Girls thrive in many sports. Now they also come for football.

Honesty Butler had no intention of going to college, let alone leaving her home state of New York. She loved art classes, but hated math and history. Art school was too expensive, so she began to completely give up the idea of ​​​​higher education.

But one day her social studies teacher at Binghamton High School mentioned that he was coaching flag football, a sport that New York State had just started offering as a varsity sport, and asked if she might be interested in joining the team.

Butler had never played a team sport before, aside from a brief stint on the track team, but from the first practice she was hooked. Suddenly she had an outlet for her competitiveness. She received positive reinforcement at school when her team started winning games. The team had a GPA requirement, so Butler was suddenly motivated to keep her grades up, even in math.

Now Butler, 19, is more than 1,200 miles from home in Fort Scott, Kan., preparing for her second season of collegiate flag football at Fort Scott Community College.

Flag football, a version of the sport in which players pull colorful flags from belts around their opponents’ waists rather than tackling them to stop play, has quickly grown in popularity. Since there is strictly no contact, it emphasizes speed and accuracy over physicality.

Although the sport is played by both men and women, the style of play favors female athletes. It gives girls a unique opportunity to play football, which has long been considered a typically – and exclusively – male sport.

“For years it was kind of like, you know, girls don’t play football, right? That kind of mentality,” said Scott Hallenbeck, the CEO of USA Football, the governing body for both tackle and flag football. “All of us in football, and hopefully society as a whole, recognize that this is a crucial and incredible opportunity to be inclusive.”

Last year, New York became the eighth state to offer girls flag football as a varsity sport, with teams from across the state set to compete for their first state championship next spring. The announcement last month that flag football would become an Olympic sport in 2028 further underlined the sport’s rise.

“A lot of people overlook flag football, and the fact that it will soon be in the Olympics is even better,” Butler said. “They can see how the sport is practiced and cannot judge it because it is practiced by women.”

Football under the Olympic flag will be offered in both men’s and women’s disciplines, but in the men’s team could consist of NFL athletes. For women, the Olympics will be an opportunity to compete at a much higher level than today’s high school and college competitions. For those just now joining high school varsity teams, the path forward in the sport is clearer than ever.

During the first season of girls flag football in New York, in the spring of 2022, there were 51 teams at the varsity level across the state, with financial support from the local NFL teams: the Jets, Giants and Bills.

There will be 180 schools competing in the upcoming season, which begins in March, according to Robert Zayas, executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association.

Zayas said flag football was added as an option in hopes of attracting students who weren’t interested in the typical offerings.

“We know that when children are involved in their school community, they do better in school,” Zayas said. “High school sports do so many things for so many kids, but they provide an immediate sense of belonging for these students who participate.”

In New York City, where public high school teams play in a different league than the rest of the state, flag football has been offered for about a decade. But Bashkim Pelinkovic, the girls soccer coach at Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island, said the sport’s popularity has increased dramatically in recent years.

When the team first started, about 30 girls tried out. Two years ago, the same year the rest of the state started competing, 100 girls showed up for the tryouts.

One of the players in attendance was Olivia Rijo, 17, a senior who played on the team all four years of high school. She hopes to attend one of the more than a dozen colleges that offer flag football — and make it to the Olympics.

Rijo has played on the U.S. girls’ under-15 and under-17 national team squads and plans to try out for the women’s national team in February. She said she cried when she found out flag football would be an Olympic sport.

“It was one of the best moments of my life,” Rijo said. “It broke my heart that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t achieve anything. But the Olympics give us something to work for.”

And while Rijo started playing flag football in high school, Hallenbeck said high school students who are elite athletes in other sports like football, volleyball or basketball now enjoy the opportunity to participate in a game they watched as kids but rarely could play. .

Payton Parliament, 16, a junior at Beekmantown High School in the northeast corner of the state, is just 18 months younger than her brother, Nathan, a senior and the starting quarterback of the school’s tackle football team.

She was about four years old when she went to her brother’s first flag football game. From that day on, Parliament played on his flag football team: he was the quarterback and she was his favorite wide receiver.

Parliament plays soccer, basketball and softball, but when her school started offering flag football, she knew she had to sign up. On the girls’ team, she has gone from wide receiver to quarterback and is now chasing her brother’s throwing record, the best in the city’s history.

“I always wanted to look like him, even though I was a girl,” Parliament said. “I wanted to prove to people that I could be like a boy and do great things.”

Next spring, she expects a close battle for her first state championship. More girls have joined the Beekmantown team and other area schools have added teams.

“Girls saw how competitive it was and how much joy we get out of it,” Parliament said.

Butler is also looking forward to more competition. She hopes to transfer to a four-year university next year, which means she will play in a higher division.

She’s still getting used to the Kansas weather, the demands of college classes and being far from home, but she now knows she’s up for the challenge.

“It surprised me and my whole family,” Butler said of her transition to college. “I’m really proud of myself. I never thought I would be so far from home.”