When the California Interscholastic Federation’s (CIF) Federated Council voted unanimously to add girls flag football as a statewide sanctioned sport for the 2023–24 school year, there had already been a boost in interest among young people in recreational leagues as well as burgeoning financial and material support from the NFL, which advocated for the sport to be added to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
According to the latest CIF Sports Participation Survey released Aug. 3, flag football is now the sixth most popular sport among girls by participation.
“We have seen the number of student athletes explode,” said CIF Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour. “Girls participating after the first year was 10,000, after the second year it was about 17,000, and we have just cracked the 25,000-participant level at the end of year three. We had about 442 teams roughly that played the inaugural season of flag football and now we’re just about shy of 900 teams.”
About half of the states in the U.S. have sanctioned girls’ flag football at the high school level (up from 11 when California did so in 2023). While there was concern that adding another sport would pull girls’ attention away from current offerings, Seymour said that far more often, local educational agencies have seen students join teams for the first time.
“There’s a lot of kids that had no interest in playing any of the sports that their school offered until they offered flag football and now they are playing, so that’s been a big, big bonus for our member schools,” he said.
A draw for new student athletes
Women’s flag football is also one of the fastest-growing collegiate sports, with athletic directors calling it “a useful recruitment tool.” Elena DeNecochea said she is seeing this firsthand as a volunteer in recruitment for California State University (CSU), Sacramento’s men’s football team and head coach for the Women’s Flag Football Club at CSU Sacramento, which will kick off in September.
She has witnessed the options open up for female athletes over the years, first as wide receiver and cornerback for San Juan Unified School District’s El Camino Fundamental High School varsity and junior varsity football teams; followed by stints serving as offensive assistant coach at Diablo Valley College (DVC) for the men’s football team and an assistant coach for the women’s flag team at DVC.
“There are just so many girls from all sorts of backgrounds and sports all coming to flag football, some of them with flag experience, some without, but I go to these events and I just see so many girls. It’s sort of like a dream come true really to witness it,” DeNecochea said. “My younger self could not have imagined that this many women would be playing football 10 years later because it’s been a decade for me since I played, and it’s amazing.”
The draw among many of the girls she’s spoken to is the passion for a game that has largely been inaccessible. Some come from football families, others enjoy the camaraderie and many see the ability to get a scholarship to afford college.
“With flag football, we’re seeing offers and then commitments and scholarship opportunities,” DeNecochea said, noting the increasing cultural acceptance around women in the football scene.
Coaching pipeline inequities
While gatekeeping the game of football has declined, DeNecochea said that in her experience, there’s still significant stigma around allowing women to lead the coaching staff, even in flag football.
However, her experience isn’t unique. According to research from WeCOACH and the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, the percentage of women coaching women’s teams at the collegiate level has declined from over 90 percent since Title IX was passed in 1972.
The 2025–26 Women in College Coaching Report Card shows a recent decline in the percentage of women head coaches after 13 years of steady progress. “While it is too early to determine if the decline is a long-term trend or a single-year anomaly … underlying biases are likely at play along with shifting cultural and sporting landscapes,” the report stated. “The historic popularity of women’s sports has made coaching women’s teams highly attractive and high stakes. Consequently, when filling prized positions, athletic directors may be defaulting to traditional, stereotypical and familiar hiring habits that favor men — limiting opportunity for qualified women.”
This creates a break in the pipeline that would allow girls playing flag football to see a future in the game they love, DeNocochea said.
“A lot of these girls, they’re going to grow up and not all of them are going to go pro with this. And even if they do, they might retire at some point, retire their cleats and want to get into coaching flag,” she explained. “And will it be a space that’s open to women? I don’t know. I think it would be nice to see more support around women coaches in this field as flag football expands to see women leading this movement of women’s sport. I think it’s important.”
While the CIF doesn’t track that same data at the K-12 level, Seymour said that one of the federation’s goals has been to help schools understand that there is a need to have quality coaches and sports officials that give back to their schools.
“We have plenty of room to grow in the development and promotion of women as head coaches in all of our sports, whether they are girls’ sports or boys’ sports, and we need to find better ways to make that pathway more open to everyone,” Seymour said. “We are starting to see more and more females who are head coaches, not assistant coaches, but head coaches in a lot of sports, including traditional boys’ sports that they are now head coaches at because they have tremendous ability to do that.”
Overcoming obstacles
When flag football first became a sanctioned sport in California, there was trepidation around scheduling, availability of referees, funding and more, but these and other concerns have largely been assuaged, according to Seymour.
“There was never a doubt from any one of our section offices or the state office that our schools would find a way to tackle some of those hurdles, whether it be funding to hire coaches or to get equipment or to find practice space and share field space with existing programs,” he said. “We’re starting to see schools that are doing some field improvement and they’re including girls flag football — painting the actual lines on the field — in their improvements. So, it’s really kind of taken on its own life. It’s really been fun to see the growth of it.”
At CSU Sacramento, DeNecochea said the women’s club team has leaned heavily on donations as well as a partnership with NIRSA, a membership association for leaders in collegiate recreation.
“NIRSA has done a good job of helping us with finding officials that we’ll need, our game schedule, our travel team, our flags that we’re going to wear in game scenarios, our footballs, but all of that is delayed until October and we start in September,” she explained. “It’s overwhelming because we have over a hundred girls signed up for the club sport team. If we only had like 20 girls, I could manage out of my own pocket to just purchase waters or purchase Gatorades to just kind of make it happen, but with over a hundred girls, to have to meet those needs and every week? We will host camps and clinics to raise that money for the club directly benefiting the girls that play the sport and their needs.”
DeNecochea said donations of everything from flags to footballs to cones to pennies made over the summer by Lady Empire and the HERisUS Foundation have proven invaluable.
Looking forward, DeNecochea said she and the other women coaching CSU Sacramento’s flag football club teams aim to create “a safe space for women to succeed in the sport that they love.
“We’re also trying to build a culture through our program that is supportive of women in sports,” she continued. “Whether you’re an athlete or a coach or you dream of coaching, we want to be very supportive of that.”
