L-L League officials begin discussion of adding girls flag football
The Lancaster-Lebanon Girls Flag Football League has a nice ring to it.
It's on the ground floor for now, so hold your horses. But the PIAA this week declared high school girls flag football an officially sanctioned sport across the state. It passed after it was reviewed and ultimately received enough votes on the third and final reading.
"You're adding more opportunities for girls, and that's always a great thing," Annville-Cleona athletic director Tommy Long, who also serves as the L-L League football chair, said Thursday. "This will be an opportunity for more girls to come out and play in what is becoming a growing sport.
"There are still some logistical pieces that need to be fleshed out because this happened a lot quicker than most people were expecting. But at the end of the day, giving kids more opportunities is always a great thing."
The PIAA requires that at least 100 schools across the state compete in a sport to sanction it, and that number was reached in flag football last spring, when 36 schools from western Pennsylvania and 65 schools from eastern Pennsylvania participated. The sport has caught on like gangbusters in the greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, where teams have been competing over the last three years.
The first wave of programs were backed by the state's two NFL franchises, the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers, who helped launch leagues in 2022. The Philadelphia Public League and the Philadelphia Catholic League — PIAA District 12 — already offer girls flag football as an official athletic program in their schools. More than 1,600 girls played in that area last spring.
The PIAA also acknowledged that girls flag football had adopted operational and safety standards, and that it created a positive, structured experience for all the players.
This has set in motion the potential for L-L League programs to start adding girls flag football to their athletic menus in the near future.
There are a few caveats. For starters, the National Federation of High School Associations won't start creating an official girls flag football rules book until January. And that's in hopes of having an official statewide season — likely in the spring — in the 2025-26 school year. That's the earliest the PIAA would host its first official championship.
"I'm always happy to see additional opportunities for female athletes at every level," L-L League executive director Todd Reitnouer said. "At the local level I believe it will take some time to see how well this develops, and what the time frame will be for our implementation. There are a lot of things to consider in sponsoring a new sport at the school district level and the league level."
This isn't happening tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. Or probably not even this school year. There are any number of logistical hoops to jump through. But the wheels are spinning.
"The AD's have to figure out how this will logistically work with what we already have going on," Long said. "Are we bringing this sport in at the detriment of other sports? How will this impact our trainers? We can't just jump in and say, 'OK, we're going to add another sport here.'
"There's still a lot of things to be worked out before you can just add a flag football team. We have to figure out all the pieces. There's a financial piece, too. You have to hire coaches. It's like when you've added other sports to your program over the years. You have to cross the T's and dot the I's before you jump in the pool."
"But," Long added, "at the end of the day, this is a great opportunity for girls, and a great opportunity for our students to excel in athletics and extracurricular activities."
The PIAA just added girls wrestling as an officially sanctioned sport last year, and those state finals were contested for the first time this past winter. Now, girls flag football will take its turn. But everyone must respect the process.
"There is no plan at the moment," said Zac Kraft, Lancaster Country Day's AD, and president of the L-L League AD Association. "We're all still kind of processing this, and we still don't even have all of the details. There are too many unknowns at this point. But we're 100% behind this, and anything we can do to support participation in female sports is A-OK with me."
The overriding message from L-L League officials: Be patient.
"This is a very cool thing," Long said. "But we need to see how it impacts the softball team. How it impacts the girls track team. Where and when are they going to play these games? Those kinds of things. We just need some time to sit down and answer those sorts of questions."
L-L League athletic directors met Thursday and discussed girls flag football for the first time. They left their meeting with more questions than answers. But once the NFHS and PIAA jibe on the rules and regulations, more programs around the state should start popping up.
"The more positive opportunities and activities for high school females is a great thing — the best of things," Kraft said. "It's awesome. Right now we just need to gather a lot of information and have a lot of conversations to get a lot of the details ironed out."
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