San Francisco (CNN) \u2014 When Austin Sheepo first told his girlfriend that he plays on his high school flag football team, she was a little confused.<\/p>\n
\u201cIsn\u2019t that a girls\u2019 sport?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
They attend different high schools, and at her school, \u201cthey have a real football team and a girls\u2019 flag football team,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Real Football: The kind where kids tackle each other; the kind with violence, an unrivaled dominance in the cultural psyche, and concussion concerns. Real football is the stuff of Friday night lights, and the subject of concerning studies about C.T.E. even in young athletes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Real football has \u201cthe risk of injury that I think people want to watch,\u201d according to Sheepo\u2019s teammate, Briggs Cline.<\/p>\n And at Lick-Wilmerding High School, an elite private prep school in San Francisco, the parents won\u2019t let their sons play Real Football. Instead, Lick-Wilmerding offers fall flag football, as part of a coalition of six schools in the area that formed a league to provide a safer (and cheaper) alternative to the quintessential American high school sport. For boys.<\/p>\n The boys on Lick-Wilmerding\u2019s flag football team \u2014 which dominates its local league, 25-1 over the last two seasons with a pair of championships \u2014 understand the compromise they\u2019ve struck between safety and love for the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a toxic relationship,\u201d Sheepo, the team\u2019s quarterback and a senior who has played his last high school snap already, said. \u201cYou want to get as close to football as you can without actually playing football.\u201d<\/p>\n But Sheepo\u2019s girlfriend is correct, at the high school level flag football is overwhelmingly a girls\u2019 sport. He and his teammates are among the only 825 boys around the country who played high school flag football last school year, compared to 68,847 girls on high school flag football teams, according to The National Federation of State High School Associations.<\/p>\n Girls\u2019 participation is booming \u2014 between the 2023-2024<\/a> and 2024-2025<\/a> school years, 25,000 more girls signed up for high school flag football and it was offered in nearly 1,000 more schools \u2014 in a trend that\u2019s garnering significant coverage and celebration. But over that same span, the number of boys playing flag football actually decreased.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, more than a million boys played tackle football last school year.<\/p>\n \u2018My parents were like, \u2018Nope\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Sometimes, the boys of Lick-Wilmerding wish they were among them.<\/p>\n \u201cI always wanted to play tackle,\u201d Sheepo said. He\u2019s tall and athletic, a star basketball player as well. When he was in middle school, coaches at other high schools tried to recruit him for football. He was enamored with the idea. \u201cAnd then my parents were like, \u2018Nope.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFootball is, by far, my favorite sport and I\u2019ve always wanted to play,\u201d said Oliver McCulloch-Juilland, another senior on the team. \u201cBut my whole life, my mom, she\u2019s just really big on not letting me get concussions and stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad played tackle football growing up, and I played it a bit at family gatherings,\u201d said Cline. \u201cBut then, when I was a kid, I got too many concussions. I\u2019ve always wanted to play football. So flag football actually lets me play football.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though they\u2019re conceding the dangers of traditional tackle football through their actions, the goal at Lick-Wilmerding is not to deny the existence \u2014 or omnipresence or even appeal \u2014 of the NFL. Quite the opposite, in fact.<\/p>\n Their coach, Davion Fleming, was a running back and a linebacker\/safety at Northwestern. Growing up in Southern California, football was a means to an end for Fleming. It was his ticket into the institutions of higher education that eventually led him here \u2014 to an idyllic campus in the hills of San Francisco, where he is the director of admissions for one of the top private schools in the country. And the football coach.<\/p>\n \u201cI want the boys to watch football on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and Monday nights,\u201d Fleming said.<\/p>\n They do.<\/p>\n \u201cI watch it all the time,\u201d said McCulloch-Juilland. \u201cI watch stuff on YouTube. Like, I learn techniques on YouTube, even though in flag football you can\u2019t use certain techniques that I\u2019ve learned.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe that\u2019s true of the tackle techniques specifically, but part of what has made the Lick-Wilmerding team so successful is its commitment to emulating \u201creal\u201d football. Fleming tapes all their games and studies their opponents. They have film sessions to prepare and dedicate a significant portion of practice to flag-pulling and flag-evading drills. They run about 60 different plays.<\/p>\n Punch left! Star! Z post!<\/p>\n That\u2019s Fleming calling out one such play in demonstration. The season is over, but they showcase the realism of the program for CNN Sports by running schemes in the school gym over lunchtime. Sheepo, wearing a button down-tie-and-sweater combo that makes him look more like a scholar than a jock, shuffles and throws as far as the basketball court they\u2019re playing on will let him. Except for the preppy uniforms, it looks like football.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been able to do really well in our league because our offensive and defensive line have dominated,\u201d Fleming says. \u201cAnd so, like, Oliver right there, I think he had upwards of maybe 20 sacks this year.\u201d<\/p>\n But not real sacks, right?<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, exactly,\u201d Fleming says.<\/p>\n Still, some players do specialize in defense, like Benjy Cho, another senior on the team, who is the best at pulling flags. Unlike his teammates, Cho never wanted to play tackle football. Baseball is his primary passion and he\u2019s captain of the varsity team at Lick-Wilmerding. But he loves consuming football content and flag gives him a chance to feel like Fred Warner.<\/p>\n \u201cThese past four years playing football has made me more attached to it going forward forever,\u201d Cho says.<\/p>\n The tension in boys flag football<\/p>\n About seven miles away from where the Lick-Wilderming boys are running routes and espousing the value of flag football, the NFL prepares for the inaugural Super Bowl-week Pro Bowl. To revive an event that had trended toward perfunctory and missable, the NFL made a couple of changes in recent years.<\/p>\n First, in 2023, the Pro Bowl switched from tackle to flag. And this year, it was held during the media frenzy of Super Bowl week.<\/p>\n Now, as part of the unofficial SportsCon of Super Bowl week, the Pro Bowl caps a daylong celebration of flag football<\/a> that includes the championship game for the under-13 international coed teams, and a showcase game featuring the 32 best girls high school flag players.<\/p>\n