Louisiana Girls Flag Football Explodes with Saints and NFL Support

The New Orleans Saints' girls high school flag football program will field 64 teams when its third season kicks off on March 16, 2026, a sixfold increase from the 10-school pilot that launched across Orleans and Jefferson Parishes in the spring of 2024. For the first time, the league extends well beyond the New Orleans metropolitan area, with six North Louisiana schools among those joining a roster that now stretches across the state. The growth comes after the Louisiana High School Athletic Association voted in April 2025 to add girls flag football as a sanctioned sport, a decision spurred by more than 100 of the LHSAA's 157 member schools expressing interest, well above the 80-school threshold required under the association's bylaws. Louisiana entered a two-year probationary period before full sanctioning takes effect, with the Saints and the NFL continuing to provide financial, logistical, and equipment support.

The People Behind the Push

Saints Owner Gayle Benson, who personally handled the coin toss at the 2025 championship between De La Salle and Warren Easton, has been the initiative's most visible advocate. "We are excited that the LHSAA has moved to make sanctioned girls flag football an official sport at high schools throughout Louisiana," Benson said following the Executive Committee's January 2025 conditional approval. Elicia Broussard Sheridan, the Saints' Vice President of Community Relations and Youth Sports Development, credited "overwhelming interest and increased demand from schools throughout the state" for the program's rapid expansion from a 10-team pilot to a 64-team statewide operation. On the national level, NFL Vice President of flag football Stephanie Kwok framed Louisiana's decision as part of a broader campaign, noting that the state's sanctioning brought the total to 15 states offering girls varsity flag football at the time, with Mississippi having announced its own sanctioning just one week earlier through a separate Saints partnership with the MHSAA.

A Playbook That's Spreading Nationwide

Louisiana's trajectory from pilot to statewide program in under two years follows a model that NFL teams have deployed across the country. The Saints' approach, which pairs each participating school with equipment packages including flag belts and footballs along with Nike-designed uniforms, mirrors programs run by the Atlanta Falcons in Georgia, the Cleveland Browns in Ohio, and the Kansas City Chiefs in Kansas. Nationally, 17 state high school athletic associations have now sanctioned girls flag football, with Ohio becoming the latest after growing from 20 to 80 participating schools in three years. Six more states, including Oregon, Kansas, North Carolina, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland, are scheduled to vote on sanctioning in 2026. An additional 18 states operate independent or pilot programs, meaning more than 35 states now offer some form of organized high school girls flag football. Florida, the sport's longest-standing program at roughly 20 years, leads the way with more than 360 schools and nearly 10,000 participants, while California reported almost 11,000 participants in its first sanctioned season.

The Bigger Picture

The numbers behind the movement are difficult to overstate. High school girls flag football participation reached 68,847 in the 2024-25 school year according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, a 60 percent jump from the previous year's 42,955 and a 388 percent increase since the first post-pandemic survey tallied 20,875 participants in 2022-23. Schools offering the sport grew by nearly 1,000 in a single year. Perhaps the most telling statistic is that roughly half of all girls who join a flag football team are playing a high school sport for the first time, suggesting the sport is drawing an entirely new population into competitive athletics rather than simply redistributing existing athletes. With the NCAA having designated women's flag football as an Emerging Sport for Women in January 2026, more than 100 colleges now offering programs across the NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA, and flag football set to make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, the pipeline from high school to college to international competition is taking shape in real time. In Louisiana, that pipeline now runs 64 teams deep and counting.