The Bears recently wrapped up their first year of the Monsters Flag Football Clinic program, which is designed for boys and girls between the ages of 11-17 to learn and develop flag football skills through 90-minute training sessions.

Monsters Flag is an extension of the Bears' Mini Monsters program, which focuses on the introduction of football and promotion of a healthy lifestyle for kids between the ages of 7-12.

While the Mini Monsters program has impacted kids across the world for nearly eight years, Bears manager of youth and high school football Gustavo Silva didn't want the organization's support to stop there. After posing the question, 'what happens when kids are too old for Mini Monsters?' Silva saw a gap that he wanted to close through the rapidly growing sport of flag football.

"For these older kids, Monster Flag allows them to focus in on learning the skills versus just having fun," Silva said. "It's still fun, but we're also learning more specific skills. It also helps with the girls flag football space where there's a lot of new high school teams and maybe the girls or coaches don't have a lot of experience. It allows us to go out there and give them a taste of flag football and start to teach both the players and the coaches some of the skills necessary to play the game."

During the program's inaugural year, the Bears hosted 20 clinics between April and December, teaching the game of flag football to nearly 1,500 students across Illinois. While Silva led the clinics, he received assistance from current and former Bears players like linebacker Tremaine Edmunds, former offensive lineman Roberto Garza and Super Bowl XX-winning linebacker Jim Morrissey.

Silva and the Bears have been committed to growing flag football since helping establish the sport for high school girls in Illinois in Sept. 2021 — a program that expanded from 22 Chicago Public League teams to over 150 teams throughout Illinois in just three years.

With girls flag football now sanctioned by the Illinois High School Association, the Bears have found new ways to continuing supporting the sport both for boys and girls.

"There is an uncertainty about 'do I know how to play?' especially with sixth through 12th graders," Silva said. "A lot of times, people start sports earlier in life at five or six years old, so they may feel like, 'oh, I'm too old to start a new sport.' So what Monsters Flag allows us to do is to show them that they already have the foundation to play flag football — that it's not that complicated. There are some specific skills like throwing or catching a football or pulling a flag, but as long as they have an athletic foundation, they're going to be super successful."

Through the Monsters Flag program, Silva has seen newcomers quickly fall in love with the game and gain confidence in their abilities, all within a 90-minute clinic.

Silva saw this firsthand in July when the Bears hosted clinics for Yorkville High School and McHenry High School — two new girls flag football programs. While most of the girls had minimal or no experience, both schools ended up making it to their respective regional finals in the fall.

"At the beginning of the clinic they were like, 'oh we're gonna have fun. We're excited to play. We hope it goes well,'" Silva recalled. "By the end of the clinic, they were like, 'yeah we'll see you at the State Championships.'

"They really gained confidence and that's a powerful thing. The confidence is going to transfer over to other things, because next time they're faced with something new or unknown, they're going to have the attitude of 'it's not if I can do this, it's when. When am I going to be that good, not am I ever going to be that good?' And it's so cool to see that."

Helping facilitate those life experiences through sports is something that drives Silva to keep creating the opportunities that Mini Monsters and Monsters Flag provide.

As the Bears begin preparation for the second year of Monsters Flag, the focus will be on expanding programming to more communities around Chicagoland and bringing the clinics to new communities in central Illinois or rural areas, with the goal of making the programs available to anyone that wants them.

"We're always really looking for ways of 'how else can we support? What more can we do?,'" Silva said. "We really want to walk alongside young people on their journey in sports and in life because we knew that sports are a vehicle, a training ground for life. We really want to support them from the time that they're five or six years old at one of our events, to when they're doing Mini Monsters at their elementary schools or playing youth football through their park district, to playing in high school and college.

"It's important that any time we see a need or a gap in someone's journey where they're not getting the support that they need, that we can meet that. That's for all communities. We want to be diverse in our programming and diverse in every sense of the word — culture diversity, racial diversity, economic diversity, and also geographic diversity. That's one thing we're focusing on this year – where are we not present, so we can be present."