The style of flag football favors female athletes

We just couldn’t let this stuff go …

Honesty Butler was not planning to go to college, let alone leave her home state of New York. She loved art class but hated math and history, writes Claire Fahy of the New York Times. Art school was too expensive, so she began to give up on the idea of higher education entirely.

But one day her social studies teacher at Binghamton High School told her he was coaching flag football, which New York state had just begun offering as a varsity sport, and asked if she might be interested in joining the team.

Butler had never played a team sport, beyond a brief stint on the track team, but from the first practice, she was hooked. Suddenly, she had an outlet for her competitive drive. She received positive reinforcement at school as her team started winning games. The team had a GPA requirement, so Butler was suddenly motivated to keep her grades up — even in math.

Now, Butler, 19, is more than 1,200 miles from home in Fort Scott, Kan., where she is preparing for her second season playing collegiate flag football at Fort Scott Community College.

Flag football, a version of the sport in which players pull colorful flags from belts around their opponents’ waists instead of tackling them to stop play, has been rapidly growing in popularity. Since it is strictly no contact, it emphasizes quickness and accuracy over physicality.

While the sport is played by both men and women, the style of play favors female athletes. It gives girls a unique opportunity to play football, which has long been considered a quintessentially — and exclusively — male sport.

“For many years, it was sort of, you know, girls don’t play football, right? That sort of mentality,” said Scott Hallenbeck, chief executive of USA Football, the governing body for both tackle and flag football. “All of us in football, and hopefully society at large, recognize that this is a critical and incredible opportunity to be inclusive.”

Last year, New York became the eighth state to offer girls’ flag football as a varsity sport, with teams around the state set to compete for their first state championship next spring. The announcement last month that flag football would become an Olympic sport in 2028 further accentuated the sport’s rise.

“A lot of people overlook flag football, and the fact that it’ll be in the Olympics soon is even better,” Butler said. “They can see how the sport is played and not judge it because it’s played by women.”

Olympic flag football will be offered in both men’s and women’s disciplines, but the men’s team could be made up of NFL athletes. For women, the Olympics will be a chance to compete on a level much higher than the current high school and college contests. For those who are just now joining high school varsity teams, the path forward in the sport is clearer than ever.