If flag football advocate Tom Brady had gotten involved with women’s tackle football seven years ago, the founder and CEO of the Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC) says it wouldn’t have mattered.
“The product wasn’t where it needed to be,” Odessa Jenkins told Front Office Sports in an interview this week.
But as the 16-team professional women’s tackle football league prepares for its championship game to air on ESPN2 on June 21 as part of a new, multi-year deal with the network, Jenkins says they’d welcome him now: “Shout out to Tom Brady. We’re ready for your support now.”
That confidence comes on the heels of what Jenkins describes as the strongest regular season yet for the WNFC, which began play in 2019.
“This sport is still in the awareness phase,” she said. “But we had a great year. Our attendance was up 25 percent. We had a new team come into the league and blow away some of our regular season attendance numbers. They had almost 3,000 people at each of their games.”
That team, the Golden State Storm, was also the league’s top-performing franchise by revenue.
Other highlights from the WNFC’s 2026 season, as per Jenkins, include renewed league-level sponsorships with major brands like Adidas and Dove, individual players “getting more deals than ever,” and increased viewership on Victory+, a free, ad-supported streaming platform that serves as the league’s primary distribution channel. (Victory+ is also the exclusive home of the NWSL’s Sunday Night Soccer.)
“I think there’s a formula now,” Jenkins told FOS, “and we’re just looking to continue to accelerate it.”
Acceleration will require capital. The WNFC is preparing for a Series A fundraising round this summer and is already in “advanced discussions” with potential lead investors. A key objective of the raise is to eliminate pay-to-play across the WNFC ecosystem, which includes flag football and youth programs.
When asked about competing for capital with the many emerging sports and upstart leagues entering the market, Jenkins—a veteran of the startup world before launching the WNFC—demurred.
“Every two days [in Silicon Valley], a new tech company is getting a $10 million seed for an idea for a product that hasn’t even hit the market yet,” she said. “There is so much capital to be deployed … I don’t see any limitation to how big our investment can be.”
And investors aren’t the only audience Jenkins is courting.
NFL fans are the WNFC’s second-highest-grossing demographic after women ages 22 to 40, she told FOS. That overlap makes the league’s new deal with ESPN—which assumed ownership of NFL Network earlier this year—especially promising.
“We’ve been aggressive since first engaging ESPN in 2025 about getting more coverage,” Jenkins said. “They’ve shown interest in it, and with their relationship now with NFL Network, I think there’s a lot more storytelling to be done there.”
The league is also prioritizing adding recognizable names to the fold over rapid franchise expansion.
“It might not be sexy, right? People want a team on the moon,” Jenkins said. “But I’d rather have the likes of Tom Brady or another great athlete or celebrity behind our existing teams.”
Jenkins went on to tease that “more of these well-known, highly-resourced individuals” will be involved with the WNFC at both the team and league levels in 2027.
For now, her focus is on delivering a strong audience for Sunday’s championship game. In its debut on ESPN2 last year, the WNFC championship game reached 954,000 unique viewers nationwide. This year, Jenkins said, “the goal is a million.”
