SPORT OF THE FUTURE?
Outlook for flag football for females improves with help from NFL and colleges
LAS VEGAS — Laila Young sees a future as a football player.
The 14-year-old spends most of her time as a dancer, but after playing for Menlo School in California’s first CIF-sanctioned flag-football season, she struggles to see life without it.
In 2028, flag football will be an Olympic sport, for men and women. It also could become an emerging women’s sport at the NCAA level in the near future. For any sort of success on an international stage, that probably has to happen soon; though the men’s game has a pipeline of NFL players, women’s football has been scattered, unorganized and mostly unsanctioned.
But players like Laila Young finally see a path. Her father and coach, Steve Young, has seen rapid progress following investment from football as an institution.
“The NFL is really pushing for flag football worldwide, which I really appreciate,” the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback told the Chronicle at a Dove-sponsored flag football event in Las Vegas. “The girls got so good this year. At the end of the season, they were so good, just wait until next season.”
Young can’t help but gush about his team whenever given the chance. Several times, he indicated his team could beat the boys’ team at flag.
Women and girls already faced an uphill climb of being weighed against men’s football players. The lack of a true pipeline for them in the sport has made it even more difficult. NFL Flag has 1,800 leagues across the country, with nearly 700,000 players, and almost half are girls. Girls high school football has been sanctioned in six states, including California and Nevada.
Though flag football will be an Olympic sport for both genders, it’s the women and girls who have pushed the sport into the rapid trajectory it’s on. They’ve long wanted to play football; the opportunity just wasn’t there.
“The first game we had this season, four elderly women came to our game,” Young said. “I asked what they were doing there, and they said they heard girls were playing and they wanted to see it. … They said when they were young, their dream was to play football. The impact of girls playing flag football this year was profound.”
On Friday, Dove hosted an event at Durango High School where top Nevada girls flagfootball players competed in an exhibition. Both of Young’s daughters, Summer and Laila, helped with the scoring. He coached against former tennis player Venus Williams.
Nearly 21,000 high school girls competed in varsity flag football in 2022-23, representing an 86% jump over four years, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Including youth and club competition, 474,000 girls ages 6-17 played flag football in the U.S. last year overall.
Whoever plays for Team USA at the 2028 Olympics is likely to be among those thousands.
For all the talk about how Taylor Swift’s presence has expanded the NFL’s audience to women, the numbers show a clear growth of women and girls participating in football already, and the flag boom caught the league’s attention.
The NAIA announced it would launch women’s flag football as an emerging sport in 2020, offering a “$15,000 coaching stipend from the NFL” to schools who sponsored the sport.
Because only eight states have varsity flag football, most girls end up quitting the sport by the time they are 14, with no other options. For true development leading into the Olympics, some sort of rapid expansion of opportunity is needed.
“I know a lot of girls who would have done so much to even have this opportunity,” said Summer Young, Laila’s sister and a senior who is seeing her flag career end as she goes to college. “A lot of people didn’t even get a chance, ever.”
Girls already have 1.3 million fewer high school athletic opportunities than boys, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation. Some of that is because boys’ tackle football rosters are so much larger than any other sport, but now that flag has proven its popularity in women, that gap could narrow.
“I had many, many women stop me and say I wish I could have played,” Steve Young said. “And the girls that did play, it became their favorite sport. It is going to be an explosion now that it’s in the Olympics. … This sport resonates with women. They love football, too.”