Just ask the Mo Steel flag football teams from the North Miami-Dade region. The 11-and-under and 14-and-under squads won the NFL Flag Football National Championships last month, marking the first time in 10 years that both divisions won gold the same year.

In the last decade, Coach David Fried has led the juniors to two national titles and the seniors to four in the tournament. He said the NFL tournament is one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Fried credits the teams’ success to a dedicated coaching staff and hard-working athletes who are willing to put in the extra time after school.

“There’s a reason why we’ve made the top five in the country for the last 10 years,” said Fried, whose teams play out of the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center, 18900 NE 25th Ave. “We have a great system in place, and there’s no signs of stopping us.”

This also marks the first time in three years that the seniors won the national championship. For the juniors, their win is equally sweet because they defended their title.

“It’s a pretty great feeling,” said juniors wide receiver and co-captain Belochi Lacombe, 12, a seventh-grader at Highland Oaks Middle School who lives in Aventura.

“Our coach keeps us focused and we work as a true team,” Belochi said. “We never argue and we’re level-headed. We’re not cocky. I think that’s the secret to our success.”

Steven Feld, 15, the co-captain and wide receiver of the seniors team, said he had won just about every other title in his five years of playing with Mo Steel — except the NFL title.

“For me, it was a dream come true to have finally won this,” the Miami Country Day School sophomore and North Miami Beach resident said. “I had won regionals, world. But never nationals. Not even when I was on the juniors team. So I’m pretty psyched right now.”

The games will be televised on ESPN at 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Fried said the players and their parents get a kick out of watching themselves on television.

“We have a watch party every year,” he said. “The kids feel like superstars.”

Aside from coaching the Mo Steel teams — which are named after their sponsors, a North Miami Beach steel company — Fried runs the Primetime Football League at the Michael-Ann Russell JCC. He started the league when he was 16.

Now 32, Fried never thought he would still be running the league nearly two decades later.

“I’ve always loved football and working with kids,” he said. “This all just sort of happened overnight. We started from nothing and now we have more than 500 kids playing.”

Fried adds that the league is also one of the few in Miami-Dade County that primarily consists of Jewish players.

“The kids are 95 percent Jewish,” he said. “That’s pretty unheard of.”

Next, the Mo Steel seniors may be headed to Ottawa, Canada for a shot at an international title. But budget cuts could prevent that from happening.

“We’re supposed to go to world’s but it might not happen this year,” said seniors quarterback and co-captain Jake Najjar, 15, a sophomore at the Hillel Community Day School who lives in Sunny Isles Beach.

In 1991 Ismail, a junior wide receiver for the Fighting Irish, was the presumptive No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. Instead he signed with the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts for a guaranteed $18.2 million over four years, then the richest contract in football history. But today, at a private session on financial planning attended by eight other current or onetime pro athletes, Ismail, 39, indulges in a luxury he didn’t enjoy as a young VIP: hindsight.

“I once had a meeting with J.P. Morgan,” he tells the group, “and it was literally like listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher.” The men surrounding Ismail at the conference table include Angels outfielder Torii Hunter, Cowboys wideout Isaiah Stanback and six former pros: NFL cornerback Ray Mickens and fullback Jerald Sowell (both of whom retired in 2006), major league outfielder Ben Grieve and NBA guard Erick Strickland (‘05), and linebackers Winfred Tubbs (‘00) and Eugene Lockhart (‘92). Ismail (‘02) cackles ruefully. “I was so busy focusing on football that the first year was suddenly over,” he says. “I’d started with this $4 million base salary, but then I looked at my bank statement, and I just went, What the…?”

Before Ismail can elaborate on his bewilderment—over the complexity of that statement and the amount of money he had already lost—eight heads are nodding, eight faces smiling in sympathy. Hunter chimes in, “Once you get into the financial stuff, and it sounds like Japanese, guys are just like, ‘I ain’t going back.’ They’re lost.”

At the front of the room Ed Butowsky also does a bobblehead nod. Stout, besuited and silver-haired, Butowsky, 47, is a managing partner at Chapwood and a former senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. His bailiwick as a money manager has long been billionaires, hundred-millionaires and CEOs—a club that, the Steinbrenners’ pen be damned, still doesn’t include many athletes. But one afternoon six years ago Butowsky was chatting with Tubbs, his neighbor in the Dallas suburb of Plano, and the onetime Pro Bowl player casually described how money spills through athletes’ fingers. Tubbs explained how and when they begin earning income (often in school, through illicit payments from agents); how their pro salaries are invested (blindly); and when the millions evaporate (before they know it).

“The details were mind-boggling,” recalls Butowsky, who would later hire Tubbs to work in business development at Chapwood. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

What happens to many athletes and their money is indeed hard to believe. In this month alone Saints alltime leading rusher Deuce McAllister filed for bankruptcy protection for the Jackson, Miss., car dealership he owns; Panthers receiver Muhsin Muhammad put his mansion in Charlotte up for sale on eBay a month after news broke that his entertainment company was being sued by Wachovia Bank for overdue credit-card payments; and penniless former NFL running back Travis Henry was jailed for nonpayment of child support.

In a less public way, other athletes from the nation’s three biggest and most profitable leagues—the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball—are suffering from a financial pandemic. Although salaries have risen steadily during the last three decades, reports from a host of sources (athletes, players’ associations, agents and financial advisers) indicate that:

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You can see all the action from the NFL FLAG National Tournament of Champions on December 25th at 6:00 PM EST on ESPN2 and again on February 8th prior to the Pro Bowl on ESPN. The NFL FLAG National Tournament will also be televised on the NFL Network on December 27th at 8:00 AM EST.

Regional champions from 12 regions competed in the tournament, which is hosted by the NFL. Mo Steel finished the tournament 5-1.

This is Mo Steel’s fourth national championship in eight years but the first for the 9-11 year old Juniors. Team members include Joey Block, Blake Edwards, Brent Hirsch, Belochi Lacombe, Everett Levy, Jacob Mars, Steven Moltmann, Bradley Moskovitz, Jonathan Rose and Matthew Wendrow. They are coached by David Fried, Blake Yagman and Brian Levy.

The championship game will be aired on ESPN on Dec. 25. Mo Steel is a division of Prime Time Football, which runs youth and adult leagues, travel teams and other flag football programs

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