One of the fastest growing sports in the country, with roots in eastern Idaho.

RIGBY — Welcome to Monday Night Lights.

I can see a future where flag football rules the field and thousands of girls play the sport that boys take for granted, exploding onto a thousand fields.

Welcome to the flag version of women’s soccer, one of the fastest growing sports in the country.

Welcome to Rigby. On Monday night on the lush green fields of Harwood Elementary School, high school flag football will take its first steps toward joining the nation.

“I grew up with my brothers and played soccer with all the boys,” Andrea Budrero said. She worked with Haley Belknap in Jefferson County School District 251 and helped start a new girls’ league. “I loved it. It was my favorite sport, but it was the only thing we knew besides powder puffing.”

That is about to change. At least in Rigby, the area’s new high school-level girls’ flag football league is underway in its first year. The league includes not only junior high school students but also teams from fourth to sixth grade. But the big news is at the high school level.

Flag football has been a youth sport for decades, but it wasn’t usually offered at the high school level.

Until now.

According to the National Federation of High Schools, nine states have already recognized girls’ flag football as a varsity sport: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, Alaska, New York, Arizona, Illinois and California. Colorado and Montana plan to sanction the sport this year, and 17 other states are also working to develop pilot programs.

While Idaho is far from sanctioning women’s flag football, the process has to start somewhere. Players, as well as organizers, parents, coaches and schools, hope Rigby’s new league will be the first domino in the process.

There are 10 high school teams in the league. Rigby has five teams, Madison has two teams and Bonneville, Skyline and Thunder Ridge each have a team. Budrero said Sugar-Salem, Shelly and Hillcrest have each expressed interest in joining the league next season.

The league is part of NFL FLAG, an organization that helps promote more than 1,800 organized flag football leagues with approximately 700,000 players across the United States.

What does that mean for Rigby’s Startup League? Most of the time, it’s about opportunity and the future.

opportunity

“I think it’s great for girls who want to participate,” Rigby athletic director Ty Shippen said, noting the goal is to grow the sport. “It’s still early days, so I don’t know how it will turn out, but there’s definitely a passion for it.”

Similar to the Grid Kid League, schools do not financially support the Flag Football League, so it essentially operates as a club team affiliated with the NFL FLAG.

Logistics don’t really matter to these girls who just wanted to have fun.

“After the first practice, I was really excited about this,” Skyline 49ers junior Mickey Lopez said. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Lopez, who is also on the Skyline wrestling team, said he wanted to try something new.

“I thought playing a new sport would change things,” she said.

Several Skyline athletes also compete in women’s wrestling, but the sport has seen a rapid increase in the number of teams and wrestlers over the past five or six years, and is expected to be finally sanctioned in Idaho in 2022. It’s a sport.

Brooke Hensley is also a wrestler at Skyline and has competed in the state tournament. Although she never played football before joining the 49ers, she said she feels there are similarities between the two sports.

“I want to do my best,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work (to qualify for the state wrestling tournament). You have to work like this to the best of your ability.”

There’s also a bit of a pioneering spirit, she noted. Some girls came under fire in the early days of women’s wrestling before it eventually became popular. That didn’t happen on the soccer field, perhaps because girls compete with other girls rather than with boys. But that mentality is still there.

“It’s fun,” she said. “We can do what they are doing.”

If you stop by Harwood Elementary School on a Monday evening, you’ll see fourth- through sixth-grade teams competing on one end of the field and high school girls playing on the other end. They wear jerseys provided by NFL Flag and the referees are state-certified. A separate field at the back of campus houses the Grid Kid team, which includes players from fourth grade through middle school.

Some boys may have played flag football from an early age before progressing to grid kidding, but for girls, who tend to gravitate toward other sports, that’s not really an option. .

Skyline coach Brian Zollinger said his two daughters were into cheerleading and wrestling before seeing a social media post about a new girls’ flag football league.

“They saw that and said, ‘We have to do this,'” Zollinger said.

Most of his 12 players had never played organized soccer, so teaching them the fundamentals from day one was a top priority.

“I was amazed at how quickly they picked it up,” said Zollinger, who has coached flag football and grid kids for 12 years. “My goals changed after one practice. They are learning more detailed soccer techniques, plays, and formations. After the first practice, they absorbed it like a sponge, so I The goals have completely changed. It’s great to see.”

“The first week he was dropping a lot of balls, but now he’s catching a lot of balls,” Rigby Cowboys coach Paul Kors said. “They’re chasing the ball. They’re more aggressive. … The girls seem to have learned the basics really quickly.”

“I just always wanted to play soccer.”

The players said they always had a passion for playing and just needed the opportunity.

“I always wanted to play football,” said Rigby freshman Sadie Stoker, who played basketball, track, softball and powderpuff football.

She said learning the intricacies of the sport was a challenge in the early days, but she’s getting used to it. literally.

“It’s easy to catch the ball, but it’s hard when the defense is on your side,” she said.

On a recent Monday night, Angie Robison, the school district’s board president, was also on the sidelines. Her two granddaughters played flag football, but the oldest had no other options after sixth grade.

She contacted Mr. Budrero, who also coached young flag football players, and after discussions with Mr. Shippen, Rigby’s athletic director, the new league began to take shape.

“The first year went really well,” Robison said. “My grandchildren were thrilled to be able to keep playing.”

The key is to keep playing

Like women’s wrestling, the growth of women’s flag football seems inevitable. Shippen said it could take time for it to be sanctioned as a varsity sport, and many factors are needed to make it happen, including more teams, more players and more schools. .

Treasure Valley recently added girls flag football for ages 8-14 through Optimist Youth Football. Perhaps the biggest motivation may be at the highest level, as flag football is scheduled to make its Olympic debut in 2028.

But after just a few weeks of high school girls flag football competition, the future looks promising in eastern Idaho.

“I don’t think we even need to hire them,” Skyline’s Zollinger said. “I think we’ll have multiple teams in the Skyline next year. … The goal is to probably do some offseason things so we can be in full swing. Based on the level of interest, we’ll have more than one team in the Skyline next year. I think there will be two or three teams in the Skyline.”

“I go to school and my friends say, ‘I want to do that next year,'” Rigby freshman Ani Berrett said. “I think everyone is scared or afraid to go outside at first, but once you see it…it’s fun.”

Who doesn’t want to have fun?

“I think this thing has the potential to grow pretty big, and I think it’ll be fun to see where it goes,” Verrett said. As a freshman, he could be a part of the league’s growth in the future. “It’s going to get pretty big.”