One of the country’s fastest growing sports taking root in east Idaho

RIGBY — Welcome to Monday Night Lights.

Where flag football rules the gridiron and the future looks like it’s about to explode into a thousand fields with thousands of girls playing a sport boys typically took for granted.

Welcome to girls football, the flag version, which is one of the fastest growing sports in the nation.

Welcome to Rigby, where on a lush, green field at Harwood Elementary on Monday nights, high school girls flag football is taking the first step to join the rest of the country.

“I grew up with brothers and we played football with all the boys,” said Andrea Boudrero, who along with Hailey Belnap, works in Jefferson County school district 251 and helped get the new girls league off the ground. “I loved it so much. That was my favorite sport, but beyond Powder Puff that’s all we knew.”

That’s about to change. At least in Rigby, where the area’s new high school-level girls flag football league is underway in its inaugural season. The league also includes fourth to sixth-grade teams, as well as junior high teams. But the big news is at the high school level.

While flag football has been a youth sport for decades, it hasn’t typically been offered at the high school level.

Until now.

According to the National Federation of High Schools, nine states have already sanctioned girls flag football as a varsity sport (Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, Alaska, New York, Arizona, Illinois and California). Colorado and Montana are expected to sanction the sport this year and 17 other states are working on developing pilot programs.

Idaho is a long way from sanctioning girls flag football, but that process has to start somewhere. And organizers, parents, coaches, schools, as well as players, hope the new league in Rigby is the first domino in the process.

The league has 10 high school teams. Rigby is fielding five teams, Madison has two and Bonneville, Skyline, and Thunder Ridge each have teams. Sugar-Salem, Shelley and Hillcrest, Boudrero said, have each shown interest in joining the league next season.

The league is part of NFL FLAG, an organization that helps promote more than 1,800 organized flag football leagues with nearly 700,000 players across the country.

What does that mean for the start-up league in Rigby? Mostly, it’s about opportunity and the future.

Opportunity

“I think it’s fantastic for the girls that want to participate,” Rigby athletic director Ty Shippen said, noting the goal is to grow the sport. “It’s so early in that you don’t know what it’s going to be, but there’s definitely a passion for it.”

Similar to the Grid Kid leagues, the schools don’t support the flag football league financially so they operate essentially as club teams that are affiliated with NFL FLAG.

The logistics don’t matter much to the girls, who just wanted to play.

“After our first practice I was really excited about this,” said Mikki Lopez, a junior on the Skyline 49ers. “It is so much fun.”

Lopez, who is also on the Skyline wrestling team, said she wanted to try something new.

“I decided playing a new sport would change things up,” she said.

Several of the Skyline players also compete in girls wrestling, a sport that was finally sanctioned in Idaho in 2022 after the number of teams and wrestlers grew exponentially over the previous five or six years.

Brooke Hensley is also a wrestler at Skyline and has competed at the state tournament. She had not played football prior to joining the 49ers, but said she sees similarities in the two sports.

“I want to do my best,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work (to make the wrestling state tournament). Just like this, you have to work and put your all into it.”

There’s also a bit of pioneering spirit, she noted. Some of the girls were stigmatized in the early days of girls wrestling before the sport eventually gained popularity. That hasn’t happened on the football field, likely because the girls compete against other girls and not against the boys. But the mentality is still there.

“It’s fun,” she said. “We’re able to do stuff the guys do.”

Stop by Harwood Elementary on a Monday evening and you’ll see the fourth through sixth-grade teams competing on one end of the field, and the high school girls playing on the other end. They wear jerseys supplied by NFL Flag and the referees are state sanctioned. On another field across the back end of the campus are the Grid Kid teams, with players ranging from fourth grade to junior high.

Some of the boys may have played flag football at earlier ages before moving on to Grid Kid, but that’s not really an option for the girls, who tend to gravitate toward other sports.

Skyline coach Bryan Zollinger said his two daughters were into cheerleading and wrestling before they saw the social media post about a new girls flag football league.

“When they saw that they said, ‘We have to do this,'” Zollinger said.

Most of his 12 players had never played any form of organized football so teaching fundamentals was a priority from Day 1.

“I was amazed how quickly they picked it up,” said Zollinger, who had coached flag football for 12 years and also coached Grid Kid. “In one practice, my goals changed. They’re learning some more in-depth football technique, plays, formations. My goal completely changed after the first practice because they just soaked it up like sponges. It’s pretty awesome to watch.”

“That first week, there were a lot of dropped balls, and now they’re catching a lot,” Rigby Cowboys coach Paul Korth said. “They’re going after the ball. They’re a lot more aggressive. … It seems like the girls picked up the fundamentals really quickly.”

“I just always wanted to play football”

Players said the passion to play was always there, they just needed an opportunity.

“I just always wanted to play football,” said Rigby freshman Sadee Stoker, who had played basketball, track, softball and Powder Puff football.

She said early on it was a challenge to learn the intricacies of the sport, but she’s catching on. Literally.

“It’s easy to catch the ball, but once the defense is on you it’s challenging,” she said.

On the sidelines on a recent Monday night was Angie Robison, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the school district. Her two granddaughters played flag football, but the oldest had no other options after sixth grade.

She contacted Boudrero, who had also coached the younger flag football players, and after discussions with Rigby athletic director Shippen, the new league started to take shape.

“It really took off for the first year,” Robison said. “My grandkids were thrilled they got to keep playing.”

To keep playing is the key

Similar to girls wrestling, the growth of the girls flag football seems inevitable. The path to getting sanctioned as a varsity sport could take some time and requires a lot of factors – more teams, more players, more schools – to make it happen, Shippen said.

The Treasure Valley recently added girls flag football through Optimist Youth Football for ages 8-14. Perhaps the biggest motivation may at the highest level as flag football is set to make its Olympic debut in 2028.

But in eastern Idaho, after just a few weeks of high school girls flag football competition, the future looks promising.

“I don’t think we even have to recruit,” said Skyline’s Zollinger. “I think we’re going to have more than one team at Skyline next year. … The goal (is to) maybe do some offseason stuff so we can hit the ground running. I assume we’ll have two or three teams at Skyline next year just based on the interest level.”

“When I go to school, friends say, ‘I want to do that next year,'” Rigby freshman Anni Berrett said. “I think everybody might be scared or intimidated to go out at first, but once they see it … it’s fun.”

And who doesn’t want to have fun?

“I think this thing can grow pretty big and I think it will fun to see where it goes,” said Berrett, who, as a freshman, can be part of the league’s growth in the future. “It will get pretty big.”