By Amy Tennery
NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) – More than a dozen colleges plan to add varsity women’s flag football teams in 2027, officials said on Thursday, adding a critical piece of the talent pipeline ahead of the LA28 Games.
The ECAC will expand from 15 to 29 schools with varsity women’s programmes, after launching a seven-on-seven league in spring 2026, part of a nationwide push from schoolyards to the NFL gridiron to create more opportunities for women in the sport.
“Just a year and a half ago, we saw that flag football was exploding at the youth level and that the NFL was leaning into it and the Olympics were going to have it,” ECAC Commissioner and CEO Dan Coonan told Reuters. “We thought, ‘Gee, college athletics is late to the party here’.”
Coonan said that another dozen schools have joined an informal “wait list” to add a women’s varsity programme under the ECAC, while sponsors lined up and the New York Jets’ Betty Wold Johnson Foundation has poured in $1.5 million.
“The talent and the desire were always there,” said Coonan. “(Players) just lacked the opportunity.”
The NCAA has long been a key incubator for American talent on the Olympic stage, with three-quarters of the US delegation at the Paris 2024 Games having competed at the collegiate level.
The NCAA voted to designate women’s flag football as an “emerging sport” in January, more than two years after it was approved for the Los Angeles 2028 programme, having met the threshold with at least 40 schools.
Access to college-level flag is essential for the women’s game to keep its momentum, said USA Football’s Senior Director of High Performance and National Team Operations Callie Brownson.
“There was this huge gap in providing high-level opportunities for athletes who wanted to continue on and potentially get to the point where they were considered for the national teams,” said Brownson, who is responsible for preparing the US men’s and women’s flag teams for the Games.
“It’s solidifying the pipeline and continuing to provide competitive elite-level opportunities for athletes to continue to grow in the game, get better, and then potentially be considered for the Olympics.”
The American women are among the hot favourites to take gold in 2028, along with rivals Mexico, and the NFL has approached flag football as a key piece of its international agenda – and as a means to draw in more female fans.
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New YorkEditing by Christian Radnedge)
