PIAA votes to sanction girls flag football, first 'official' season arriving in spring of 2027

Mike White / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Are you ready for some more high school football in the WPIAL and PIAA? Well, it’s coming soon to a school near you.

Only this football will have girls — and flags. And it will be played in the spring.

The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) board of directors voted Wednesday afternoon, 32-0, to adopt the sport of girls flag football, beginning in the 2025-26 school year. Some schools around Pennsylvania have had girls flag teams for the past three years, but neither the PIAA nor WPIAL sponsored the sport.

The first season that the PIAA and WPIAL will sanction the sport is in the spring of 2026. However, there will be no PIAA championships that year; the PIAA championships will start in the spring of 2027. The WPIAL is part of the PIAA, and WPIAL executive director Scott Seltzer said the league will also sanction the sport.

“Girls flag football has become popular. I believe we’re the 13th state to fully sanction it,” PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi said. “Recognizing it as a sport and hosting championships we feel is in the best interest of our student-athletes. It’s great.”

This is the second girls sport adopted by the PIAA in the past two years. The PIAA and WPIAL sponsored girls wrestling for the first time in the 2023-24 school year.

There is much work to be done, though, before that first “official” PIAA and WPIAL flag football season of 2027. The National Federation of State High School Associations is in the process of formulating a rulebook for the sport. Among other things, the PIAA and WPIAL will have to set up a playoff system.

“We’re going to take one season in 2026 to get everybody on the same page [for girls flag football], train officials and do those types of things,” Lombardi said. “We want to get a year under our belt, as sort of a trial run, just so we can get everything organized and do it right for 2027.”

The groundwork for Pennsylvania girls flag football was laid over the past three years. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles were among the NFL teams backing the sport, and both the Steelers and Eagles started and sponsored leagues in 2022.

The league in southwestern Pa. area is the High School Girls Flag Football League. It had only six teams in 2022 but was up to 36 last year, including teams from WPIAL schools and four from the Pittsburgh City League. The Steelers have helped with uniforms for some schools.

The PIAA requires at least 100 schools across the state to sponsor a team in a sport before considering whether to adopt it. Lombardi said in April that Pennsylvania had 103 girls flag teams in the spring.

The PIAA issued a release on Wednesday that included this comment from Steelers president Art Rooney II: “We are excited to see such a groundbreaking moment for the future of girls flag football. It has been great working with the Eagles to accomplish a successful ruling that will now give young girls the chance to compete at a state level. We look forward to seeing how girls flag football continues to grow in Pennsylvania and worldwide.”

Participation in girls flag football has grown tremendously across the country the past few years.

According to an annual survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of girls flag football participants at U.S. high schools doubled from 2023 to 2024 and about tripled from 2022. A total of 1,777 high schools in the country had girls flag football in 2024, and 42,955 girls participated. In 2022, there were only 15,716 participants.

“The NFL teams of the Eagles and Steelers, and the NFL office, have been very supportive of this initiative,” Lombardi said.

According to the NFHS, nine state associations sanctioned girls flag football this past spring: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, Alaska, New York, Arizona, Illinois and California. Montana and Colorado were expected to sanction it. Seventeen other states had some sort of pilot program.

Additionally, some colleges are starting to sponsor the sport and will offer some scholarship money. Flag football will be an Olympic sport for men and women at the 2028 Olympics.