Football legend Odessa “OJ” Jenkins, above, and Odessa Jenkins
when she played for the Panthers, below
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
Her record is unequalled. She’s the No. 1 woman running back in the world. And as a coach, her record stands at 91-5.
But she’s not just the best women’s full contact football player and coach in the world; Odessa Jenkins is also the founder and CEO of the Women’s National Football Conference.
That record beats anyone else in Dallas professional sports and is one we should be hearing more about, because Jenkins is also founder, owner and head coach of the Dallas Elite Spartans, a professional women’s tackle football team.
But rather than talk about all of her wins, I had to ask about those five games she lost.
“I’m human,” she said. “The other teams played better than us those days. I got out-coached.”
But don’t expect that to happen on Saturday, June 21, when the Elite Spartans play the Washington Prodigy for the WNFC IX Championship Cup at The Star in Frisco. Jenkins’ Dallas team has won the cup each year.
The game will be broadcast on ESPN2.
“This is the moment we’ve been building toward,” Jenkins said. “The WNFC has always been about proving that women’s football belongs on the biggest stages. Our first live linear broadcast on ESPN2, paired with our record-breaking attendance goal, is a statement about the future of this sport.”
Jenkins began playing football as a child with her brothers and male cousins. She was as good as they were at the sport.
And everything she’s done since then has prepared Jenkins to become CEO of the WNFC.
“My first job was coaching college football as a 19-year-old,” she said. “I’ve had a strong corporate business background for two decades.”
Her experience includes sales, marketing, strategy, product development and more. She’s been CEO of two other tech firms. And in 2017 she earned the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Internship and became just the third woman in an on-field coaching position, working with the Atlanta Falcons.
In other words, Jenkins was just the right person with a broad range of experience to start a women’s football league.
Today that 18-team league is run by just six women. One of them is Jenkins’ wife, Elizabeth who left an executive position with Charles Schwab to become president and CFO of the league.
The league “looks like it’s operated by 150 people,” Jenkins said. “Really it’s just six bad-ass chicks.”
This year, the league hit a few milestones. One of those was sponsorships. Another is actually selling franchises, rather than finding someone who had the money to fund a team.
And the most important of those milestones has been paying players recognition stipends and covering airfare and hotel costs.
Dove is the league’s biggest sponsor. As part of its sponsorship agreement, Jenkins became a proud member of the Dove Body Confident Collective. That group includes Billie Jean King, Venus Williams and Kylie Kelce.
Adidas and Riddell helmets have also come on board. And not only are sportswear firms sponsoring, but they’re working with the league to create gear for women. Big Game USA, a Dallas-based company that manufactures footballs, is even working with the WNFC to design a ball that better fits a woman’s smaller hand.
Along with other women’s sports, this season, the league has gotten more recognition than ever. That includes Jenkins appearing on The Today Show in a segment the show liked so much they repeated it, and they have invited Jenkins back.
Looking ahead to next week’s championship game that will be broadcast on ESPN2, Jenkins said, “A big move for us this year is a professionally curated halftime show.”
(I checked and it won’t be Beyonce, at least not this year. But why not? Beyonce performed for that men’s game. Why not perform for the women?)
Jenkins is rightfully proud of what she’s already built — an 18-team league with more than 1,000 women playing tackle, not flag, football, with a championship game played at The Star in Frisco. That facility, Jenkins pointed outs, isn’t open for just anyone to rent out. Her league was invited by the Cowboys.
And Jenkins, a recognized DEI expert, is rightfully proud of the diversity of the players on her teams. She said probably more than half the players are lesbian, although she’s never surveyed that. What she does know is while there are a lot of “butch” players, there are some “femme” ones too. The league’s rosters include Black, white and Asian players, some from rural areas and some from urban areas. The players come from 30 different countries.
It’s that last statistic that really awes Jenkins — that women from around the world have moved here just to participate in the WNFC.
Always the promoter, Jenkins ended our chat with, “Buy a ticket.”
Tickets for the June 21 championship game at 2 p.m. against the Washington Prodigy in The Star in Frisco are available at SeatGeek.com/wnfc-tickets.