The football of the female flag comes to a program of division I in Texas.
UT Arlington announced Thursday to add the sport as a complete university program in 2027.
It makes the Mavericks the fifth program of Division I of the NCAA to publicly declare that it will sponsor the sport at the university level. The others are Mount St. Mary’s, Alabama state, Long Island and Mercyhurst.
UT Arlington is the first Division I program in Texas to add sport at the university level, and also the first member of the Western Athletic Conference to do so. Two other schools in Texas, Division III Concordia and Naia Texas Wesley, also sponsor the football of the women’s flag at the university level, while two other WAC programs in Grand Canyon and Cal Baptist have it as a club sport.
In a statement, UT Arlington said his flag football program will play at Maverick Stadium, a 12,000 -seat place. At the end of this year, the program will hire a coaching staff and begin to sign players.
For UT Arlington, the addition of a women’s flag soccer team marks the first time in 40 years that the Mavericks will have a football team of any kind. His male Tackle team was disigned in 1985. This is also the first time that UT Arington added any sport since 2017, when the Mavericks were competing in the female golf.
Football of the female flag is widely seen as a rising sport and one of the fastest growing in university athletics. Last month, the Atlantic East of Division III was the first NCAA League to play a full season of women’s flag football and guilty with a conference championship.
It will be an Olympic sport in 2028 in Los Angeles, and the NCAA has been recreating its emerging sports program for women.
Currently, according to the NCAA, around 65 schools have flag soccer teams at the university level or club, but to be considered for the state of championship, at least 40 NCAA programs will need to sponsor the football of the women’s flag as a wars within 10 years. These teams would also have to meet the minimums in the games played and the player participation.
Earlier this week, Radford, a Division I program in Virginia competing in the Big South, announced that he was adding women’s flag football as a club sport this fall “with plans to turn it into an intercollegial university sport.”
Until now, no school at the Power 4 level is adding the sport at the university level, but the Atlético director of Nebraska, Troy Dannen, recently said that flag football is “something we all should watch closely.”
