Four years ago, Liane and Rod Higa decided to move their family from Hawaii to Las Vegas so their twin 13-year-old daughters, Akemi and Akiko, could continue playing flag football.
Then last month, Akemi Higa was the U.S. starting quarterback at the World Championship, leading the team at age 17 to a runner-up finish in Düsseldorf, Germany.
“I don’t remember the first few drives of every game because I was crying too much,” mom Liane said. “It was so emotional for me to see her there.”
Two years from now, a 19-year-old Akemi could be throwing passes at the Olympics as the sport makes its debut at the Games in Los Angeles.
“Just to think of where we were just a little while ago, where this was just a dream, and here we are,” dad Rod said. “I got chicken skin right now just thinking about it.”
Akemi can thank older brother Christian for her start in the sport. He brought home a flyer one day for an after-school flag football program on Oahu. Akemi was 5 or 6 years old and, in those early days, the only girl on the team.
“She’s always been pretty athletic,” Rod said. “I think it was just something she just caught onto quickly and just fell in love with.”
The family didn’t watch the NFL or college football, but Rod considered it a life skill to be able to throw and catch a pigskin. Akemi honed it over sunsets on the driveway, tossing the ball with her dad while barbecue dinners cooked.
“I don’t think we went anywhere without a football,” Rod said. “I remember we took a vacation to go to Disneyland, and we were (playing catch) at some park in San Diego. I think we had more fun tossing around that football than whatever we planned on that vacation.”
But as Akemi and Akiko, who started playing a year or two later, became teens, Hawaii had not yet sanctioned girls’ flag football as a high school sport (it later did starting in 2024).
“Their football stint was done if we stayed in Hawaii,” Liane said. “So that’s when I just started calling around.”
Through the Higas’ traveling club team out of Hawaii, the family learned about the Apex Predators, a decorated Las Vegas-based team.
Liane, Akemi and Akiko moved to Vegas in 2022 to start high school. Rod stayed in Hawaii as Christian finished high school there, and then they relocated, too.
The goal, Akemi said, was to find a way to keep playing into college. It quickly became clear that much more was possible.
Rudy Fernandez, a U.S. youth boys’ national team coach, was invited to the 2022 Desert Oasis High School girls’ flag football tryouts as a guest speaker.
He saw Akemi, a 14-year-old freshman, and immediately called U.S. girls’ national team coaches. I think I found our future quarterback, he said.
“She was throwing a very tight spiral, very accurate,” Fernandez remembered. “And then I called her over and asked her to throw a deep ball, and she threw a deep ball incredibly (about 40 yards).”
The next four years, the Higa twins lit up Nevada prep competition. Akemi holds the national records for career passing yards (23,519) and passing touchdowns (384), according to Maxpreps. Akiko had 486 catches for 7,813 yards and 150 touchdowns, many coming on the sisters’ specialty hitch-and-go route.
They both played for the youth national team. Akemi was the primary quarterback for the 15-and-under team in 2023 and for the 17-and-under team in 2024 and 2025 — winning the Junior International Cup each year.
In 2026, Akemi graduated from Desert Oasis and aged up. She tried out for the senior national team for the first time.
“I didn’t think I was going to make the final roster,” she said. “I was just going to learn and then come back later and develop, I guess, because of the age that I was coming in as.”
But Akemi did make the team as the primary quarterback. She succeeded a legend — 46-year-old Vanita Krouch, who led the U.S. to the previous three world titles in 2018, 2021 and 2024. Krouch underwent knee surgery in March, a month before the first of two national team tryout camps. Though she didn’t make the national team this year, she can still bid for the 2028 Olympics.
“Once I actually started sitting and thinking about it, I was like there’s no way this is real because we went from having the most well known quarterback ever in flag football to now having this random 17-year-old come in,” Akemi said.
Akemi Higa with U.S. head coach Saaid Mortazavi at the World Championship in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Florian Wiegand/AP Content Services for International Federation of American Football
Not only that, she would play in arguably the most important tournament in the sport’s history to this point — August’s World Championship in Düsseldorf — the last global championship before flag football’s Olympic debut in Los Angeles.
Before the first game in Germany, older teammates surprised her by taking off their warm-up jackets to reveal T-shirts with “AI Akemi” written on them. She developed the nickname within USA Football for her precocious intelligence in reading the field and decision-making.
“I don’t want to have everyone be so confident — oh, this is the next quarterback for USA — and then I just do terrible,” Akemi said. “That was one of my fears going into this tournament, and so all of the (teammates) were like, the reason why you’re here is because you earned the spot.”
Akemi said she was the quarterback for all five games at the World Championship except for one drive in the opener. Fernandez said she’s already the world’s best quarterback.
The U.S. trailed late in all three playoff games. Akemi threw touchdown passes in the final 30 seconds to beat Germany in the quarterfinals and Great Britain in the semifinals.
Canada held off the U.S. 27-20 in the final after the Americans didn’t score on a drive in the last 30 seconds.
Akemi graded herself at an A-minus or B-plus overall for the tournament.
“She led us to multiple games where there were hard fights where we were coming from behind, and she stayed poised the entire time,” U.S. assistant coach M.K. Beach said. “I couldn’t be more impressed with her and how she came out in her first World Championship.”
Now Akemi and Akiko, who also tried out for the 2026 national team, are freshman roommates at Nevada State University, where they’ll play for a program that went 13-0 last season in its first year.
Consider the mission from Hawaii to Vegas accomplished, with much more possibly still to come.
“It’s crazy seeing something go from a dream to reality in such a quick amount of time,” Akemi said.
