Nevada may rank last nationwide for youth participation in sports, but when it comes to flag football, it’s a leader. 

The Nevada Interscholastic Athletic Association, the governing body for the state’s high school sports, in 2012 launched a flag football pilot program in Clark County. It was approved as a varsity sport in 2016, making Nevada just the second state after Florida to authorize flag football. 

Nationwide and in Nevada, flag football is especially popular among female athletes.

“There’s a lot of trailblazers out there in Nevada who have been championing it for girls,” said Charles Torwudzo, the manager of the U.S. national teams and of player personnel at USA Football, the governing body for flag and touch football.

Nevada’s program is one of the nation’s strongest, boasting multiple athletes on the U.S. flag football teams for both teenage girls and adult women. Last year, more than 1,800 girls played high school flag football in Nevada. 

That’s triple the number playing in the 2013-14 school year, the earliest year data is available from the National Federation of State High School Associations.

“Nevada specifically has a great grassroots baseline out there, as one of the early adopters,” Torwudzo said.

Sixteen states now authorize girls’ high school flag football, with 12 of these states doing so in the last three years alone. The sport’s growth has been helped by millions of dollars from benefactors such as Nike and the NFL and has unfolded as interest in women’s sports explodes.

Collegiate opportunities are also increasing. At least 65 NCAA schools sponsor girls flag football at the club or varsity level, including UNLV and UNR. Nevada State University launched its first team this fall.

The sport was also recently approved to join the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program, the first step to possibly becoming an official sport for the top three divisions.

Scott Blackford is the director of programs at Nevada Youth Sports, an organization that runs recreational and club sports in Southern Nevada and manages charter schools’ sports leagues.

Blackford said his Las Vegas-based sports organization has seen girls’ participation in their flag football teams increase by 250 percent since 2021. Four years ago, one in every 10 of their flag football players was female. Now that number is one in every four, he said.

He attributed the sport’s popularity to its inclusivity. 

“It’s a sport almost anybody can play. Tackle football is for a certain type of person,” Blackford said. “Flag football is also football, but allows kids to to enjoy the game without the other stuff that tackle brings.”

Torwudzo theorized that the sport has found success because of its limited barriers to entry, with minimal equipment and easy-to-learn rules.

Girls who play flag football said the activity has given them a chance to make the sport their own.

Maci Joncich, a Henderson native who in 2024 became the youngest member of the U.S. women’s national flag football team, told The Nevada Independent she grew up playing the sport with her older brothers. 

She said she thinks the sport is so popular because it “gives girls the opportunity to really work for something” by joining competitive varsity teams.

Flag football has changed gender patterns in sports nationwide, according to Project Play, a branch of the Aspen Institute think tank. Although boys still generally participate in sports at higher rates than girls, that gap has grown significantly smaller since the pandemic. 

That trend has not materialized in Nevada, where U.S. Census Bureau data shows girls’ sports participation was higher than boys’ prior to the pandemic but has since dropped dramatically. 

But when it comes to football, girls in Nevada are far outpacing boys, whose participation in high school tackle football has dipped slightly in the last decade. Girls’ participation in flag football has tripled. 

Joncich said she never expected this level of participation among girls.

“Younger girls will come up to me at events and say, ‘I want to play,’” Joncich said. “It warms my heart, because I never used to see that growing up.”

Alyce Brown of The Associated Press contributed to this article.