NCAA adds women’s flag football to ’emerging sports’ ahead of Olympics
An NCAA Tournament for women’s flag football is closer to becoming a reality.
In Washington, D.C., on Wednesday at the annual NCAA Convention, the Division I cabinet approved the addition of flag football to the Emerging Sports for Women program. This comes as several schools across the NCAA landscape have added flag football as a women’s varsity sport in recent years. The sport will make its Olympic debut in 2028.
The NCAA recommended adding flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women program last February. The program, which started in 1994, has had success in converting sports like rowing, ice hockey, water polo, bowling and beach volleyball into varsity women’s sports across the NCAA. Most recently, women’s wrestling was granted widespread varsity status and will hold the sport’s first sanctioned NCAA championship this year in Coralville, Iowa.
The Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) announced it will launch a women’s flag football league with a $1 million investment from the Jets through the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation. The league will begin play in next month.
A handful of Division I schools have launched or announced plans to start a varsity women’s flag football team. That group includes Alabama State, Long Island, Mercyhurst, Mount St. Mary’s, UT Arlington and Cal Poly. Many others in the Division II and III ranks also have varsity teams.
Last year, the Division III Atlantic East Conference held a full varsity season of women’s flag football capped by a conference championship, becoming the first NCAA league to do so. Jacqie McWilliams-Parker — commissioner of the CIAA, a Division II HBCU conference — said last year that she hopes to have flag football as a varsity sport in the league during the 2026-27 academic year. Division I commissioners like Sherika Montgomery of the Big South and Jim Phillips of the ACC have said on the record that they’re paying attention to the rise of women’s flag football.
While women’s flag football now has status in the Emerging Sports for Women program, there are still milestones the sport needs to meet before reaching championship status and an NCAA Tournament.
According to data published by the NCAA last year, about 65 schools had flag football teams at the varsity or club level. But to be considered for championship status at least 40 NCAA programs will need to sponsor women’s flag football as a varsity sport within 10 years. Those 40 teams would also have to meet minimums in games played and player participation.
The NFL has estimated about 20 million people across 100 countries are playing flag football or some variation of it. In the U.S., the National Sporting Goods Association said from 2022 to 2023, girls participating in flag football increased by 55% to 1.6 million.
Heading toward the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, the NFL is signaling it is heavily invested in seeing the sport grow. It ran commercials promoting flag football during the 2025 Super Bowl and has had an active hand in helping colleges start teams. The NFL has also pivoted to flag football at the Pro Bowl, with 4.7 million people tuning in to last year’s game, a figure that was in the same ballpark as the NBA All-Star Game.