CINCINNATI (WXIX) – An Eastgate high school senior is a finalist for the Girls National Flag Football Player of the Year Award.
Each of the NFL’s 32 teams sponsors an athlete to compete for the prestigious Maxwell Football Club honor.
Evie Schoolfield is a senior at Mt. Notre Dame High School and she has led her team to back-to-back Bengals regional flag football Championships. So, the team nominated her to be recognized on the national stage.
“You have been nominated as our 2025 girls high school flag player of the year,” Taylor Conklin, director of community engagement with the Cincinnati Bengals, said in a statement. “(Evie) exemplifies excellence both on and off the field. A true trailblazer, she embraced a new sport just a few years ago and now holds eight scholarship offers to play at the collegiate level.”
When a school administrator pulled Evie out of class that day in November and told her to follow him, she thought she was in trouble.
“I thought I was. I thought I had done something,” she explained.
But to her surprise, she walked into a group that was cheering for her.
“I walked up the steps and I seen my parents and everything and I was like ‘oh Lord’ and the tears started coming because like everybody’s here. The whole team here, tons of students are there,” Evie said.
“Um, shocked. I didn’t believe it, especially when they had come out to school and surprised me and everything and apparently everybody was in on it for weeks. And I had absolutely no idea and it was just, I still just kind of don’t believe it, like, I grasped the concept of it, but it’s just really like exciting,” Evie said.
Evie’s flag football coach, Desmond Gault, knew there was something special about this young lady when he first saw her throw a football.
“Either you got it, or you don’t, and Evie has it,” Gault said.
The Bengals presented Evie with tickets to the Super Bowl in February but her coach says the team also gave her another special gift.
“Her most cherished present is her very own Evie Schoolfield jersey,” Gault added. “So, she’s a part of the team.”
Evie is so involved with the sport of flag football that she wants other girls to get involved. Over the summer, she held a flag football camp at her grade school, St. Thomas More in Eastgate.
“I always wanted to play when I was a kid whether it was tackle football,” Evie said. “I didn’t even know flag football was a thing. So, just do it and you never know where you’re going to be in five years, like, I never knew I’d be here if you asked eighth grader me.”>
The second annual Maxwell Football Club National Flag Football Player of the Year award will be presented on March 14th at the 89th Maxwell Awards in Atlanta, Georgia. If Evie wins, you can expect to see more tears of joy roll down her face.
See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.
Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.
Copyright 2025 WXIX. All rights reserved.