Geneseo Women’s Flag Football inaugural season in 2025
Photo courtesy of geneseoknights.com
With the addition of women’s flag football in 2025, Geneseo will be home to 22 intercollegiate sports, adding to the appeal of Geneseo’s academic and athletic rigor for prospective student-athletes.
This past week, The SUNY Geneseo Department of Intercollegiate Athletics and Recreation announced the creation of Women’s Flag Football as an official National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sport for 2025.
Flag Football is a variant of gridiron or North American football, but instead of tackling players to the ground, the defensive team must remove a flag or flag belt from the ball carrier to end a down. The best available records of flag football creation were from the early 1940s when American soldiers played the sport recreationally with the idea of staying fit and reducing mental injuries.
People consider flag football a safer option than the football we usually watch on Sundays, with more and more dangers emerging every day related to football injuries. Most notably, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), which is a brain disorder likely caused by repeated head injuries. It causes the death of nerve cells in the brain, known as degeneration. CTE gets worse over time, and the only way to definitively diagnose CTE is after death during an autopsy of the brain. With not much being known about the deadly degenerative disease, more people now than ever are criticizing and moving away from contact sports like football.
While one aspect of flag football sparking people’s interest is the reduced risk of injury, another major component is that women can play football with a level playing field on the physicality of a sport like football.
Geneseo is looking to recruit a roster of around 25-30 student-athletes, current and transfer students, to kick off their inaugural season. Director of Athletics Dani Drews says, "Flag football is exploding at the high school level, especially in Section V (Rochester) and Section VI (Buffalo), making Geneseo an ideal spot for growing the sport into the College game. We are confident this will soon become an NCAA-sponsored sport and want Geneseo to be pioneers on the flag football landscape." With flag football on the rise, Geneseo is poised to be one of the best teams to be a part of. Combining the local areas' interest in flag football, the academics offered by the school, and two turf fields and facilities, it is the perfect equation for success among prospective flag football student-athletes.
The National Football League (NFL) has pushed for the expansion of flag football as a national sport in high schools and colleges nationwide. The league featured the national team quarterbacks from the United States and Mexico as offensive coordinators in this past February’s Pro Bowl Flag Football game in Las Vegas. Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive vice president of football operations, said, "It's working because of people… Young women, if the opportunity presents itself, they want to play." Flag football is creating an opportunity for an untapped group of young athletes to be allowed to be a part of the future of one of America’s greatest pastimes. Another push for national attention would be getting flag football into the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles because if flag football was in the Olympics it is likely visibility and interest would increase exponentially.
The addition of the Women’s Flag Football team to Geneseo’s athletic repertoire is bound to be an exciting and impactful moment in history for the school and its athletic program. This new venture reflects a growing demand for safer, more inclusive alternatives to traditional contact sports and symbolizes a movement toward equity in athletics. The journey of this new program is one to watch, as it has the potential to redefine what success in women's athletics looks like—not only at Geneseo but across the country.