Diana Flores becomes first flag football player in Pro Football Hall of Fame

Diana Flores became the first flag football player with artifacts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame when the NFL added her Run With It jersey and a football signed by Billie Jean King and Sauce Gardner to the collection in Canton, Ohio. The move turned a Super Bowl commercial into a permanent piece of football history and gave flag football a place inside the game’s most established archive.

The NFL announced the honor on May 24, 2023 as part of a commemoration of Run With It, the league’s Emmy-winning Super Bowl LVII spot. A Pro Football Hall of Fame video posted on May 30 repeated the same milestone: Flores was now the first flag football player with artifacts in the Hall. That distinction matters because the Hall does not preserve objects for novelty. It preserves the items it believes will still define the sport decades later.

Flores’ inclusion tied flag football to both the NFL’s current marketing machine and the sport’s international rise. The NFL identified her as the quarterback of Mexico’s women’s national flag football team, and she had already helped Mexico win gold at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. That combination, elite player and global ambassador, is what made her the face of Run With It when it aired during Super Bowl LVII on February 12, 2023.

The objects themselves carry the story. Flores’ jersey from the commercial is not just a costume from a campaign. In the Hall, it becomes proof that flag football had moved from promotional content to preserved history. The signed football adds another layer: Billie Jean King connects the moment to the wider history of women’s sports and gender equity, while Sauce Gardner, then with the New York Jets, links the artifact to the modern NFL player ecosystem that helped push the campaign into the mainstream.

The Hall recognition also came as the sport kept stacking institutional milestones. The International Olympic Committee approved flag football for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics in October 2023, and LA28 has said the sport will make its Olympic debut with both men’s and women’s events. That gave Flores’ Hall of Fame entry added weight: the sport was not only being celebrated in pro football culture, it was being positioned for the Olympic stage.

IFAF’s women’s flag football history notes that the sport lacked a central organization until 1995, a reminder of how recent its formal structure really is. Flores, now described by the NFL and related profiles as a global ambassador for both the NFL and IFAF, has become one of the clearest faces of that rapid rise. The Hall of Fame artifacts made the point in the sharpest way possible: flag football is now being saved alongside football’s canon, not outside it.