You might remember Diana Flores from her popular commercial that aired during Super Bowl LVII in 2023. As she ran through a football stadium and then an entire city, the quarterback and captain of the Mexican national flag football team evaded the women and men trying to grab her flags. Flores leaped and spinned and jumped, her hips jutting side to side to escape each opponent, until finally she was joined on the street by a crew of other women football players. While that commercial raised the profile of both Flores and her sport, it also changed her life by bringing her in contact with a legendary figure in women’s sports.
Among those who made a cameo in the action-packed commercial was Billie Jean King. While King’s appearance in the ad was fleeting, the impression she made on Flores during filming was not.
“She became a friend and a mentor for me,” says Flores. “She’s guided me in this journey off the field to know what I need to know to represent athletes in the best way, and keep growing the game, and ask for what we deserve.”
Though King and Flores were born more than half a century apart, they have much in common. King’s career was defined by taking risks, such as starting the Virginia Slims Series for women in 1970, and defeating Bobby Riggs in the ballyhooed “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973.
Now, Flores is carrying on that pioneer spirit as the face of women’s flag football, which will make its Olympics debut in 2028. As the 28-year-old continues to power the sport’s historic growth ahead of the Los Angeles Summer Games, King’s Women’s Sports Foundation is set to honor Flores with its inaugural 2025 Game Changer Award. And Flores is also authoring a book—Flag Football for Dummies, releasing in January 2026—that aims to help break down the fundamentals of the game, including rules, strategies and more, through an approachable, illustrated guide.
Flores began playing flag football when she was just 8 years old, with the encouragement of her father, Luis Flores, who played tackle football in high school and college in Mexico City. One day her father noticed women training on a football field one day and immediately drove home, put his daughter in the car and brought her to their practice. The Mexico City team was made up of teenagers and young women, but their passion caught her attention. The young Flores was captivated by the way the players were throwing the ball, running and yelling on the field. When her father asked the women if his daughter could join the team, they said yes, and she became the youngest member.
“The adrenaline that the game has always brought me, since I was young, is one of the things that made me fall in love with the sport over and over again,” says Flores. She needed that enthusiasm because flag football tested your commitment in the sport’s fledgling days. She remembers her coaches asking team members to bring trash bags to practice so they could spend the first 15 minutes clearing garbage from the field. They rarely had their own gear. They used hand-me-down boy’s tackle football uniforms, often played on dirt fields or public parks or wherever they could find a patch of grass. And most of the time, Flores was the youngest, as the team had trouble recruiting players in those early days.
“I found that my motivation for showing up was for the girls that couldn’t, and for some of my teammates that started playing but had to stop playing flag because they stopped having the support of their parents,” Flores says. “As I grew up I realized this sport was giving me a lot of opportunities that other girls didn’t have. And all I could do was just do my best.”
At 16, Flores became the youngest player to compete in an international flag football tournament after she was named to the Mexican national team for the 2014 world championships. Two years later, she helped lead Mexico to a third-place finish at the worlds, and the nation has been a force ever since. Mexico won gold at the World Games in 2022 and 2025, both with Flores as captain.
“Those two gold medals have been some of the best and biggest accomplishments I have had with my team,” she says. “But off the field, to be an ambassador for the sport and have the opportunity to contribute to this movement of change and keep opening doors for the game, it’s one of the biggest blessings and accomplishments for me to be part of that.”
As an ambassador for flag football, Flores has officially worked with the NFL and the IOC to bring flag football to LA 2028, an Olympic-sized opportunity she knows will turn the tide for women’s football.
“I think that will forever be one of the biggest accomplishments I’ve had, because I know that transcends my role as an athlete on the field,” she says. “It just helped open this possibility for the next generations of flag football athletes to dream bigger than ever and have more opportunities in the future.”
Spoken like a true friend of Billie Jean King’s.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Mexico’s Diana Flores Is the Face of Flag Football You Need to Know .