Atlanta Falcons running back Devonta Freeman was in a contract year. At the time, in 2017, he was widely regarded as one of the top backs in the NFL. Coaching him that season was Odessa Jenkins, one of the first women to earn the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship. She had just wrapped up a highly decorated football career of her own, playing running back in various women’s football leagues and earning numerous all-pro honors, MVP trophies, and championships.
Freeman racked up nearly 1,200 yards that season and earned a $41.25 million contract. Jenkins admits that she became envious. “I’m the top running back in the world,” she remembers thinking. “And no one’s ever given me anything. Not $1. Not a promotion. I’ve never been in a brand campaign. Not a free jersey. Not even socks.” She dreamt of becoming the first female head coach in the NFL, but that feeling changed everything. “In order to achieve the highest level that I could achieve as a woman in football, I had to go do it for men?” she asked herself. “I should be able to work with women and get where I want to go.”
Odessa Jenkins says her mistakes have led to even greater successes.
Despite the WNFC having brought in more capital than any full-contact women’s football league in history, Jenkins is far from where she wants to be. But she’s even further from where she’s been. “I signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a streaming company, and they only paid us $300,000,” she says. “We signed another streaming deal, and the company folded soon after. I even had a business partner who ended up in prison.” Today, the WNFC has a broadcast partnership with Victory+ and struck a deal with Disney to broadcast its IX Cup Championship Game (the league’s Super Bowl equivalent) on ESPN2. She scored the 12,000-seat Ford Center at The Star as the game’s host.
That epiphany led to the launch of the Women’s National Football Conference. Jenkins is founder and chairwoman of the Dallas-based league, while her wife, Elizabeth, serves as president. The league just concluded its fifth season and boasts 1,300 female football players across 17 teams. None of them earn a salary. (Bonuses are paid to athletes who earn weekly honors and yearly awards.) Its 2025 season yielded $1.1 million in revenue—up about $500,000 year over year. The league reached profitability in just four years. “If you can’t make $10 look like $10,000, then it’s going to be hard to survive in women’s sports,” Jenkins says. “Were it not for the players and coaches willing to build this without getting paid, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.”
Last October, she wrapped up a $1 million seed round, and now she has her sights set on raising up to $15 million more. It’s time to start compensating the players, Jenkins says. “Somewhere from 60 to 65 percent of our next raise will go toward the teams to fund the players,” she says. “There’s still a couple of million dollars we want to put into the business, we want to make a couple of acquisitions, and we want to build out our flag football business.”
Jenkins has always been a hustler. She came of age in South Central Los Angeles, where she fell in love with basketball. She polished her game on the blacktop alongside male counterparts and eventually got recruited by California Polytechnic State University. As a point guard, she averaged 8.2 points in her career.
After graduating, she joined Medco Health Solutions and stayed for eight years. In 2008, she earned a promotion and was transferred to Dallas. When she wasn’t working, she was racking up yards for the Dallas Diamonds, a local women’s football team. In 2013, she won her first gold medal as part of Team USA in the International Federation of American Football World Championship. A year later, she joined the B2B SaaS platform YourCause as a vice president. Around the same time, the Diamonds folded. So, she launched her own team, the Dallas Elites, as part of the Women’s Football Alliance, agreeing to coach and play. In 2017, she earned her second gold medal as part of Team USA.
Jenkins has three long-term goals for the WNFC. “Money is validation, so step one is establishing we are valuable enough to pay players,” she says. “Step two is making sure we break away from being niche. I see a world where fans are wearing our players’ jerseys. Step three is ensuring every little girl who wants to play football has it in her mind that she can. Because if she can do that, she can do everything else.”
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Ben Swanger
Ben Swanger
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Ben Swanger is the managing editor for D CEO, the business title for D Magazine. Ben manages the award-winning publication