It was May 2023, the end of her freshman year, when Ella Kecskemeti had the idea of starting a flag football team at Groves High School in Beverly Hills. Her dad had sent her an article about a flag football league the Detroit Lions started for girls that same year; she used to play with the boys when she was a kid.
She wanted her school to be part of that league.
“So I kinda just went up to my school’s athletic director the next day and was like, ‘Hey, my dad sent me this thing. I was wondering if it’s something we could do next year’,” Kecskemeti said. “And he was like, ‘Um, that’s not really how this works.'”
Kecskemeti said she was told that she first needed to find between 15 to 30 students who would be interested in playing the sport. Her athletic director, she said, didn’t think that many students would be interested due to playing other sports during the spring season. She took to Instagram and made a post looking to gauge how many girls might want to play. Within a week, Kecskemeti said she had a piece of paper with about 40 signatures of interested students.
In October, the school signed off on forming a flag football team.
“It was just really great,” said Kecskemeti, 16, of Beverly Hills. “I was just happy to meet everyone and become teammates with them and work together. And it’s just super fun to see everyone else have the same passion as me and I talk to girls who are like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been wanting to play football my whole life’ or ,’I used to play as a kid, too,’ and now we all get to share this opportunity and experience together.”
Flag football, the non-contact adaptation of NFL football for all genders and ages, has grown in popularity over the past four years in the U.S. and has been especially impactful for girls looking to play football.
It’s a sanctioned high school sport in 11 states. Students like Kecskemeti and coaches across the state say they hope the growing number of high schools playing the sport in Michigan will lead to the same official distinction here, with a state championship, like soccer, volleyball and basketball.
Flag football is played by 20 million people around the world, according to NFL.com. The league is continuing to showcase the sport’s growth and popularity with a recently announced flag football championship this summer that will be broadcast across multiple ESPN platforms and on NFL+. In October, the International Olympic Committee announced that flag football would be added as an Olympic sport at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Already, nearly 37,000 youth between the ages of 4 and 17 are playing flag football in 60 licensed NFL Flag Football leagues across Michigan, said Jaclyn Thomas, chief marketing officer of RCX Sports, a national youth sports organization that partnered with the NFL and took over the leadership of the NFL Flag Football program.
A spokesman for the Michigan High School Athletic Association said the organization needs to see more proof of interest from high schools before it would consider adding flag football as a sport.
Players and coaches say they’re ready to make that happen.
“Why they don’t sanction it as a high school sport? I don’t know. I mean, I think — and this is my opinion — I think it’s ridiculous that they don’t…” said Jesse Siordia, head coach of Siena Heights University’s newly created flag football team. “Because there’s a lot of girls out there that really want this to take off and really want to be a part of it. So, I think that Michigan is missing a phenomenal opportunity to create this sport and hopefully for other universities in our area like Madonna, Lawrence Tech, to create a team to give an opportunity for these girls to compete at the next level.”
Advancing the game
Flag football started seeing more mainstream success in 2020 when RCX Sports took over the leadership of the NFL Flag Football program. Thomas said the organization’s goal wasn’t only to grow participation in a sport that had over 420,000 kids playing in the U.S., but to also get girls to play the sport.
“We saw that — just by researching and going out there — the girls that were playing loved it; it’s a very transitional sport for soccer, or volleyball…,” Thomas said. “From there, we knew that we wanted to put together an initiative to get girls playing flag football. And so right off the bat, we created this initiative of females in flag. And made it a focus to figure out how we can build flag football into more of a pathway for girls.”
The organization created events for girls to participate in to draw their attention to the sport, including hosting showcases and adding more girls into its marketing material. In May 2020, a partnership between RCX and the National Athletic Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) was made to offer flag football as a varsity sport at a collegiate level.
Genevieve Caffelli, the founder of SNAPtivities youth program in Bloomfield Township, has coached thousands of kids in the Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills area and runs seven NFL Flag leagues. Caffelli, 52, of Birmingham, said in February the four things she truly enjoys about flag football are that it’s a non-contact sport, it’s recreational, it doesn’t require a lot of time commitment and it’s not an expensive game. Players only need a football, a mouth guard, shoes and, of course, a flag football belt and flags.
“That’s what makes it so accessible for everybody to be able to play, whether you’re from a rural area or an urban area … you can play the game with limited equipment and that’s what makes it so great to play,” said Chris Fritzsching, executive director for football education for the Detroit Lions.
Fritzsching developed the football education program after spending time as a youth and high school football coach. The purpose of the program, he said, is to teach kids the fundamentals of football and he incorporates flag football in those teachings to help grow the game across Michigan.
“NFL flag, or flag football in general, is just an opportunity for everybody to get involved in the game and that’s what makes it so exciting for the growth of the game; not only for boys but also girls as well, ’cause everyone can play, it’s inclusive for everybody,” he said.
In 2021, while attending an annual NFL Club Summit, Fritzsching said he remembered a conversation being had about girls flag football and the excitement it was bringing to the markets where flag football was sanctioned. After speaking with those organizations and learning about how they got started, along with football coaches across Michigan, the Lions successfully launched the Michigan Girls High School Flag Football Pilot League in January 2023.
The league consisted of four schools and played over a three week period in the spring last year.
“It was a great opportunity to advance the game and grow the game,” Fritzsching said. “In the 20 years now that I’ve been here with the Lions, witnessing and being a part of that program on that day-one was one of the most rewarding programs I’ve ever been a part of.”
After the success of the inaugural season in 2023, the number of teams that participated in the second season of the league in 2024 increased from four to 24.
Taking the lead
The Lions haven’t been the only organization to promote the sport in Michigan. Siena Heights, a private university an hour outside of Detroit in Adrian, announced in November that it planned to launch the first women’s flag football team in the state in the spring of 2025, spurred by the growing popularity of the sport.
In March, the university named Siordia as its new head coach for the upcoming team. Since taking on the role, he has recruited 15 students to commit to the team; three play flag football in high schools in Michigan.
Siordia said he believes one of the biggest reasons the sport hasn’t become sanctioned in Michigan is because it doesn’t have enough leaders and supporters backing it and championing the cause; the only person he sees taking a widespread initiative in Michigan is Fritzsching. With additional leadership, he believes that more schools could join the Lions league and could help push to getting the sport sanctioned.
“Somebody needs to take that as full-time job,” Siordia said. “Because I can guarantee you, next year — it went from four teams to 24 teams (this year) — I can guarantee you next year, it’ll be at 50 or more.”
‘Part of a conversation’
Back at Groves High School, teacher Geoff Wickersham was asked by Kecskemeti to coach the Groves flag football team due to his over 20 year experience running powderpuff football programs. In his first year, the Groves flag football team had a 4-0 season. After seeing how much the girls enjoyed playing the sport, Wickersham said he has already spoken to the school’s athletic director to find out how to get flag football sanctioned.
“The real question is, when is it going to happen,” Wickersham said. “Is it going to happen in the fall or the spring?”
There are requirements that need to be met first before a sport can become sanctioned by the MHSAA.
There are more than 750 high schools that participate in MHSAA programming. In order for a sport to become sponsored (what the MHSAA calls a sanctioned sport) at least 10% of the schools (roughly 75 schools) would need to have a varsity team, said Geoff Kimmerly, communications director for MHSAA. He said that according to an annual survey the MHSAA sends out to its schools about sports participation, over the past eight to nine years, there has been an average of 200-600 students (both girls and boys) playing flag football. This year there were only five schools that had a boys team and six schools with a girls team, Kimmerly said.
In order to add a sponsored sports for girls, the MHSAA must also add a sport for boys. It was recently announced that boys volleyball and girls field hockey will be the next sponsored sports in the MHSAA beginning the 2025-2026 season. The last time new sports were added to MHSAA programming was during the 2004-2005 season when boys and girls lacrosse were approved. Kimmerly said it’s unlikely the MHSAA would add any sport for sponsorship for one gender, without the approval of another.
While other sports like indoor track have had more conversations about sponsorship, Kimmerly said the conversation to add flag football isn’t completely off the table.
Girls flag football, he said, has “at least been part of a conversation because we realize that that has the potential to grow very quickly.”
In nearby Illinois, the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) announced in February that girls’ flag football would become the next sanctioned sport in the state after the popularity of the sport rose after the Chicago Bears organization launched a pilot program three years ago.
Wickersham said that announcement from the IHSA gives him hope that Michigan will have success in sanctioning the sport.
“They’re a northern state,” Wickersham said. “Most of the other states are southern or western where it’s warmer and they can do that. They’re a Great Lakes state like us and they have the same weather we do in the fall or in the spring.”
Making a difference
While those in charge continue to debate flag football’s future in Michigan high schools, the sport is making a difference.
As the youngest of 13 and the only girl, Ojni Canales, 12, of Detroit, grew up playing football with her brothers. Her mother, Victoria Canales Jones, 55, said she always wanted her daughter to be a cheerleader but said Canales “wanted no parts of that.”
Canales has struggled with shyness. When her mother enrolled her and her siblings into the Downtown Boxing Gym in Detroit in 2020, “she was literally mute for weeks,” said Asiyah Williamson, director of enrichment at the youth organization and Canales’ mentor. In 2023, Williamson recruited Canales to join the organization’s flag football team and she became the only girl on the team. Canales Jones said that her daughter’s confidence has only grown since joining the team.
“It seems like she gets on the field and she just forgets that shyness,” Canales Jones said. “She’s really especially competitive, especially with the boys. So, she’s kinda fearless when she gets out there, she’s not hesitant, she doesn’t hang back, she kinda just goes for it.”
For Kecskemeti and her teammates at Groves, the sport has started to provide them life-changing opportunities. Three of the Kecskemeti’s teammates were offered scholarships to play at Siena Heights and they were able to achieve a success that the boys football team has yet to achieve.
“The funny part is that we went to Ford Field before the men’s (varsity football) team went,” said Sara Litowiec, 17, of Southfield and an incoming senior at Groves.
Sarah Day, assistant coach for the Groves flag football team, believes in order for the sport to be sanctioned, every school district has to be on the same page to keep pushing the sport forward.
“I think our call to action should not only be MHSAA but also the athletic directors in the area and in Michigan because I think they have a lot of say in ‘Okay this is something our kids are interested in,'” Day said. “I mean, our girls put out a whole poll of do you want to do this. And we just need more districts and schools to do that because I think women would want to do this, high school girls would want to do this, but I do think that’s not on the top of the radar for athletic departments, truthfully.”
Siena Heights’ Siordia is hopeful that with all the attention flag football is receiving, more girls will try out flag football and further showcase the sport.
“That’s what I’m hoping that people start realizing, like, ‘Hey this sport is for real,'” Siordia said. “This is not just something that’s just some type of recreational type thing.”
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Eric Guzmán covers youth sports culture at the Free Press as a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support this work at bit.ly/freepRFA.
Contact Eric Guzmán: eguzman@freepress.com; 313-222-1850. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter: @EricGuzman90.