Gridiron girls

High school football isn’t just for boys anymore. States across the country now offer flag football to girls. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), 16 states have sanctioned the sport—meaning schools can compete for state championships—for the 2025-26 school year. Twenty-two more states have independent associations or pilot girls’ flag football programs with an eye toward becoming sanctioned.

NFHS figures indicate the sport’s growth has been explosive, with nearly 69,000 high school girls playing flag football during the 2024-25 school year—more than three times as many as in 2022-23. The sport owes its surging popularity largely to the fact that despite loving football as much as boys, girls have had far fewer opportunities to play competitively.

Flag football derives its name from the two long, colored strips attached Velcro-style to a belt around each player’s waist. Instead of tackles, play typically stops when a defender rips a ball carrier’s flag from its mooring. While this makes flag football safer than tackle football, violent collisions still do occur.

Whereas tackle football normally involves two teams of 11 players, high school flag football is typically seven-on-seven. Field lengths in flag football vary from 50 yards to the traditional 100. And because flag football is usually played without goalposts, there are no field goals or point-after kicks—“tries,” or points after touchdowns, are determined via runs or passes.

One way in which girls’ football mirrors the boys’ game is that participants can compete in college. NCAA Division II boasts two conferences, and NCAA Division III and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics each have three. Florida and Alabama each have conferences for community colleges.

Women’s flag football will soon get an even bigger stage: The sport will debut in the Olympics at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

Maria Lysaker / Getty Images

Lone Star solidarity

College football teams across Texas are honoring those who lost their lives this past summer in a deadly flash flood.

Adorning the helmets of virtually every high-profile program in the Lone Star State—both public and private—this season will be a decal featuring a dark green ribbon tied around a map of Texas that incorporates the state’s flag. The decal honors the more than 130 people killed when the Guadalupe River flooded in the Texas Hill Country on July 4, including 27 campers and counselors at a Christian girls’ camp.

Eric George, Rice Univer­sity’s deputy athletic director, had the original idea for the logo. “I reached out to friends at different schools, and everyone was on board,” he said in a school press release. “The company that made the stickers even donated them for a lot of schools, which was really cool.”

The universities also collectively released a video showing equipment managers affixing the special decal to their schools’ helmets.

It’s fairly common for sports teams to honor victims of regional tragedies with helmet decals or uniform patches. But not since 9/11, it seems, have so many teams paid homage to those who died in the same destructive event. —R.H.