There were several track and football athletes on the Murdock Stadium field that gloomy afternoon, but most eyes were on flag football player No. 5, Cydney Kone. The camera was too.

The pale sunlight crept through her curly brown hair when she caught the football. It was like she was floating through the air, athletic limbs balanced on an invisible beam, a graceful form she picked up from 15 years as a gymnast.

Right below the mole on her face was a charismatic grin. Her eyes were focused, honing in on the sky. Landing neatly, she opened her chest to the camera, sporting her new flag football uniform, laughing lightly.

“I’m not used to these poses,” Kone said.

Kone, 28, graduated from Sacramento State University with a degree in criminal justice in 2021. Her road to El Camino, with a pursuit in French to sharpen her skills, began serendipitously. It’s the same road that led her to El Camino’s first flag football team.

For the past year and a half, Kone has dedicated her time to training in flag football, a sport she’s new to, but has always been passionate about. Her father played football, her uncle played and coached, and her grandfather, D. Richard Walker, coached for the Steelers and Ohio State.

“They didn’t have flag football when I was growing up, so now that there’s an opportunity for it, I’m excited to be a part [of it],” Kone said. “Plus, I have hopes of making the national team.”

In the fall of 2023, the International Olympic Committee approved flag football for its Olympic debut at LA28, an event and team that Kone is training to be a part of.

Flag football is a sport also growing on high school and college campuses across the country. NFL Flag, the largest youth flag football league in the country, reports that the sport has grown by 38% since 2015 in young athletes from the ages of 6-12.

The National Federation of State High School Associations reports that, within the past five to seven years, the sport has seen growth across the country. California is one of nine states to have sanctioned the sport for girls, and 17 other states are in different stages of pilot programs.

California community colleges, including Cypress College, Irvine Valley College and Saddleback College, have added the sport to their campuses since spring 2025. El Camino recruited for the club sport around October, began playing at the start of the spring semester, and the team hopes to become an official ECC sport by 2027.

This sport is making history, a history that El Camino and Kone are now a part of. The team’s recruitment began as soon as physical education and kinesiology instructor John Hall was hired in October. Hall had two months to get a team together, a recruitment process that was far from traditional.

Kone and Hall crossed paths one day, and it felt like fate, Hall said.

Kone was out on the athletics field in February, running through drills with a friend, when she caught his eye.

The team was already a couple of games into their first season, and on this day, Hall was packing up equipment in their van, getting ready for another game. He saw Kone work her drills, and it stopped him in his tracks. He knew he didn’t recognize her as an athlete within El Camino’s athletics department, so he had to approach her.

“It felt kind of like fate, you know?” Hall said. “She was put there for a reason. We were meant to interact.”

After exchanging information, Kone joined the team for workouts and practices, establishing herself as a new member. She was quickly vetted by assistant coach Agion Quinney, otherwise known as Coach AJ.

Quinney recognized Kone as one of the players from LA Legends, a premier women’s and girls’ sports organization within the Women’s National Flag Football League, based in Los Angeles, which is focused on leadership development, discipline and teamwork that she coaches for.

Other members of the team were recruited through outreach methods including interest forms, skill showcase events and social media initiatives. Hall was focused on targeting enthusiastic, open-minded individuals committed to learning and joining the team.

Art and architecture major Dechelle Brackett, 20, known as “Dynamite” by her team, was one of the first students to show interest. Brackett believes her dedication and leadership skills landed her the captain position. She leads her team with motivation, highlighting where the team has improved and pushing them from potential to results.

The team is already making an impact on campus. Athletics Department administrative assistant Linda Olsen is impressed by how the team is coming together, given that some players have little to no football experience. She sees these young women as one big family, pushing for improvement and playing with great sportsmanship.

“They’re all one unit,” Olsen said. “When they lose a game, they come in to get snacks from me, and they say, ‘That’s OK, Miss Linda. We’re gonna get them next time.’ I love that.”

Hall and Quinney agree that Kone brings a unique experience and perspective as someone who’s trained as a college athlete and is a college graduate.

“She’s the prototype of the type of athlete I want to coach,” Quinney said. “She doesn’t talk back, she doesn’t complain, she gives full effort.”

Kone’s ambition and discipline was instilled in her from a young age through sports and family. Her mother, Tia Spells, trained in several sports, including gymnastics, cheerleading and wrestling. She is also a black belt in kung fu and wushu. Both her parents are also personal trainers, so hard work, fitness, and training for life, not just sport, is the expectation.

She and her siblings, older sister Raven and younger brother Cheik, were born and raised in Georgia. Her mother’s side of the family resides in South Mississippi, Texas and Atlanta, while her dad’s side of the family is in Senegal and Canada.

When Kone moved to California in 2005 at the age of 7, she had her grandparents, but found a lot of community through sports and other organizations.

Now living in Inglewood, Kone juggles a hectic daily schedule. Day by day, her schedule changes with a mix of business for her and her mother’s nonprofit, flag football practices and training, rehearsals for musicals, and auditions for films.

As a kid, when Kone first moved to L.A., she began acting and modeling before gymnastics took over. She got back into entertainment around 2022, and at the beginning of the year, Kone signed with O Models. They’re a modeling agency that represents talent across different platforms of fashion, beauty and commercial print and represents Kone in her acting and modeling career.

Kone’s acting history is made up of a range of roles in commercials, different shows including “The Family Business” and “Skeletons,” which is set to come out this summer. She recently finished production for the musical “Born 2 Reign”, a modern retelling of the story of King David, in her role as Michal, David’s first wife. The musical took place at The Miracle Theater in Inglewood.

Off the field and on the stage, Kone’s presence is commanding, and during one rehearsal for the musical, it was felt.

The sun was setting on a slow evening in late April. The city was settling down, but in a small white church in the Los Angeles area, music was alive. The cast of “Born 2 Reign” was inside on the second floor, running through scenes from their performance that would take place in a week.

Kone and her mother arrived an hour or so into rehearsal, clacking up the stairs to the second floor in shiny black heels and sleek suits. They had come from a business conference in West Hollywood, but were quick to slip into their practice clothes, their heads switching gears like an automatic response.

There was a deep focus in Kone’s eyes, as sharp as they looked on the field. Her movements during the first scene she rehearsed were poetic; each rise and fall of her arms was a stanza, each sway of her hips was a rhyme. She had fallen into place like a soldier in line, steady and agile.

“She’s been a star for as long as she’s been born,” Spells said. “She literally lives and embodies and fulfills everything that she wants to do, and that is so inspiring to me.”

Kone’s passion for the arts runs in her family. Her grandmother, CCH Pounder, has played in roles including Mo’at in James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Dr. Loretta Wade in “NCIS: New Orleans.”

Outside of rehearsals, one of Kone’s biggest commitments is to her community. She honors that through the shared nonprofit organization she built with her mother.

Kone and Spell’s 4ever4kids Foundation focuses on service toward opportunity-challenged youth, senior citizens and those experiencing homelessness. They offer an Integrity in Action 12-week life skills youth program and their efforts are executed through resource distribution, community outreach and social events. They just celebrated their first year as a foundation in January.

Along with these services, Spells is a children’s book author, and her stories explore underrepresented communities to uproot children from racism.

“You see what each person or race contributed,” Spells said. “That eliminated racism ‘cause you can’t say that one race did everything when all these different people did all these things.”

Spells wanted to instill these values in her own children, insisting that they know they come from greatness. She told them that they are kings and queens and repeated their family motto every chance she got – “I came to conquer, and I cannot be beat.”

“I raised them, and I said, in life, you can love whoever you want, but you’ve got to love yourself first,” Spells said. “So I’m a huge advocate of Black history, knowing that first and then learning about everyone else.”

Associate professor of journalism and sociology at the University of Southern California, Ben Carrington, understands what it takes to be an athlete, especially one who is Black and female.

Within the field of sports, Black people are often seen as physically superior but intellectually inferior, making it harder for them to fit into coaching and leadership roles, he said.

For Black women, it can be a double burden when their sexuality and gender are called into question, Carrington said.

Carrington also acknowledges what kind of mindset it takes to be a top athlete, a mindset that is reflected in Kone’s actions. Top athletes overcome adversity and failure, and are at a certain level of commitment and dedication, Carrington said.

“I think the key characteristics, undoubtedly, you know, [are] a strong sense of self-identity, perseverance, and determination,” Carrington said. “Actually, most sports, it’s about failure, about not winning, about coming second, but then still going the next day.”

As a little girl, Kone performed with nerves of steel, Spells said. In gymnastics, she progressed incredibly fast, and during her competitions, she owned the spotlight.

“I would tell her, ‘You came to conquer, and you cannot be beat, and she would live in it,” Spells said.

At the age of 8, Kone was up on a beam, telling her mom to stand close and watch her, an unnerving thing for a gymnast’s parent. Her bravery was uncanny, and her strength was like magic seeping out of her small body and pouring out into the world around her. She would execute each routine, and she would kill it, Spells said.

She gives a lot of credit to gymnastics for shaping the mindset she carries today. By the age of 8, she was training 30 hours a week in the sport, learning time management, discipline and figuring out the best ways to succeed as an athlete. She spent three years at Sacramento State competing as a Division 1 athlete with her team.

Despite it not being a contact sport, Kone said you take on a lot of injuries and a heavy mental load while having to maintain a high GPA.

“Gymnastics is a whole other beast on its own, I mean, it’s [one of the] top three most dangerous sports in the world,” Kone said. “So the mental capacity and tenacity that you build in that sport is just completely different than anything else, but I’m grateful.”

With so much on her plate, rest and recovery have become a method of grounding. Kone is no stranger to stress and burnout and at some point, it consumed her.

During her time at Sacramento State University, Kone studied engineering, even being offered yearly summer jobs with Raytheon.

However, strict requirements from the NCAA made her change courses. While she was on track academically, 40% of her major needed to be done to compete, so the ultimatum was that she needed to change her major or be ineligible to compete on the gymnastics team.

With so much of her time and energy being given to gymnastics, she made the decision to change her major to criminal justice, and a year later, she blew out her shoulder, ending her gymnastics career.

Her medical retirement from the team was crushing and watching her team compete without her sent her into a dark place.

She was faced with an identity crisis she didn’t quite know how to navigate, so she left campus and her team to study abroad at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. Her new venture was cut short when COVID-19 hit, and she had to make her way back to the states.

In 2022, Kone got into a bad car accident that left her with a broken back and the very wakeup call she needed to make a change. She felt her next fit of burnout may have been something she wouldn’t have recovered from.

“I just had to sit with myself and deal with my problems,” Kone said. “So I did a lot of unpacking, soul searching, therapy, all the things. And coming out of that, I vowed that I would, you know, never lose myself again.”

Through reconnecting with nature, writing and self-care, Kone worked endlessly to reclaim who she was, learn who she was without her sport and prioritize her health.

“Whenever I start feeling like I’m floating, I’m like, oh, I need to get grounded,” Kone said. “The float starts to happen, and then eventually your feet can’t touch the ground at all.”

Despite the trials and tribulations she’s faced, she’s grateful for the wisdom and deep understanding of life she now carries because of her experiences.

Currently, her ultimate goal is the national flag football team and to compete with them in the 2028 Olympics. Her place on the team at El Camino is helping her achieve that through consistent opportunities to practice and play.

Just last year, Kone appeared in a campaign commercial produced by NFL Flag 50, promoting the growth of women in a male-dominated sport. During this opportunity, Kone was surrounded by national team members from a variety of countries, including Germany, France, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and the U.S.

Kone had been working hard to get to that point and playing with the team was the exact encouragement she needed to continue her training. She never doubted her place on the field, but starting the sport only a year and a half ago from ground zero, when others have been training for years, set her further back.

“Playing with them and kind of seeing these are the best representing their countries at the game, and I wasn’t far behind them,” Kone said. “I feel that I do have the ability, and with the right training and the right opportunity, I can succeed at that.”

This story was originally published on El Camino College Union on May 21, 2026.