A year ago, point guard O'Mariah Gordon was leading Florida State into the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Not only is the 5-foot-5 grad student now at another school, but playing an entirely different sport.
Shooting jumpers has been replaced by covering receivers and catching passes at Warner University in Florida. It’s opened up a whole new lane for her — one that could possibly end up with Gordon on the 2026 Team USA flag football squad for world championships this summer in Germany. Down the road, maybe even on the team when the sport makes its Olympic debut at the 2028 LA Games.
Same with Loryn Goodwin, a second-round pick by the Dallas Wings in the WNBA draft who pivoted and turned her talents toward the football field.
The sport is so new that USA Football is looking for players in all sorts of places. Gordon and Goodwin were among the athletes named to a pair of training camps this spring in Chula Vista, California. Their journeys could be just the start of a migration of players to the football field from the basketball floor or the soccer pitch or the volleyball court or the world of track.
“Friends that I have played basketball with are asking me, ‘How did you get into this? How did you start?’” said Goodwin, who played hoops at North Texas, Butler, UTSA and Oklahoma State, where she earned All-Big 12 honors. “Anybody can play. To be elite, you’ve just got to put the time in.”
The skill set from basketball to flag football is a natural crossover. Rebounding is akin to the timing of pass catching, while the ability to read a defense and hand-eye coordination remain paramount. Not to mention both are 5-on-5, featuring sudden stops and starts.
All those things came in handy for Team USA receiver/defensive back Isabella “Izzy” Geraci, who's developed into one of the top players in the world after a basketball career at Cleveland State and USC Upstate. She envisions players of all sorts and heights one day turning up on flag football fields.
“With the pace the sport’s going, there may be a lot of women who are interested in joining the game,” said Geraci, whose last season was 2022-23 with USC Upstate where she started all 31 games. “Some of those women may be 6-5, 6-6 — your freak athletes.”
Gordon was finished at Florida State last season after a career that saw her score more than 1,000 career points and earn All-ACC honors.
Finished, too, with college sports — or so she thought.
She attended a sneakers convention in Tampa, Florida, last summer when she ran into Warner coach Tim Mimbs. She dabbled in flag football in high school but not recently.
“He's like, ‘Want to give flag football a try again?'” Gordon recounted. “I took a chance on myself and here we are.”
In addition to being a receiver (six TD catches this season) and a safety (seven interceptions, two for scores), she's working toward her master's degree in business.
Last week, Gordon participated in the U.S. national team trials, where she stood out and earned an invitation — along with Goodwin — to the training camps in April and May. On the men's side, Heisman Trophy winner and NFL QB Robert Griffin III earned a spot, while 66-year-old Hall of Famer Darrell Green fell short in his comeback bid.
After the two camps, selected athletes will move to a third one in June. USA Football will then name the 2026 alternates and final 12-athlete rosters for both the men’s and women’s teams. It's another step in identifying talent before the Summer Games.
There's a clip on Instagram that shows Goodwin's pass-catching prowess. It was a backyard family football game a few years ago. Blanketed by little brother TJ, a quarterback in college, Loryn Goodwin sprang free and made a one-handed grab while falling to the grass.
She comes from a family of tackle football players. Another brother, Jayden, played defensive back at Air Force and her cousin, Marquise, was a receiver in the NFL.
A flag football player as a kid, she gravitated toward hoops, where she moved around in college — “before transferring was cool,” she laughed — due to coaches leaving, family situation and staff changes. She found the perfect fit at Oklahoma State and averaged 20.6 points in 2017-18 for a Cowboys team that made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Goodwin was taken by the Wings with the 18th pick. She spent time with the Wings and Los Angeles Sparks. She also played in Europe, where she broke her foot and led to the end of her pro hoops career.
Enter flag football.
A friend introduced the 32-year-old Goodwin to a team in Florida. Little did she know it was an all-star squad.
“I was playing at the very highest level right off the bat with zero experience,” Goodwin said. “That’s wild to think about.”
It prepared her for this — a chance to make the Team USA roster this season. Down the road, maybe the Olympics.
“I've put," Goodwin said, "everything into this.”
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
FILE - Oklahoma State guard Loryn Goodwin (32) holds the ball during an NCAA college basketball game against Iowa State in Stillwater, Okla., Jan. 24, 2018. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed off on a nearly $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate President Donald Trump's allies for alleged political prosecution, he may have pleased his boss.
But the eyebrow-raising move — the latest in his push to prove his loyalty to Trump — has agitated the same Republican lawmakers if he is nominated for the permanent job.
Blanche insists he’s not auditioning for the job of attorney general. But a succession of splashy steps the Justice Department has taken under his watch since he took the position on an acting basis last month, including an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, has left no doubt about the impression he’s hoping to make on the president who appointed him.
The fund in particular has put Blanche at the center of a Republican firestorm at a time when he aims to establish himself as the perfect person for the job for the remainder of Trump’s term. And it sharpened concerns from Democrats and other Blanche critics that he has not shed his mantle as the president’s personal attorney.
“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, said in a statement.
A former federal prosecutor in New York, Blanche came to public prominence for his lead role on Trump's defense team, including during the Republican's hush money trial in New York. That perch afforded him, he has said, a firsthand look at what he contends was the weaponization of the criminal justice system against Trump.
He was brought into the Justice Department as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job, then was elevated last month after Trump ousted Pam Bondi.
Now he finds himself the latest Trump-appointed attorney general to simultaneously confront expectations from subordinates to uphold institutional norms and demands from the president to do his bidding.
Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was forced out after the 2018 midterms after infuriating the president over his recusal from an investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign. Another, William Barr, resigned after their relationship fizzled over Barr's refusal to back Trump's baseless claims of massive election fraud. Bondi was removed after struggling to bring successful prosecutions against Trump's political opponents.
Two weeks after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche announced the appointment of Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former Justice Department prosecutor from the Reagan administration, to a special position inside the department. He'll oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.
“At some point, at the right time, that will be made public and the American people will see exactly what happened to this administration and President Trump over the past decade," Blanche told Fox News.
Prior government reviews of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, a centerpiece of the current conspiracy investigation, have failed to produce criminal charges against senior officials or evidence of criminal conduct by them. It's not clear what, if any, new information the continuing investigation has developed.
The Justice Department also last month obtained an indictment charging Comey, a Trump foe whose prosecution the president has long called for, with threatening Trump through a social media photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47" — a case legal experts say will be challenging for prosecutors. Comey has said he wouldn't be surprised if the Justice Department pursues additional indictments.
In other moves, Blanche announced an indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that has been the target of conservative outrage, with misleading donors about its activities, and has publicly defended a Justice Department crackdown on leaks to the news media, including subpoenas to reporters.
Arguably the most audacious demonstration of loyalty to Trump came this week when the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who feel they've been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, coupled with a guarantee of immunity from tax audits for Trump and his eldest sons.
As Republican concerns grew, Blanche held a tense meeting with GOP lawmakers Thursday. Shortly afterward, Senate Republicans abruptly left Washington without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies.
Blanche, who defended the fund at a congressional hearing this week, has said anyone who believes they've been persecuted can apply for compensation regardless of political affiliation. But the fund has been widely understood as a boon to Trump allies investigated during the Biden administration.
“It’s pretty clear that he’s not the attorney general for the United States as much as he's the attorney general for President Trump,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor and senior Justice Department official in the 1980s. He said Blanche would get an A+ if report cards were issued for fealty to Trump.
David Laufman, a former chief of staff to the deputy attorney general in President George W. Bush's administration, said that rather than protecting the Justice Department's independence, Blanche has been a “willing and ardent accomplice for carrying out any partisan or corrupt scheme the White House may devise.”
Blanche’s supporters dismiss the suggestion he is trying to curry favor with Trump to secure the permanent job.
“What he is doing is he is seeking justice based on facts and the law,” said Jay Town, who served as a U.S. attorney in Alabama during the first Trump administration. “And I don’t think that will ever change about him, whether he is the attorney general going forward or doesn’t spend another day in the administration. He is an honorable man and anybody that knows him knows that to be true.”
Blanche also says he is not angling to keep his job or feeling pressure to placate Trump.
He has told reporters he would be honored to be nominated but, "if he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’ I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.”
In recent days, he's functioned as the fund's public face and most visible defender, a role consistent with his comfort in the spotlight. He sometimes holds multiple press conferences a week and grants interviews to a variety of news outlets, a contrast to Bondi, who largely stuck to Fox News appearances.
His defenders say his experience as a federal prosecutor has made him a more sophisticated communicator for the department than Bondi, but his statements have at times invited backlash, including his refusal to rule out that violent Jan. 6 rioters could be eligible for payouts.
Though Blanche will appoint the five commissioners tasked with processing claims, his precise role in the fund’s implementation is unclear. He told CNN it was developed through negotiations with Trump’s private lawyers, not him.
For some Democrats, that's a difference without a distinction.
“Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president's personal attorney," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told Blanche during a combative exchange in the Senate hearing, "and that's the whole problem."
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
