![\"UCF](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/K2_1519-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTEMPE, Ariz. \u2014 They stood tall, looking to the west end of the stadium toward the Stars and Stripes whipping in the desert breeze as the National Anthem echoed. Some shook their heads, awestruck by the stage they\u2019d long believed could become a reality.<\/p>\n
All those seasons scrounging for practice fields, all those long car rides to youth tournaments, all those busted fingers suffered going to grab a flag \u2014 it all meant that much more Sunday afternoon as this championship game was being broadcast live on ESPN.<\/p>\n
As with all momentous championship football games, there was the sudden engrossing sound of an aircraft flying overhead during the anthem. Unlike the Super Bowl or College Football Playoff, however, they weren\u2019t F-16s streaming low over thousands in attendance. They were Southwest Airlines flights ascending after takeoff from Phoenix\u2019s Sky Harbor International Airport.<\/p>\n
Nobody was arguing the semantics of ambiance. Like everything else, the University of Central Florida Knights and Florida Gators leaned into the weight of the moment and let the reality sink in. The in-state rivals were facing off with a hefty trophy on the line, but they believed the results were already solidified regardless of who won.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just the start,\u201d said UCF\u2019s Elian Higbie-Long, \u201cand this is a big start.\u201d<\/p>\n
The inaugural Fiesta Bowl Flag Football Classic featured eight teams from around the country in a two-day tournament on Arizona State\u2019s campus. Sponsors transformed intramural fields into a sprawling event that featured 18 games in less than 48 hours. Over those two days, 140 athletes from UCF, Florida, Georgia, ASU, Charlotte, Grand Canyon, Alabama State and USC faced off in the first Division I women\u2019s flag football tournament.<\/p>\n
More than 2,000 tickets were sold for the event. The semifinal and final games aired live on ESPNU on Sunday afternoon. Fans brought cowbells and rang them at will. Florida had an inflatable alligator on its sideline to commemorate highlights. While players escaped the heat between games, they performed TikTok dances together. Fans questioned offensive play calls and hollered about timeout usage. It was a weekend of, well, football.<\/p>\n
Flag football was known as a niche offshoot of football and primarily an intramural collegiate sport, but over the last several years, its reach has overtaken the youth sports realm. In the last year, 2.5 million girls played organized youth and high school flag football.<\/p>\n
According to USA Football, the number of girls aged 6 to 12 playing flag football increased by 283 percent from 2015 to 2024. A sliver of that number was represented this past weekend in Tempe. On Sunday afternoon, UCF defeated in-state rival Florida 19-7 in the championship game held inside Sun Devil Soccer Stadium.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis event itself is a pivotal moment in women\u2019s flag football,\u201d said UCF junior quarterback Kayla Ludwig, whose 44-yard touchdown run late in the fourth quarter sealed the victory for the Knights.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n UCF won the Fiesta Bowl Classic championship 19-7 in a \u201cpivotal moment\u201d for the sport. (Patty Kennedy \/ Fiesta Sports Foundation)<\/p>\n
The sport\u2019s explosion onto the national scene has yet to earn it official NCAA scholarship-level status. Women\u2019s flag football is currently one of four sports on the NCAA\u2019s Emerging Sports for Women program alongside rugby, equestrian and triathlon.<\/p>\n
Gretchen Miron, director of education and external engagement with the NCAA, is part of the emerging sports program. Miron said the significant uptick in investment in women\u2019s sports in the last decade will only help flag football\u2019s popularity continue to soar.<\/p>\n
Miron said sports in the emerging women\u2019s program need at least 40 Division I teams nationwide to move on to the next phase of the process. It\u2019s estimated that more than 60 Division I programs will compete this spring. Anything above 40 in Year 1, Miron said, shows significant staying power.<\/p>\n
Of the eight teams that competed at the Fiesta Bowl Classic, only one, Alabama State, is a varsity-level program recognized by its athletic department. The rest are either well-established or newly established club teams. UCF\u2019s women\u2019s team started in 2013, Baroody said, but didn\u2019t start officially competing at the national level until 2021.<\/p>\n
One of the programs competing in Tempe didn\u2019t even exist in December. USC\u2019s club team came together all of three months ago, when 19-year-old freshman Alia Pasternak took it upon herself to get a team off the ground. Pasternak started playing at the high school level in 2023 when it became an official CIF varsity sport her junior year at Huntington Beach High. She posted about tryouts on social media, and within days had over 100 interested players.<\/p>\n
The USC program officially started on January 12 and now has two teams: a competitive team like the one that came to Tempe and a developmental team that is learning to play. Pasternak was named to the all-tournament team over the weekend and proudly clutched her diamond-encrusted Fiesta Bowl emblem gold necklace.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an opportunity to show our athletic department that this needs to be a varsity sport,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s my goal with our program, to create a statement powerful enough to show them that it is flag football\u2019s time, and there\u2019s interest to back it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once the spring season ends, Miron said a committee on access, opportunity and impact would aim to vote and recommend that the Division I, II and III levels establish a nationwide championship allowing all participating schools to compete.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re on track,\u201d Miron said.<\/p>\n
![\"UCF](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/K015840-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n (Patty Kennedy \/ Fiesta Sports Foundation)<\/p>\n
At least one Power 4 conference is already voicing its interest in adding flag football. Scott Draper, the Big 12 Conference\u2019s chief football and operating officer, told The Athletic that one of the conference\u2019s priorities soon after Commissioner Brett Yormark was hired in 2022 was to study women\u2019s flag football. A year later, when it was officially added to the Olympic Summer Games starting in Los Angeles in 2028, that was the real \u201cjumping off point,\u201d Draper said.<\/p>\n
Of the 16 Big 12 members, Draper said there are already a few universities interested in adding it, with more schools keeping it under consideration.<\/p>\n
According to Miron, if flag football meets all the requirements and is greenlit throughout the various voting stages by the NCAA, the first official NCAA women\u2019s flag football championship tournament would be in the spring of 2028, just a few months before the Olympics in L.A.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe showed the world that flag football can be a female sport and that it deserves to be on the NCAA stage,\u201d UCF coach Brandon Baroody said.<\/p>\n
Alabama State head coach Tyrone Poole is a former two-time Super Bowl champion defensive back. Poole, who played 12 years in the NFL, quoted one of his favorite movies, \u201cTalladega Nights,\u201d in a metaphor often over the weekend: \u201cIf you aren\u2019t first, you\u2019re last.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fiesta Sports Foundation, Poole believes, has laid the groundwork for other prominent bowl games to attempt to replicate a tournament of this stature in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are finally putting money behind it,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s not ignore the elephant in the room now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poole said these flag football athletes deserve the opportunity to earn full athletic scholarships to minimize the financial burden of a college education.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlag football is becoming a very, very powerful sport, which is going to require very, very powerful people that have an understanding of how to make these athletes great and maximize their abilities,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Like past Fiesta Bowl participants, the players were treated to red-carpet treatment.<\/p>\n
When the players arrived at Sky Harbor in Phoenix last week, Fiesta Bowl representatives stood waiting for them at the bottom of the long escalators in their yellow bowl game jackets. There was a dedicated Media Day on Friday for all athletes to discuss their personal paths in the sport and stylized photoshoots for social media content. The Fiesta Sports Foundation provided each team traveling in with a travel stipend, paid for all accommodations, ground transportation and meals.<\/p>\n
Phoebe Schecter, an NFL and flag football analyst for Sky Sports, remembers when major international women\u2019s flag football tournaments were played in the slop and mud. They used to have to walk the field before kickoff to make sure there were no mounds of dog or goose poop.<\/p>\n
Now?<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the expectation,\u201d she said, \u201cand it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEMPE, Ariz. \u2014 They stood tall, looking to the west end of the stadium toward the Stars and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[462],"tags":[62910,8378,62909,354,38815,39353,62911,5,4,465,466,273,58013,39355],"class_list":{"0":"post-557562","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl-draft","8":"tag-alabama-state-hornets","9":"tag-arizona-state-sun-devils","10":"tag-charlotte-49ers","11":"tag-college-football","12":"tag-florida-gators","13":"tag-georgia-bulldogs","14":"tag-grand-canyon-antelopes","15":"tag-hockey","16":"tag-nhl","17":"tag-nhl-draft","18":"tag-nhl-entry-draft","19":"tag-sports-business","20":"tag-ucf-knights","21":"tag-usc-trojans"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116445645003791170","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}