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How flag football is on collision course to becoming a TSSAA championship-level sport

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Pearl-Cohn junior quarterback Madison Woodard would love to finish her flag football season during the final week of May, in Murfreesboro, during Spring Fling.

“My teammates, we’ve all talked about it,” Woodard said. “That would be the highlight of the season, because we all love playing flag and winning a state championship would be the peak.”

Woodard threw two touchdown passes as Pearl-Cohn won the second Metro Nashville flag football title, finishing the year 11-0 with a 12-2 win Saturday against Overton at Pearl-Cohn High. But that is the end of the season. For a state title game to be established, the sport must cross one more hurdle to be considered a championship sport by the TSSAA after the high school governing body’s legislative council sanctioned flag football April 9.

Flag football was sanctioned as an “emerging sport,” meaning it will be treated the same as all TSSAA sanctioned sports, except a state championship will not be offered until the sport is played at school districts throughout the state, not just middle Tennessee. Emerging sports are defined as having 15% or more of the TSSAA membership schools either participating in the sport or committing to participation once sanctioned.

Williamson County was the first to head up a pilot flag football program in 2022 with nine schools. Ravenwood captured its third straight flag football title in as many years last week. Metro Nashville and Montgomery County began their pilot programs last year as Hillsboro won Metro’s first title, while West Creek won in Clarksville in 2023.

Next year the TSSAA will create a postseason invitational in the spring, but school districts new to flag football won’t be required to play in the spring. Hamilton and Knox counties are scheduled to begin next school year, and Hamilton County will have a fall schedule (October to December). But once the board of control approves a state championship, flag football must be played in the same season as that championship.

The addition of Hamilton and Knox counties will push the number of schools participating in Tennessee to more than 70, and Rutherford County is scheduled to begin play in 2025.

“As far as a sports calendar thing, we’ve just said school districts can choose when they want to play it, but you can’t play more than 16 regular-season contests over a 10-week period,” TSSAA assistant executive director Emily Crowell said. “Right now, most districts are still looking at the spring, and I feel like when we do get a state championship it’ll be in the spring.”

Crowell said the TSSAA will survey its member schools this spring to gauge the growing interest in an effort to develop a postseason invitational schedule. There is no specific number of schools needed to reach a championship level, but there needs to be an “appropriate amount of geographic growth throughout the state,” Crowell said.

“I can tell you based on my talks with other districts, I think you’ll see growth more than double within a year,” Williamson County district athletic director Darrin Joines said. “I think it’ll be a state championship sport within two years.”

It was Franklin High that made a formal proposal to the TSSAA legislative council to sanction flag football; the vote was unanimous, making Tennessee the 10th state in the country to sanction it. Colorado became the 11th state on April 23.

“Anybody who is considering or wondering if they should start flag football, the answer is positively and undoubtedly, without reservation yes,” Metro Nashville Schools athletic director Mark North said.

Reach sports writer George Robinson at georgerobinsontheleafchronicle.com and on the X platform (formerly Twitter) @Cville_Sports. 

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