At the beginning of our spring sports season at Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the women’s flag football team will join us. With about 40 girls participating and their coaches, Danny Bradach, a counselor at IBW, Britney Small, the principal’s assistant, and Robby Sharf, a coach and sub here. IBW can now say it has a women’s flag football team. 

Spring season is a busy time for sports, there’s track and field, softball, baseball, women’s and men’s lacrosse, women’s and men’s tennis, and there’s flag guard. For a while now, the idea has been that there should be a flag football team because there are so many spring sports, but they never had the numbers to do it. Now that they approached it as a secondary sport, many girls were interested in it.

“I know a lot of girls have wanted to play football forever. I mean, I remember my mom talking about how she could have played football,” Bradach says. In the fall, there is contact football that you can play, but men dominate it. “I’ve wanted to play football for a bit now, but my parents won’t let me because of how dangerous it is,” Anna Slade, a freshman here at IBW, says. Which is only fair, about 2-9% of high school football players get concussions per season, according to the Portland Tribune.

There was only one girl who played during the fall season, but there have been up to seven girls. Which still isn’t a lot when we have three football teams, the freshman team, the JV team, and the Varsity team. Anaya Blank, a junior at IBW, is on the women’s flag football team. “I think girls who are sort of interested in tackle football because they’re worried about embarrassment or getting made fun of. I think this is a way for them to do that without being embarrassed or ashamed that they’re playing actual football, because flag football is a lot of fun.”  

The flag football team has been having a good season, even though they’re a new team their playing strong. They will have 13 games and play teams all over Oregon. IBW is the only PIL women’s flag football team. As a new team their still working out logistics on practices and games, but it’s still a fun community, “I think this will really help the wells community, especially since it’s a strong program that’s starting to come up and it’s centered around girls and finding their voices, especially since so many of the girls are so young, it’s gonna really strengthen that community between the different sports.” A senior, Lena Mende, says about the flag football team. 

There are many differences between contact football and flag football; the biggest difference is that in flag football, there is no contact. While flag football has 6-8 players, football has 11; they also last 12 minutes per quarter, unlike flag football, when it’s only 25 minutes per half. They overall play differently; flag football is just a safer way to play.

Having a girl-centered sport is always helpful; football is such a man-dominated sport, with no girls in the NFL. Girls being more confident in this sport will create more opportunities for them. “I think the more opportunities we can give people to be like athletes in high school, the better. I think we have a lot of great no-cut sports as it is, and so just giving people more opportunities, and I think especially giving girls more opportunities to be on no-cut teams,” says Bradach.

As the season goes on, their team will grow. Maybe next year in the fall, you will see some girls on the tackle football team.