Built to Last: Why HBCUs and Women Leaders Are Shaping the Future of Flag Football

When the NCAA voted on January 16, 2026, to add women’s flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women program, the news traveled fast. New programs announced. A Power 4 school signed on. Olympic excitement kept building for Los Angeles 2028. But a quieter story is emerging: the one about who built the pipeline that made the decision possible.

The answer matters to the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation because it is our own story told in reverse. A group of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a conference commissioner, and a network of women coaches and executives did not wait for the sport to be legitimized. They built first, and the NCAA caught up.

This is what access looks like when it is created on purpose.

A Sport Growing at Extraordinary Speed

The numbers are unlike anything else in high school athletics. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), girls flag football participation reached 68,847 athletes in the 2024-25 school year, a 60 percent jump from the year before, and a 388 percent increase since the first post-pandemic NFHS survey. Nearly 1,000 additional schools added the sport in a single year. Sixteen states have sanctioned it at the varsity level, with 22 more running pilot programs.

At the college level, the trajectory is even sharper. At least 40 NCAA schools planned to sponsor flag football at the varsity level for the 2025-26 academic year, with tracking from sport leaders anticipating as many as 60 schools participating in spring 2026. Eighteen Division I programs have now committed, with the University of Nebraska becoming the first Power 4 school to announce, followed by the Big South becoming the first Division I conference to sponsor the sport. And women’s flag football makes its Olympic debut at LA28 alongside the men’s competition, with six nations qualifying per event.

Growth alone, though, is not the story. What’s just as important is who owned the growth when it started, and who still shapes it now.

HBCUs Moved First

In April 2024, Alabama State University announced that it would launch the first Division I women’s flag football program at any HBCU. The Hornets played their inaugural season in spring 2025 and, in the offseason, awarded the first-ever Division I scholarship in the sport to Ki’Lolo Westerlund, a player who had already appeared in the NFL Flag 50 commercial during Super Bowl LIX alongside NFL stars Marshawn Lynch, Myles Garrett, and Justin Jefferson.

The Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) – founded in 1912 and the oldest HBCU athletic conference in the United States – began playing women’s flag football as a club sport that same spring. Winston-Salem State University won the inaugural CIAA championship. In 2026-27, the CIAA becomes the first HBCU conference to sponsor the sport at the varsity level. Other HBCUs, from Edward Waters University to Florida Memorial University to Xavier University of Louisiana, are building programs of their own.

These decisions were not reactions to a national trend; they were the trend. HBCUs demonstrated viability – real rosters, real games, real championships – before the NCAA opened the door.

The Commissioner at the Center of the Vote

When the NCAA’s three divisions voted to approve women’s flag football as an emerging sport, the recommendation came through the NCAA Committee on Access, Opportunity, and Impact. The chair of that committee is Jacqie McWilliams Parker.

McWilliams Parker has served as CIAA Commissioner since 2012. Her appointment that year made her the first African American female commissioner representing all three NCAA divisions — Division I, II, and III.

When the Committee on Access, Opportunity and Impact held its first meeting in October 2025, consolidating the work of four longstanding NCAA equity committees, she was named to chair. She called the emerging-sport decision “a meaningful step toward expanding access, equity, and opportunity.”

The symmetry is hard to miss. The first HBCU conference to sanction the sport is led by the same woman whose committee drove its national recognition, which then accelerated adoption at every level, including the Power 4. Access, built on purpose, opened doors that most others would have considered closed.

Women Coaches Are Writing the Playbook

At the high school level, the coaching pipeline for girls flag football has largely been built by women who saw what the sport could become before most athletic directors did. Jennifer Constuble, who formed the first NFL Flag affiliate program in her California county starting in 2003, became Alabama State’s first head coach and the first head coach of any Division I women’s flag football program. She stepped down after a single season in August 2025, a reminder that emerging sports still face real growing pains when it comes to sustaining leadership.

Alabama State’s current head coach tells a different version of the same story. Tyrone Poole was a first-round NFL Draft pick in 1995 and won two Super Bowls with the New England Patriots across 13 NFL seasons. He is also a proud graduate of Fort Valley State University, an HBCU in Georgia, and was selected for the 2026 Black College Football Hall of Fame class.

In February, he served as the NFC defensive coordinator at the NFL Pro Bowl flag football game. In his day job, he is building a first-of-its-kind Division I program at an HBCU.

The pipeline is not coincidental. When decision-makers reflect the communities a sport grows in, the sport grows differently and more sustainably.

A Blueprint That Works

For more than two decades, the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation has made one fundamental argument: access to opportunities in football is not built by goodwill. It is built by institutions taking strategic and intentional steps to open doors and build a pathway. Progress follows a blueprint. 

The rapid rise of women’s flag football serves as a powerful contemporary example of this blueprint in action. It demonstrates what is possible when institutions commit to a specific infrastructure: the NCAA created an emerging-sports category, the CIAA piloted competition, the RCX Sports Foundation funded grants, scholarships followed, state associations sanctioned play, and national rules were written. By focusing on these deliberate design choices, from the collegiate level to the Olympic stage, the sport has created a sustainable pipeline for players and coaches alike. 

The growth of flag football illustrates the Foundation’s core belief: when a pathway is designed for inclusion and opportunity, it produces results. The work ahead is to continue applying this same discipline across all levels of the game to ensure every pipeline is built to last.

A League Worth Watching

LA28 will be the showcase. The harder work happens in the years before it: more states sanctioning, more conferences sponsoring, more coaches hired, more scholarships awarded, more media investment, more young players like Ki’Lolo Westerlund seeing themselves as the face of a sport that did not exist at this scale just five years ago.

The Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation believes what we have always believed. Deliberate pipelines work. Institutional commitment works. Leaders who reflect the communities they serve make better decisions for those communities.

The women of flag football — the players, the coaches, the commissioners, the executives, the grandmothers who once cheered for Fritz Pollard and the granddaughters who will play in Los Angeles — are proving it again, right now, in real time.

We are proud to watch, cheer them on, and be their advocates. And we intend to help make sure the pipeline stays as open as the people who built it envisioned.