Women’s flag football explodes in US as 2028 Olympics beckon
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A player from the Staten Island Giants throws the ball during a practice session on April 21.
PHOTO: AFP
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LOS ANGELES – Flag football, a non-contact version of American football, is spreading like wildfire among US girls drawn by the prospect of its inclusion in the 2028 Olympics – its popularity even sparking plans for a professional league.
“It’s the youth version of pickleball, the fastest-growing adult sport. It’s crazy,” says Michael Colt, comparing flag football to the racket sport that is all the rage among the over-30s.
Colt, 44, coaches the Staten Island Giants, the 2024 Under-18 US champions.
Since he co-founded the club in 2019, their youth teams have earned a host of national titles and sent several players to the national team. But he said it had been a “struggle” early on to gain recognition and find backing.
“We fought for everything,” Colt said. “We were kind of always pushed to the side, like this wasn’t serious. In the beginning, nobody really wanted to coach girls.”
The Giants’ trajectory mirrors that of the sport as a whole. Developed as an alternative to collision-prone tackle football, girls and women’s flag was relatively unknown six years ago.
Yet participation reached close to 270,000 girls aged six to 17 in 2024, according to USA Football, which oversees US teams in tackle and flag football – and Colt’s Giants club have the financial backing of the National Football League’s (NFL) New York Giants.
But, even as the NFL throws its impressive weight behind the game, the scope of flag football can still come as a surprise to the uninitiated, especially the opportunity it provides for gridiron-loving girls.
When the 14-year-old Brielle Caetano talks about flag, which she has been playing since kindergarten, people are “very in shock”. “And (then) I tell them you can get a (university) scholarship from that,” she said. “They’re definitely in shock.”
“Football has always been considered a boy’s sport. But flag football has grown so much for women of all ages,” said Annie Falcone, 16, of the familiar high-contact game whose pinnacle is the NFL.
In flag football, most often played in a five-on-five format, an offensive player is “tackled” by pulling one of two “flags” worn on a belt around the hips. No blocking is allowed, further reducing the risk of injury in a game that focuses on running and throwing skills.
“It’s just incredible to me how fast flag overall is growing, but really led by girls and women. In my probably 30-plus years of being involved in sports, I’ve never seen a discipline of a sport scale (up) as fast as we’re seeing flag,” said Scott Hallenbeck, USA Football’s chief executive.
Hallenbeck added that a lot of credit for that growth goes to the NFL, which is pushing to develop the game.
That includes at the youth level, with the NFL organising its own national flag tournament for boys and girls in July, with sponsors and a TV broadcasting contract. He said that flag football could be an international game changer, adding: “(They are) really pushing flag to help grow fandom and opportunities around the world and then obviously putting a lot of emphasis around it here in this country.”
Gaining inclusion at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is a key part of that campaign, and is already having an effect.
The NFL is also already looking beyond the Games, and is “exploring very aggressively now an opportunity to create a professional flag league for both men and women”, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in February. AFP
