With NFL support, NCAA interest and Olympics ahead, a D3 league offers a glimpse into the future of women’s flag football
Often touted as the fastest growing sport, flag football will debut at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, a Division III league just held the first NCAA championship for the sport.
ARLINGTON, Va. — The wind is picking up, the sun is beginning to set and time is running out for the Eastern Eagles and the Marymount Saints in what will go down as the first-ever conference championship at the NCAA varsity level for women’s flag football.
It’s halftime and the score is tied 0-0. Eastern, who back in January started its program with just six players, is proving to be a worthy adversary for undefeated Marymount. Just before the second quarter ended, the Saints were knocking on the door of the endzone, but Marymount sophomore quarterback Cara Vollmer’s throw was intercepted by Damiyae Moyet. The Eagles’ junior defensive back nearly housed the pick, taking it 60 yards before her flag was yanked.
Halftime came and went quickly at Bishop O’Connell High School’s football stadium, a venue with no lights, but there was enough time for Eastern coach Amanda Ruller to give her team a brief speech, with the hopes that they could retain their momentum.
“Defense is putting in work today. Keep doing that. This is our game. This is our time,” Ruller tells her squad that has grown to 16 players. “I expected this to be a good matchup and it is. We are putting so much pressure on them. Let’s keep that up.”
Unfortunately for the Eagles, the Saints — who entered this game having outscored their last five opponents 162-2 — found just enough of an offensive stride in the second half. At the end of the third quarter, Vollmer completed a short five-yard dump pass to Samantha Bulik, who evaded one would-be flag puller and then stretched the ball across the pylon as another Eagle tore her flag out of its socket. The touchdown was good, and Marymount would score once more in the fourth frame to win the Atlantic East Conference Championship 12-0.
While Bulik notched the important game-deciding score, Carly Rivera powered the Saints with 75 yards of total offense on 12 touches. She also notched five flag-pulls on the defensive end.
“When I was a kid, I never thought I would be able to play flag football past high school, and even then, it was more of a secondary sport. So, to be able to play it in college is unreal. And it was literally the most fun months I’ve had in a long time,” Rivera tells SB Nation. “I think it’s just going to keep growing. It’s going to start here and then I think it’s quickly going to take off at the NCAA level. Next thing you know, we’re going to be having sort of a March Madness.”
Assuming she would never be able to play flag football past the youth level, Rivera pivoted her focus at St. John’s College High School to other sports, like basketball. She went on to hoop at Columbia where she would finish top 10 all-time in program history in assists and help the Lions win their first-ever Ivy League title in 2023.
Those days playing at Columbia were special for Rivera. But this, standing here in near-darkness on a high school football field while holding the Atlantic East Championship trophy for flag football, feels different. The feeling finally sets in as she watches a bucket of ice water get dumped on her father who is the head coach. Rivera and the Marymount Saints will always be the first champions of the first NCAA conference to sponsor women’s flag football at the varsity level.
“I have no words for that. That’s one of the coolest feelings,” Rivera says. “We are truly the first ever to have accomplished this. We just wanted to show as best we could that the sport is going in a great direction and there is a future in it.”
With the backing of the NFL and an international stage looming, flag football is booming and growing in leaps and bounds. It has often been touted in recent years as the fastest growing sport in the world. The NFL estimates that about 20 million people across 100 countries are playing flag football or a variation of it. In the U.S., the National Sporting Goods Association said that from 2022 to 2023, girls participating in flag football increased by 55 percent to 1.6 million.
It’s spreading at the college level too. More teams and more conferences are adding flag football, and there’s a real possibility that it becomes an NCAA-championship-level sport over the next decade.
But whatever the future holds for flag football, the Atlantic East — a Division III NCAA league founded in 2018 made up of schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Virginia — will always be first. It was the first NCAA conference to declare its intentions of making women’s flag football a varsity sport, the first to complete a full season at that level, and the first to hold a conference championship for it. In the same way that people in women’s basketball talk about Delta State and Immaculata as early groundbreakers, the Atlantic East and its teams should be referenced that way as the history of women’s collegiate flag football is recorded.
“We had buy-in from our presidents, our athletic directors, our campuses, and that’s a huge part of it, being able to step up and do something for these student-athletes,” Rebecca Mullen, the interim commissioner for the Atlantic East, tells SB Nation. “There’s no one else that can say that they did this, and these student athletes will have one of the most unique experiences.”
For the first time ever, flag football — men’s and women’s — will be an Olympic sport when the Summer Games come to Los Angeles in 2028. The International Olympic Committee announced the future inclusion of the sport in October 2023. A few months before that news broke, the Atlantic East said in a press release that it was partnering with the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles and RCX Sports with the hopes of becoming the first NCAA conference to sponsor women’s flag football at the varsity level.
Last Saturday in Arlington, Virginia — where Rivera hauled in passes and dodged flag-pullers in a blue No. 15 jersey — that dream became a reality.
The 2024 season featured just five club-level teams — Centenary, Cabrini, Immaculata, Marymount, and Neumann. For its debut varsity campaign this year, three more schools added teams — Eastern, Penn State Schuylkill, and Holy Family — while Cabrini closed due to financial struggles, bringing the Atlantic East to seven teams. They would play 7-on-7 rules, with field dimensions of 80-by-40 yards and 12-minute quarters with a running clock.
Between its first proclamation that it was venturing into flag football and now, the Atlantic East changed commissioners. Jessica Huntley resigned after six years on the job in July 2024, and Rebecca Mullen has been the interim commissioner ever since. A former Division III athlete herself, Mullen played lacrosse and field hockey at Worcester State, where she graduated from in 2013 before going on to obtain a Master’s degree in Sports Industry Management from Georgetown.
Mullen had been the assistant commissioner of the Atlantic East for about a year when Huntley and the conference announced its intentions to be the first NCAA league to sponsor women’s flag football at the varsity level. Last Saturday in Arlington, her fingerprints were all over the championship as she met with referees before games, drove stakes into the ground, then used that hammer to weigh down the cloth on a table that presented the championship trophies, and then cleaned up the press box and turned the lights out as one of the last people to leave the stadium.
When asked why the Atlantic East wanted to be among the first to have flag football in the NCAA, Mullen gives credit to the conference’s universities who saw the vision.
“There has to be a buy-in for the financials. Because adding a sport adds schedules, travel, all those kinds of costs,” Mullen says. “It’s growing so much at high schools and youth levels around the country, around the world, and it’s just really exciting to give them the opportunity for the next step, and we’re excited to add to that.”
When Marymount was starting up its flag football program, it didn’t have to look far for its first head coach and someone who could build the team from the pavement up. Michael Rivera, an Arlington resident for three decades, coached flag football at the youth level for 15 years and founded the nationally-recognized Virginia Hurricanes program. He coached in eight NFL Flag National Championship tournaments and in 2022 was one of five coaches nominated for NFL Flag Football Coach of the Year. With the Virginia Hurricanes basketball teams, Rivera coaches alongside Katie Fudd, the mother of UConn star Azzi. The Fudds were in the bleachers on Saturday in Arlington, with Tim Fudd leading some fan chants.
“It was an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. And it was an opportunity to do something a little different,” Rivera told SB Nation about coaching Marymount. “It just made sense, because it’s such a fun sport, and it’s grown so much in the past five years on the girls’ side. I was optimistic it was going to be coming to college, and then when it did, I was really excited to be part of it.”
Most head coaches of collegiate sports don’t have to teach their players the basics of the game. Basketball players enter college knowing how to set screens and how to shoot. Soccer players know what the offside rule is. Softball players know the difference between balls and strikes.
But the players that make up Rivera’s team at Marymount — and the teams across the Atlantic East — are typically converts from other sports. Most of them didn’t play flag football in high school. And so, while Rivera can spot athletic ability, talent and skill, he still has to do a fair amount of instruction on the game.
“That’s what made this really interesting. A lot of our youth players are soccer players and basketball players, and we teach them how to play flag,” Rivera says. “We did not recruit — we didn’t have time to recruit flag football players. We have taken athletes at Marymount, converted them into flag players, and they’ve been tremendous.”
One player who knew the sport well was Rivera’s daughter, Carly. She still had a year of NCAA eligibility left following her time playing basketball at Columbia and had been hanging around Marymount’s basketball team to get her fix for an athletic activity and some competition. She’s going to medical school later this year, so her father made a simple pitch to her before the season started: “Why don’t you do something fun before you go to med school?”
Carly Rivera led the Saints in receiving, hauling in 53 passes for 600 yards and eight touchdowns. She also led the team in flag-pulls with 54 and registered three interceptions.
“I’ve always loved flag football and I’ve just been trying to find ways to stay active and harness my competitive side. So, this was perfect. It was a little bit of getting-back-on-the-bike,” Carly Rivera says. “My dad joked with me that it’s completely changed from when I was a kid, and he’s right. I’ve always loved to pull flags, so I was very excited once I remembered that I could still do that.”
Amanda Ruller was working at Division II Central Washington University when she heard that a small private school in the northeast suburbs of Philadelphia, Eastern University, was starting a varsity women’s flag football program and looking for a head coach. She had success at Central Washington as the team’s running backs coach — coaching a 1,000-yard rusher and helping the team make the third round of the NCAA Tournament — but she wanted something more.
While Ruller has an impressive resume — she’s coached in college football in the U.S. and Canada, and spent time with four teams in the NFL and CFL — she felt like she was bumping her head against a glass ceiling and kept being overlooked for more prestigious jobs because she’s a woman. So, when Eastern presented her with not just the chance to be the head coach, but to also build a program from scratch in her vision, she jumped at it.
“It was a learning opportunity for growth,” Ruller told SB Nation. “Out of all the things I’ve ever done in football, it’s been challenging to move up, because there’s not a lot of women being offensive coordinators or head coaches. This opportunity afforded me both of those opportunities. Now is my opportunity to actually show what I can do in football on a real stage, on a real level.”
Indeed, Ruller isn’t just the head coach of Eastern’s flag football team. She’s also its offensive coordinator. She’s also the play-caller and scheme-designer. She built this program from nothing as its chief architect. There was a bigger calling and much more responsibility here than had she just gone to another college to be a positional coach for the men’s tackle team.
After a bumpy start by beginning the season with back-to-back losses, the Eagles went on to win 12 of their next 14 games with their only losses coming to Marymount. Along the way, Ruller was teaching the finer points of flag to her players she converted from other sports, she was tweaking play designs and trying players at different positions, and she was running the team’s social media accounts too.
Through the Bill Walsh Fellowship program in the NFL a few years ago, Ruller got to work with the Seattle Seahawks and under then-head coach Pete Carroll. That’s when she knew she too wanted to be a head coach and has been pursuing the chance to lead and mold her own team ever since.
“(Carroll) actually showed me what a head coach looks like at the highest level possible, and I knew at that very moment that I wanted to be just like him,” Ruller says. “I actually take all of those practices that he showed me — from running a team meeting to installing a philosophy to creating a team — into my team. I do everything the exact same, and I feel like it has fostered these girls into a unit.”
Ruller was one of just two head coaches that are women in the Atlantic East this season. Her hope is that as flag football expands in the college ranks, it presents more opportunities for women to get into and advance in coaching football.
“The question isn’t if, the question is when, right? When is this going to branch out to a bigger stage? Now, we’re on the smallest stage possible, and I’m so excited, because every step we’re taking is going to make it bigger and bigger and bigger,” Ruller says. “Eventually, every (NFL) team is going to have a sister team. The question is not whether women belong anymore. The question is, where can we place them? Because they’re here to stay.”
Currently, 15 states have officially sanctioned girls flag football as a high school sport and 17 others have announced pilot programs. Mississippi and Washington were the latest states to sponsor the sport at the high school level. USA Today even launched a top 25 ranking for the best high school teams throughout the country.
But as the sport barrels toward its debut on the international stage at the 2028 Summer Olympics, Michael Rivera believes there is more work to be done.
“We still need more of it on the high school level,” Rivera says. “It’s very interesting in this country where you have states that have had flag football for 10 years, or states like California and Florida with 300 high school teams playing, and then you have some states where it’s not even a sport. That is the most important thing, and then getting the colleges on board so we get a critical mass, so that it becomes sanctioned in the NCAA, so that we can have our March Madness or April Madness tournament. We need colleges to add it so they can get the numbers.”
At the college level, a handful of Division I schools have started teams, including Mount St. Mary’s and Alabama State. More conferences will play full varsity seasons next year too, including the Empire 8 (D3), Conference Carolinas (D2) and United East (D3). The CIAA — a Division II conference made up of HBCU programs — held a tournament this year, but not a full season.
Back in February, flag football made a significant stride in gaining ground in the college ranks when the NCAA recommended adding it to its Emerging Sports for Women program. Since its inception in 1994, the program 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 the NCAA will host the sport’s first sanctioned championship next year.
Should flag football be granted status in the Emerging Sports for Women program at the 2026 NCAA convention, there’s still a ways to go before fans see something like an NCAA Tournament for the sport. Currently, according to the NCAA, about 65 schools have 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 NCAA discussing it as an emerging sport and kind of moving in that direction really does help our institutions see the next steps,” Mullen says. “Now, we want there to be more of a championship experience with those next steps. And a lot of that comes from people having conversations, building programs.”
Heading toward the Olympics, the NFL is heavily invested in seeing the sport grow at all levels — from youth, high school and college, all the way to a potential pro league. The NFL ran commercials promoting flag football during the Super Bowl and Eagles’ quarterback Jalen Hurts appeared in an ad teasing the sport’s inclusion in the 2028 Summer Games. The NFL has also made the flag football pivot with its Pro Bowl and a whopping 4.7 million people tuned into the 2025 game, matching the viewership of this year’s NBA All-Star Game.
In March, Front Office Sports reported that the NFL was fielding interest from potential business partners to found a professional flag football league. The NFL even had WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark and tennis legend Serena Williams participate in a panel discussion about the sport. According to Chiefs’ owner Clark Hunt, at one point during the panel, Clark said, “If flag football was around when I was growing up, I might not be a basketball player.” Williams and her husband have emerged as potential investors in a flag football league.
“It’s going to go like wildfire in Division II and eventually Division I,” Ruller says. “There’s going to be tons of NIL deals involved in this and girls are going to go nuts.”
With the NFL backing it, with the NCAA exploring it and with folks with deep pockets aiming to invest in it, the future for flag football seems to be bright.
And wherever the sport goes, the Atlantic East will always have been first.