is back in Panama City, spending her time as a typical high school senior in the first part of her school year. 

With her friends on the team and a group of solid players such as Earle and Medina, the Raiders have put a special team together. Multiple players even started to practice outside of the regular team sessions to improve after last year’s defeat in the championship game. 

“We started getting better as a team and as individuals and now we are taking it very seriously,” Medina says.

A full ride to catch

It’s a Thursday afternoon, which means there is no practice for the varsity team today. The girls could be relaxing at home or spending time with friends, but you won’t find Vincensini or Earle sitting in their air-conditioned homes. Instead, they’re out in Parque Felipe Motta, with cones set out in a small rectangle.

As children practice the basics of football and dogs roam around, these two are running routes in between the cones with Allen firing pass after pass into their hands. Their feet squelch in the mud as they prepare for their next game. Allen has been running private training sessions with Vincensini for almost a year and a half, while Earle began working with him earlier this year.

“With my coach, it’s really been amazing because I can go up to him in a practice and say I want to get this better. And he’ll be like, ‘OK, let’s work on that,’” Earle says. “And of course, it’s hard, but it all shows up in the game at the end of the day.”

Allen isn’t letting the girls off easy. If they want to train, they’ll have to work for it. Vincensini is holding two weights in her hands, making it harder to grip and catch the balls thrown by Allen. Earle is faced with the tall task of defending against her MVP-caliber teammate. This work pays off in games though, as the offensive players consistently know what each player is doing.

“We have a very good connection so if my friend here is like ‘Oh I’m going to run this route’ I know where I can adjust,” Earle says. “With Claudia [Medina] it’s going to be the best because she’s a very good receptor of information and she’s very empathetic.”

The girls aren’t necessarily working this hard just to train; there is another goal for the young Panamanians: a ticket to the United States.

Some are playing flag football because they know they have a chance at a scholarship in the United States – something that did not exist until 2020, when the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, an alternative to the NCAA for smaller schools, launched flag football and partnered with the NFL to give colleges a $5,000 stipend to start their teams.

There are currently 15 teams the NAIA’s women’s flag football division, all consisting of smaller schools in the southern, midwestern and western regions of the United States. Through this relatively new venture, girls playing in Panama have found a path to a less expensive or totally free education in the United States. 

So far, Vincensini has been offered scholarships at the University of Saint Mary in Kansas, Warner University in Florida, Hesston University in Kansas, Bryant and Stratton in Buffalo and Midland University in Nebraska, all of which she has posted on her football-based Instagram account, @ana23vincensini.

On the opposite side of Vincensini stands Earle, a 5-foot-10 receiver who can jump with Vincensini and works hard to defend the star. Earle is not here because of college or a life beyond high school football. She has her own reasons for putting in that extra effort.

“I want to do a good job representing my school and my country and I really love it,” Earle said. “I want to be great. I’ve been average all my life. I want to be great.”

For these players, this love of the game is all the drive they need. Allen knows they have that passion and want to be great because they love being great. He sees the future of his team and understands that after this season, he’ll be losing Vincensini to college. But more girls motivated to do the same will take her place for the same reason. 

As she packs up her muddy cleats and wipes dirt off her legs, Vincensini is not done for the day. She and Allen are headed back to practice for the middle school team. Much like the relationship between Vincensini and her idol, the younger girls hope their futures will follow a similar path.

“It’s surreal for me because I don’t see myself like that,” she said. “But it’s really cute when [the girls] tell me, ‘I wanna be like you.’”

For Medina, she is the perfect example of a student looking forward to what’s in front of her. A short quarterback with a strong arm, she was once just used to run the ball, but her potential as a quarterback has greatly increased as she has gotten stronger. While she isn’t sure about next steps, she knows she has it pretty good right now.

“I would like to play in the university, but I don’t know anything for sure now,” she says. “But [I] encourage the younger girls … to play the sport. It is a very beautiful sport. And I think that it grows you as a person and as an athlete.”