Florida A&M alum looks to win more gold at the Flag Football World Championships

During the day Florida A&M University alumna Deliah Autry is a pediatric physical therapist. After hours, the 29-year-old member of the U.S. women’s flag football national team can be found either coaching young girls who aspire to play the sport or working out as part of her training regimen.

In March, Autry made her fourth national team roster. In previous international competitions, she tallied two gold medals and one silver, and she will compete for another medal at this year’s International Federation of American Football (IFAF) Flag Football World Championships, which will start Tuesday in Finland.

The Tampa, Florida, native fell in love with flag football as a student at Robinson High School in her hometown. Florida became the first state to sanction girls flag football as a varsity high school sport in 2003. However, since none of the state’s colleges offered flag football as a varsity sport while Autry was in college several years ago, she continued playing on club and intramural teams.

When Autry attended Florida A&M from 2017 to 2020 for physical therapy school, she played on the Rattlers’ intramural flag football team. During her college application process historically Black colleges and universities weren’t discussed at her high school, she said, but attending Florida A&M was a welcome experience for her. 

“I just felt like I belonged there, and I felt super empowering being there,” Autry said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, they really don’t show you the glory of going to an HBCU.’ … I just felt so much more connected to myself and my family, my roots, by going there. So I always say it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

Autry said the experience of growing up helping her brother with his diabetes and being surrounded by other Black and minority future doctors at Florida A&M helped her learn how to care for the young patients she currently sees.

“It helps me advocate more for people, knowing that in our health care system, there’s already stereotypes of minorities that doctors might miss or vice versa, or just truly isn’t understood,” Autry said. “So I certainly feel like I can sympathize and understand and connect to people who go through these things. The pride in being able to represent minorities and come from a program of minorities and come from a minority program, I carry that with me every day.”

As a member of the club football team, Autry learned how to play multiple positions, setting the stage for her international women’s flag football career. 

Despite flag football not being a Division I collegiate sport, the road to making the women’s national team included playing in tournaments around the country and getting noticed by scouts and members of the Team USA flag football team. 

The international model of women’s flag football is five on five, with players often shifting between offensive and defensive roles. Autry has experience as a quarterback, wide receiver, defensive back and center. 

“That’s how she got on the team, with the fact that she could do multiple things,” said Christopher Lankford, a former head coach for the U.S. women’s national flag football team. “Her biggest strength is just that she plays multiple positions, but Deliah is also a person that’s going to study. She wants to be the best at all those positions.”

Autry’s younger brother, Darius, remembers the days of watching her study for physical therapy school and work out for flag football. Her family still supports her at most of her national team commitments after more than a decade of her playing the sport.

“She’s a smart player and a student of the game. It’s like watching her play chess out there. She knows what to do, when to be there and how to do it,” Darius Autry said. “She is one of the quickest, the shiftiest and the smartest out there, and she uses all her attributes in a way that makes her shine and be a presence and a force to be reckoned with while she’s on the field.”

He still raves about a touchdown Deliah caught in the back of the end zone at the World Games in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2022. He also remembers how their family’s support would always fuel his sister to play harder and aim higher.

“There’s not many brown girls out here doing what she does at this level. She’s one of the smaller girls on the team, and she’s also a doctor and has her own business and has her own kids camp,” Darius Autry said. “She does a lot of things to give back, and I think she just leads by example. There’s something about Deliah that they can relate to, inspiration, especially if you’re a young brown girl in the sport.”

Deliah Autry believes the game has given so much to her, and she loves passing on the knowledge she has learned over the years to younger players. 

“I feel like the sport is just so inclusive. For the most part, in my experience, you look at a team and it’s diverse because the thing about flag football is it’s a sport for everybody,” Autry said. “There’s a role, responsibility, position for everybody of every color. Flag football has become, like, a safe space for everybody.”

Autry describes herself as a perfectionist always focused on improvement. After making the national team roster for the first time in 2021 she was able to play without any fear, but as she continued progressing in her flag football career she faced a roadblock. It became harder mentally for her to compete, so she made a conscious effort to put just as much work into her mental health as her physical health to prepare for competitions.

She sees a mental health specialist once a week and said she is actively working to eliminate negative self-talk and focus on positive affirmations.

“At the end of the day, it’s about enjoying the experience. There are a very select few out of this entire country of people who get to play and represent your country,” Autry said. ”It’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment. You have to be able to enjoy the actual moment and literally play and react to what is happening right in that moment.”

Although Lankford is no longer the head coach of the national team, he still follows the program and can see the results of Autry’s shift in attitude.

“Her biggest growth now is the fact that she’s 100% confident in her abilities and that she also understands that she is really captain of that defensive team for the USA national team right now,” Lankford said. “She’s the one who really understands how everybody’s supposed to be lined up in teams that they’re playing against. She knows exactly what those teams like to do.”

Watching the Olympics earlier this month heightened Autry’s excitement for flag football’s future Olympic debut in 2028 in Los Angeles. 

Flag football’s inclusion in the Olympics showcases the growth of the sport, Autry said, and gives additional opportunities to young girls. 

“All of this is a direct correlation to how far [flag football] has come and how much buzz and excitement and hope and inspiration there is around the sport,” she said.

In the meantime Autry is focused on the upcoming international world championship. The U.S. national team completed training camp in early August and are now in Finland, where the U.S. team has won gold medals at the last two IFAF Flag Football World Championships.

“We’re all feeling very, very confident in our work, each other, our coaches and our system,” Autry said. “We’re super excited, and we know this is different than last year. We’re going to have a lot more competitive teams and see a lot more competition in the bigger stage, which is nerve-wracking. But I think our trust in each other and our relationship with each other is going to be what kind of carries us through the whole thing.”