Steve Young Helps Foster California’s Flag Football ‘Explosion’

A three-time Super Bowl champion with the San Francisco 49ers, quarterback Steve Young won two NFL Most Valuable Player Awards and threw for more than 33,000 yards in his 15-year career, which was punctuated by his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in 2005.

Remembered as one of the most efficient passers of all time, Young led the league in passer rating in six of seven seasons from 1991 to 1997, and still holds the fourth-highest career rating (96.8) among retired quarterbacks, behind Tony Romo, Tom Brady and Drew Brees. He posted a 64.3 percent completion percentage for his career and reached peak accuracy (70.3 percent) during his otherworldly 1994 season, when he also led the league in passing touchdowns (35), won his second MVP award, and guided the 49ers to a Super Bowl championship. In that Super Bowl victory, Young threw six touchdown passes, which still stands as a record for football’s grandest stage. On October 5, 2008, the seven-time Pro Bowler and four-time NFL All-Pro had his iconic No. 8 jersey retired by the 49ers.

Prior to entering the professional ranks, Young starred at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he followed up his 1982 Western Athletic Conference Offensive Player of the Year honor with an outstanding senior year that saw him named a unanimous All-American, Davey O’Brien National Quarterback Award winner, and runner-up for the Heisman Trophy.

Young’s prep years were spent at Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, where he excelled as a multi-sport athlete. In addition to earning Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference All-State honors as a quarterback and leading Greenwich to a state championship runner-up finish in 1979, Young averaged 15 points per game on the basketball court and recorded a .384 batting average and a 5-1 record as a center fielder and pitcher on the baseball team.

Following the California Interscholastic Federation’s (CIF) announcement that it would sanction girls flag football for the 2023- 24 school year, Young volunteered to be an assistant coach for the team at Menlo School, where he coached his daughters, Summer, a senior, and Laila, a freshman, under head coach and former 49ers teammate, John Paye.

Below are some of Young’s thoughts on the excitement surrounding girls flag in California, his first coaching season at Menlo, and his outlook on the sport’s future growth.

Question: Had you heard much about the NFL’s efforts to grow high school girls flag football prior to finding out that Menlo School was going to have a CIF-sanctioned team?

Young: “In the background, I’d heard that there was an effort to try to get girls playing flag football, but I didn’t ever connect (it) with my two girls, who were playing all kinds of sports, that it would be in the high schools. I guess I thought it would always be on the periphery. It was in the spring when California said, ‘we’re going to make it a varsity sport’ – that’s where it exploded in my house. Both of my girls were like, ‘we can’t wait to play!’”

Question: Between you and your daughters, who was interested first?

Young: “My two boys didn’t really play sports, so football was not in our house. It was a previous life (for me), but it just wasn’t around much. If I was watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, it was probably me on my phone, cooking lunch. It just wasn’t the main event. And so, I got used to that. I had other outlets for talking about football – it wasn’t a big deal. So, I hadn’t thought much about (flag football). And then it was in the summertime, after (Laila and Summer) both decided to play that the (head) coach, my old friend, John Paye, called me and said, ‘hey, do you want to come over and help a little bit?’ And the girls were like, ‘yeah, come on, dad!’”

Question: What were those first few practices like for you?

Young: “Immediately, I was shocked – maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was – I was shocked by the emotion I felt from the girls at the idea that they now can play. They can play a sport they’ve been watching their brothers play, (a sport) the whole world watches. And now they’re playing it, and you could feel that ‘WOW’ from them. The other thing I thought was, ‘man, they really don’t know the game.’ So, what was fun for me was I had four girls who were willing; they had no idea how to throw a football, but they were willing to jump in the middle and be the focal point of the sport. They asked me, ‘how do we hold the ball?’ And I thought, ‘huh, I haven’t thought about that since I was growing up, looking up at the poster on my wall of Roger Staubach on the Dallas Cowboys.’ And then it was, ‘well, how do I throw it?’ And I had to go back and think about how you throw a football, and I hadn’t thought about that in forever. So, that first day I went home, and I was like, ‘man, I just walked into something that was very engaging.’ And so, from then on it was, every day, ‘what can I teach?’ ‘How can I help?’ And the thing about our girls is, they paid attention. You tell them, and you describe a step in the choreography of the offense, they are on it. And they got better almost daily.”

Question: How did your first season coaching flag football compare with your past experiences playing tackle football?

Young: “In my heart, I’m coaching the 1994 49ers offense. We’re running the (same) plays, we’re signaling the same way. It’s seven-on-seven, but the dynamics of trying to complete (passes) and score touchdowns are very, very similar in my heart. We’re playing football, so anyone who says, ‘well, it’s not real football,’ I get that, that’s fine. There’s truth to that, but there’s also a lot that’s not true. When I’m coaching with these girls, I feel like I’m coaching football, absolutely. It’s resonant to how I played it. Maybe as a defensive lineman you can say this isn’t football, that’s fine. But as a quarterback, this is football.”

Question: So, when Dan Pompei wrote in his article for The Athletic that “the Menlo playbook is the (former 49ers head coach) Bill Walsh playbook,” he’s not exaggerating at all, is he?

Young: “Oh no, it’s the same. We run the exact routes; we signal them the exact same way. John and I were, like, ‘okay, how did we signal ‘dragon’? Oh, yeah, that was it.’ And then, ‘how did we signal ‘dancer’? Oh, yeah, that’s it.’ It was a one-to-one relationship. There was no adaptation. Well, the only adaptation was possibly that you knew you were going to get rushed and that you wouldn’t have much time to throw, so you had to figure out how to make sure the routes were going to work because there’s no protection. But once they understood that the plays are designed to influence the defense – to fool them, to cause them grief – and that the exactness and the nuances of what they were doing was going to affect the players on the defense, they just took to it. Like, ‘how do we trick them?’ And then they started talking to each other – ‘hey, look, you should come behind me, and then I’ll come this way.’ And you could see that they had ingested it all and were now spitting out all these incredible ideas on how to do it better.”

Question: What other things stood out to you as highlights from this season?

Young: “Just their joy. About three weeks in, I asked three or four of the girls, ‘how do you like football?’ (And they said,) ‘it’s my favorite sport! This is my favorite sport I’ve ever played!’ And that wasn’t because I was there or because it was new. It was genuinely because it was their favorite sport to play. And then, the first game we had, there were four elderly women sitting up in the stands. And my wife was there, and she went over to them and she’s like, ‘(which players) do you know?’ And they said, ‘we don’t know anybody. We just heard that girls were playing football, and we dreamed about that when we were younger, and now it’s happening and we have to witness it.’ And that part of it, along with the number of girls who now love playing football, it makes you think, ‘why did we not do this a long time ago?’ But it’s been an amazing experience for me, teaching it from the ground up. Watching (the quarterbacks) learn how to see the entire field and have that emerge for them like, ‘coach, I can see that route now!’ That was very meaningful for me. And when the season was over, the last practice, we all kind of gathered up and I was emotional. They were emotional, like, they didn’t want it to end. They’re just going to get better and better and better, but this first time was super special. And then to have my girls standing there with me was almost too much, at times. It hit me in a very soft spot.”

Question: You also took the Menlo team to a 49ers game in September where they got to meet NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. What was it like to accompany them as they took in that experience?

Young: “It was fun. It was connecting other parts of my life. As I said, in my home, football doesn’t run the show, and I don’t go to many 49er games because no one wants to go with me. And so, to have my girls say, ‘I want to go to a 49er game’ and have them all there watching, asking me questions, was great. ‘There it is! That’s that route that you talked about!’ Or ‘what’s a fair catch? Explain fair catch.’ The things that you don’t ever think about (anymore), but they have to be learned. But to be there with Roger Goodell and take a picture with the commissioner of the NFL with our girls flag football team, yeah, it was a connectivity that I hadn’t felt in a long time.”

Question: Flag is now sanctioned by high school activities associations in eight states, with many more conducting pilot programs. It will officially become an Olympic sport at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. What do you think the ultimate impact of flag football can be as it continues to grow nationwide?

Young: “Well, (men) are going to have flag in the Olympics, so I think that’ll be explosive as well, because the dream of being in the Olympics is going to draw a lot of people to it. Even my daughters are thinking, ‘oh my gosh, the ’28 Olympics, is this possible (for us to play?) So, I think what’s going to happen with the Olympics is there’s going to be a whole theme with the unique parts of flag football that are really fun, much like the game that we see as tackle football. Other than the center, everyone else is a receiver. There’s no blocking, and there’s just somebody rushing from seven yards deep. And so, you have so much vulnerability on offense and defense and it just creates all kinds of fun, interesting plays and dynamics and it’s awesome. And for anyone who’s going to start playing – and there’s a whole nation that’s going to start playing this – I hope that you have as much joy as I did with this team because it was super special.”