Girls flag football is booming at the high school level. It’s a little more complicated for the boys

By Hannah Keyser, CNN

San Francisco (CNN) — When Austin Sheepo first told his girlfriend that he plays on his high school flag football team, she was a little confused.

“Isn’t that a girls’ sport?” she asked.

They attend different high schools, and at her school, “they have a real football team and a girls’ flag football team,” he said.

Real Football: The kind where kids tackle each other; the kind with violence, an unrivaled dominance in the cultural psyche, and concussion concerns. Real football is the stuff of Friday night lights, and the subject of concerning studies about C.T.E. even in young athletes.

Real football has “the risk of injury that I think people want to watch,” according to Sheepo’s teammate, Briggs Cline.

And at Lick-Wilmerding High School, an elite private prep school in San Francisco, the parents won’t let their sons play Real Football. Instead, Lick-Wilmerding offers fall flag football, as part of a coalition of six schools in the area that formed a league to provide a safer (and cheaper) alternative to the quintessential American high school sport. For boys.

The boys on Lick-Wilmerding’s flag football team — which dominates its local league, 25-1 over the last two seasons with a pair of championships — understand the compromise they’ve struck between safety and love for the sport.

“It’s almost like a toxic relationship,” Sheepo, the team’s quarterback and a senior who has played his last high school snap already, said. “You want to get as close to football as you can without actually playing football.”

But Sheepo’s girlfriend is correct, at the high school level flag football is overwhelmingly a girls’ sport. He and his teammates are among the only 825 boys around the country who played high school flag football last school year, compared to 68,847 girls on high school flag football teams, according to The National Federation of State High School Associations.

Girls’ participation is booming — between the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, 25,000 more girls signed up for high school flag football and it was offered in nearly 1,000 more schools — in a trend that’s garnering significant coverage and celebration. But over that same span, the number of boys playing flag football actually decreased.

Meanwhile, more than a million boys played tackle football last school year.

‘My parents were like, ‘Nope’’

Sometimes, the boys of Lick-Wilmerding wish they were among them.

“I always wanted to play tackle,” Sheepo said. He’s tall and athletic, a star basketball player as well. When he was in middle school, coaches at other high schools tried to recruit him for football. He was enamored with the idea. “And then my parents were like, ‘Nope.’”

“Football is, by far, my favorite sport and I’ve always wanted to play,” said Oliver McCulloch-Juilland, another senior on the team. “But my whole life, my mom, she’s just really big on not letting me get concussions and stuff.”

“My dad played tackle football growing up, and I played it a bit at family gatherings,” said Cline. “But then, when I was a kid, I got too many concussions. I’ve always wanted to play football. So flag football actually lets me play football.”

Even though they’re conceding the dangers of traditional tackle football through their actions, the goal at Lick-Wilmerding is not to deny the existence — or omnipresence or even appeal — of the NFL. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Their coach, Davion Fleming, was a running back and a linebacker/safety at Northwestern. Growing up in Southern California, football was a means to an end for Fleming. It was his ticket into the institutions of higher education that eventually led him here — to an idyllic campus in the hills of San Francisco, where he is the director of admissions for one of the top private schools in the country. And the football coach.

“I want the boys to watch football on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and Monday nights,” Fleming said.

They do.

“I watch it all the time,” said McCulloch-Juilland. “I watch stuff on YouTube. Like, I learn techniques on YouTube, even though in flag football you can’t use certain techniques that I’ve learned.”

Maybe that’s true of the tackle techniques specifically, but part of what has made the Lick-Wilmerding team so successful is its commitment to emulating “real” football. Fleming tapes all their games and studies their opponents. They have film sessions to prepare and dedicate a significant portion of practice to flag-pulling and flag-evading drills. They run about 60 different plays.

Punch left! Star! Z post!

That’s Fleming calling out one such play in demonstration. The season is over, but they showcase the realism of the program for CNN Sports by running schemes in the school gym over lunchtime. Sheepo, wearing a button down-tie-and-sweater combo that makes him look more like a scholar than a jock, shuffles and throws as far as the basketball court they’re playing on will let him. Except for the preppy uniforms, it looks like football.

“We’ve been able to do really well in our league because our offensive and defensive line have dominated,” Fleming says. “And so, like, Oliver right there, I think he had upwards of maybe 20 sacks this year.”

But not real sacks, right?

“Yeah, exactly,” Fleming says.

Still, some players do specialize in defense, like Benjy Cho, another senior on the team, who is the best at pulling flags. Unlike his teammates, Cho never wanted to play tackle football. Baseball is his primary passion and he’s captain of the varsity team at Lick-Wilmerding. But he loves consuming football content and flag gives him a chance to feel like Fred Warner.

“These past four years playing football has made me more attached to it going forward forever,” Cho says.

The tension in boys flag football

About seven miles away from where the Lick-Wilderming boys are running routes and espousing the value of flag football, the NFL prepares for the inaugural Super Bowl-week Pro Bowl. To revive an event that had trended toward perfunctory and missable, the NFL made a couple of changes in recent years.

First, in 2023, the Pro Bowl switched from tackle to flag. And this year, it was held during the media frenzy of Super Bowl week.

Now, as part of the unofficial SportsCon of Super Bowl week, the Pro Bowl caps a daylong celebration of flag football that includes the championship game for the under-13 international coed teams, and a showcase game featuring the 32 best girls high school flag players.

Those events are part of a broader push by the NFL to make flag football more popular, available, and viable. It’s an effort that runs the gamut from youth opportunities – the NFL recently announced a new partnership with Pop Warner – to inclusion in the LA 2028 Olympics and future pro leagues. At those Games, there will be both women’s and men’s flag football, including NFL player participation.

Although there are few specifics determined yet, late last year, the NFL clubs voted to financially support the launch of men’s and women’s pro flag football leagues.

It’s a pipeline, or a ladder, designed to make football a lifelong option even for fans wary of the injury risks associated with tackle. But there’s at least one rung missing. Boys are still expected to play tackle football in high school and college, where flag was recently approved as an emerging sport — which puts it on the path to varsity designation — for women.

“Hopefully they have some sort of intramural flag football or something” Sheepo says about Occidental College, where he’s headed in the fall to play basketball. “I would 100% do that.”

Cline isn’t sure yet where he’ll attend college, but he imagines he’ll go to football games — the real kind — and, probably, watching them do what he cannot because of his injury history will bring up some emotions.

“Jealousy,” he said. “Like, these people, they have a sport that they get to go out and play and that I used to be able to play. I’ll be more sad about it for sure.”

He hopes that his school will offer flag as an intramural option for boys, but even if it does, he doesn’t expect anyone to be watching him wistfully from the stands. Even with his own experience — that of multiple concussions and a beloved high school flag team that enjoyed tremendous success — he understands the undeniable hierarchy.

“Flag football won’t have that same draw or appeal, like large crowds,” he said, “just cause football is baked into the culture of these schools.”

So yeah, maybe they’ll catch clips of the Pro Bowl after the fact. But they’re not tuning in even if it means a chance to watch their version of football on the big stage.

This is the tension around boys’ flag football at the high school and even college level. As a sport, the boys of Lick-Wilmerding love it. Their coach is confident they’re learning the same kind of perseverance and consistency and strategy as their tackle counterparts. The players know football better; when they watch it on TV, their experience on the flag field gives them inklings of recognition. They feel closer to the game.

But no one understands better than they do that by avoiding the risk of tackle ball, they’re sacrificing some of the allure, and maybe all of the machismo. The best boys flag football team in the Bay Area knows that you wouldn’t watch football without the violence.

So, is what they do Real Football?

“There’s a big distinction between just the game of football and the culture of football,” Sheepo said. “I feel like we still play the game of football, but we’re not really a part of the football culture.”

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