Texas university becomes first in state to add flag football
Football will be at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and we're not talking about soccer. American football will be an Olympic sport in 2028 as flag football is set to hit the fields of the Golden State. It's the latest sport to earn gold medal status and schools across the country are following suit.
Thirteen states have made flag girls flag football a varsity sport at the high school level — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — but not Texas. Despite being famed for its high school football, women athletes in Texas have yet to toss the pig skin at the high school level. However, one university has broken from the pack to become Texas' first college to offer women's flag football as a collegiate sport: Concordia University in Austin.
Around the same time that flag football was announced as one of five new sports added to the Olympic Games , Concordia announced it was joining a new conference, the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) , which just so happens to have four schools trying to promote flag football as a sport. So, when the move became official in 2024, Concordia made the push and added flag football to its women's sports.
"I think what it really sets us apart in the sense that we're choosing to do something that's really, in other words, not adding sport that's already considered an NCAA or an Olympic sport, whatever you want to call it," Athletic Director Ronda Seagraves said to MySA. "You know, we've got the opportunity to step forward with that."
Seagraves noted that while flag football is not a high school sport, the club level has had a strong presence in Texas for years. So, when it came to finding a head coach they didn't have to look far. Keenan Hughes has been a director and coach for the Texas Fury youth flag football program who has helped develop 13 teams across the state in eight years. His name immediately came up when Concordia was searching for coaches and he jumped at the opportunity, bringing his son Kaden as assistant coach.
The team wasn't officially announced until the start of the 2024-25 school year. As a result, Concordia is only able to field a team made up of current students and athletes from other sports. So far Hughes has been able to recruit 18 athletes, some of which are soccer players joining the team during soccer's offseason. The flag football team currently practices once per week with plans to increase to two to three practices per week ahead of an SCAC interconference tournament in the spring.
"The girls have been super open to the ideas that we're coaching them on every single week," Hughes said to MySA. "The majority of the girls that we have on the roster have really never played flag football before. A lot of them have athletic backgrounds, either playing some sort of sport, either in high school or just like intramural leagues when they were younger. But that's that's really all that they've brought to the table."
It remains to be seen if Texas high schools will follow Concordia's path, but MySA has reached out to Austin ISD, Eanes ISD and Lake Travis ISD to see if they'll be adding girls flag football to their varsity sports.
When it comes to the Olympic level, many expect the men's side will be filled with NFL superstars with the likes of Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Jalen Hurts, Tyreek Hill and Caleb Williams expressing interest, according to Bleacher Report . Still, for the women, the sport needs to grow and grow fast if it plans to field a gold medal squad by 2028. Schools like Concordia will go a long way to make that happen.
"Hopefully that's something coming down the road also with the announcement of flag football going to the Olympics," Hughes said to MySA. "Hopefully that's something that we can push into high schools and, you know, I couldn't be more proud to represent Concordia as the first college to actually offer women's flag football in the state."
