New flag football coach stresses team values on and off the field

Leilani Utupo has seen the Darwinian side of sports. Up close and too personal. Every time she looks at her ankle—the one with the torn ligament that wouldn't heal, the one that prompted a blood test that revealed she was a Type 1 diabetic—the lesson returns.

Give back. Build community. Construct a mind/body connection that can persevere through defeat and depression. And, most of all, pour a foundation of support that enables all of the above to thrive.

That torn ankle ligament ended Utupo's college basketball career at Colorado, brought her back to California and sent her on a roundabout path to where she is now: the newly minted flag football coach at Santiago Canyon College's newly minted flag football program. The Hawks begin play in the spring of 2027.

Utupo, meanwhile, busies herself with the details of building a program from scratch: assembling a staff, researching and reaching out to the many flag football programs sprouting like mushrooms across the region and building the offensive and defensive playbooks.

That's the basics, the paint-by-numbers part of the game. But Utupo wants you to know there is more to the game than the game. It is one of the many lessons she learned on her path from—deep breath—Colorado to Long Beach City College to Long Beach State, where she earned a bachelor's degree in communications, to coaching stints at Long Beach Millikan, Lakewood High School and Long Beach Poly, a year as an assistant at USC and, finally, SCC.

Have life experience, will travel.

"I was raised by a coach, my brother played the game, my husband played the game, and it was something that brought our family together," she said. "It's important that we provide that network, the camaraderie in the locker rooms to our players because the network outside of football is important to me.

"It's really important to me to see women who look like them, who have played sports and done things outside of sports: having children, supporting families. To win on the field is important to me, but it's more important to me they win at life. That definition is different for everyone, but showing them examples is super important to me."

Utupo is a good example to roll out. When she got back from Colorado, after losing her scholarship to injury, she realized the mental aspect of athletics was more important than anyone ever taught her. Inspired by the Las Vegas Raiders hiring Kelsey Martinez as the NFL's second female strength and conditioning coach, Utupo's first coaching position was as Millikan's strength and conditioning coach. When she met and married her husband, Justin, Utupo's real coaching odyssey began.

The first flag football stop was at Lakewood. That came after Utupo was hired as strength and conditioning coach, when then-athletic director Mike Wadley told her there was nobody better to coach the new flag football program.

"I think that he was right," Utupo said. "I have a pretty strong presence with the boys in tackle football. It's not easy to win over male athletes in a male-dominated sport, but I knew I put in the work over the years and knew that females were being introduced to the sport and the conversations we had for providing opportunities. That's what coaching is for me: providing opportunities, and I knew he wanted me to set an example for female athletes."

Utupo led Lakewood to a CIF quarterfinal playoff appearance during her two years there. Then, she followed her husband to Long Beach Poly, double-dipping again as the strength and conditioning coach. She set another example in 2024 when the Los Angeles Chargers named her Los Angeles County's All-Star Head Coach for the annual LA County-Orange County All-Star Game.

At every stop, including that one year as a USC assistant, where she grasped the business side of the game, Utupo's lessons about mental toughness meshed with her desire to build athletes who can learn something from every play. Because she remembers the lessons from that torn ankle ligament and where it led.

To where she is now. And there's a message in every moment.

"I tell my athletes that you should show up to the weight room like you are at church: humbled, but ready to serve," she said. "For church, you show up in your Sunday best. For the weight room, that means to be dressed like an athlete. The goal is to practice discipline, be in uniform and follow the structure.

"Practices are designed to be hard and difficult. They're built for them to fail. But there's a science behind that failure. We learn camaraderie. We learn character. We learn our mental breaking points and how to rebuild from there as a team and as an individual. Teaching those values is important not only on the field, but in life."

Compliments of OC Register & Brian Robin