Abigail “Abby” Mora | QB | Class of 2028 | Clairemont High School | San Diego, California

Abby Mora will tell you why Drew Brees is her favorite quarterback, and the list is what you would expect from someone who has studied him: the underdog mentality, the hunger to prove doubters wrong, the loyalty, the sportsmanship.

Then she adds the part that makes it personal.

“He showed a ton of grit through injuries,” she said. “Also, I get called Mini Brees.”

She picked that comparison before she knew how much of it she would end up sharing.

Last January, Mora separated the AC joint in her throwing arm. She missed her winter rec playoffs and spent months in physical therapy and chiropractic care trying to get healthy in time for the flag travel season. The physical setback was the smaller problem.

“Mentally it really messed me up knowing that I couldn’t play the sport I love until it was healed,” she said.

She got it back. Mora returned for local tournaments and then played in the high school division at the inaugural AAU Junior Olympics for Flag Football in Houston — a first-year event, which is fitting, because almost everything about her football career has involved arriving somewhere before it was established.

That started early. Mora has been playing for ten years, since a friend mentioned a program at the Toby Wells YMCA and she signed up for a coed team as a four-year-old. She was not a quarterback then. She was a center.

The person who moved her was Coach Keith Des Rosiers, the first of three coaches she refuses to rank.

“He taught me at a very young age to believe in myself and my capabilities,” Mora said. “He taught me how to be a good teammate and took me from a Center to a QB while teaching me the fundamentals of flag football.”

From there the education split into specialties. Coach Mac Johnson taught her to read defenses and audible at the line, and how to move in the pocket to keep a rusher from getting a hand on her flag. Coach Brittany Daniels taught her the other half.

“She taught me discipline, how to be a strong leader for my team, and reminded me that all wins and losses come with lessons and growth,” Mora said — and, above all, how to control her emotions on and off the field.

That composite shows up in how she describes the position. Ask what makes a great quarterback and Mora talks about leadership, overcoming adversity, and mental preparation, framed in terms of speed: knowing the game well enough that when a problem shows up mid-drive, the solution arrives fast.

She is also honest that the pressure is the appeal.

“I enjoy the pressure and opportunity to showcase my knowledge of the game,” she said. But her favorite thing about football is not the spotlight. “I like playing a sport where you work with others towards a common goal. Everyone has to rely on each other to get the win. It’s very rewarding to be in a group in bad and good.”

Which brings up the moment she named as the best of her career, and it is telling that she described it as the program’s rather than her own: Clairemont High School beating Del Norte at the CIF Division 2 playoffs to reach the quarterfinals — the first playoff win in the history of the school’s girls flag football program.

Her junior year is next. The plan is to keep getting stronger, perfect the deep ball, and work on the mental side of being an athlete, which for a player who has already come back from one long injury is not an abstract goal.

Ten years in, Mora has been a founding member of nearly everything she has played in. She seems entirely comfortable with the job.

Building the Résumé: Why Upgrading Your Membership Matters

Abby has been early to everything. Early to the sport, early to a program that had never won a playoff game, early to an inaugural national tournament. Being early is how you build something. It is also how you go unnoticed, because the coverage never gets built at the same speed as the sport.

That gap is the whole problem, and it is fixable.

Custom graphics turn her season into something people stop for. Every month, an upgraded member gets a professionally designed graphic built around her — her photo, her moment, her name in a format that looks like it belongs. The Del Norte win deserves one: the first playoff victory in Clairemont’s girls flag football history is a piece of program history, and right now it exists as a sentence on a form. As a graphic it becomes something coaches stop scrolling for, teammates share, and her school can point to.

Reposts on Instagram and X put her in front of people who are already looking. A post from her own account reaches people who already found her. A repost from QB Magazine reaches a feed that coaches, trainers, camp directors, and other quarterbacks follow on purpose — people whose job is finding players. Those are two different audiences, and only one of them is doing the searching. For an athlete in a sport whose recruiting pipeline is still being built, that difference matters more, not less.

Engagement compounds. Weekly reposts across both platforms build familiarity, and familiarity is what turns a name into a known quantity. A name that appears once is noise. A name that appears every week becomes the quarterback at Clairemont. Abby is Class of 2028 with a junior season ahead — the visibility she builds now is what people will already know about her when it counts.

And there is the part that has nothing to do with recruiting. Abby came back from an injury that, in her own words, messed her up mentally, and she did it in time to play in Houston. That is worth having written down somewhere permanent — not a clip that vanishes down a feed in a week, but a record of what she did at sixteen and the three coaches she credits for it.

She got called Mini Brees before she had earned the injury part. Upgrading is how the rest of it gets seen.

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