By Alyssa Haduck
Medill Reports

Diamond Gallardo had only been involved in football for a matter of months when she found herself in a suite at Soldier Field taking in a bird’s-eye view of a Bears game. The young quarterback, along with the rest of the Back of the Yards girls flag football team, had earned the honor by winning the inaugural Chicago Public Schools girls flag football league championship.

Gallardo cites the exclusive experience as her favorite memory of the 2021 CPS girls flag football season. This sentiment is shared by Gustavo Silva, manager of youth football and community programs for the Bears, who was instrumental in bringing the league to fruition. 

“Being able to experience coming to the game through their eyes for the first time, and then knowing that they belong there, not just as fans but as fellow football players, that is just an amazing thing to see,” Silva said.

Back of the Yards was one of 21 teams to participate in the first year of the CPS girls flag football league. As preparations begin for a return to play this fall, the competition will now be twice as fierce, with 50 teams set to take on the 2022 season. This rapid rise in participation is a key component to earning recognition by the Illinois High School Association, a move that would not only legitimize the sport, but also girls’ involvement in the game of football. 

Over the last 50 years, Title IX has advanced girls’ participation in school sports, but during this time, football has remained a male-dominated activity. Of the millions of kids who participate in tackle football, only about 2,500 are girls, according to 2018 data from the NFL. 

Despite this dearth in tackle football, girls’ participation in flag football is on the rise. Seven states currently offer girls flag football as a varsity sport, and the activity is becoming more available at the club level, including in Illinois. 

In 2021, the Bears partnered with CPS to introduce girls flag football to Chicago-area students. What began as an eight-team pilot program soon grew at a pace quicker than either Silva or his CPS counterpart Juliana Zavala had ever imagined.

“Seldomly things exceed your expectations,” Silva said, “but I think in this case, we can certainly say that they did.”

The CPS girls flag football league aims to diversify the overall sport of football in a way that makes girls feel welcomed and safe, which resonated with Gallardo. Though the senior eagerly contributed to the Back of the Yards basketball and softball teams, she never considered football as an option until the introduction of the girls league.

“I was pretty excited that we even got to play a sport like this in CPS because females could go on the football team, but it’s very rare, so here’s a thing where all females can feel comfortable and actually not be scared to participate,” Gallardo said.

This sentiment seems to have been felt by many of Gallardo’s peers, as the Back of the Yards team quickly amassed a group of nearly 20 girls at the start of the 2021 season. Coach Alicia Maxwell, who also oversees the girls basketball team, said she was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. 

Many of her flag football athletes were involved in other sports, but few possessed any knowledge of the game. And while Maxwell guided the Bobcats by drawing on her own experiences playing intramural flag football in college, she appreciated the inexperience leaguewide, as it gave each team a fair chance. 

“Our kids aren’t always exposed to sports at a young age,” Maxwell said of Back of the Yards students. “The cool thing about flag football is everybody started off at the same level. There’s no one school where they’re like professionals because they’ve been doing it. It made the competition a lot better.”

Because equity is at the heart of the NFL’s community efforts, Silva said it is no accident the CPS girls flag football league also accomplishes the additional task of improving athletic opportunities across socioeconomic boundaries. 

“For us to be able to start it in the city, that was deliberate,” he said. “We always want to keep in mind where the need is greater so that we can really target those areas, because that’s the definition of equity, right? It’s not to say, ‘Hey, we offered the same thing to everybody.’ That’s equality. But equity is really meeting the needs in that particular situation, and that’s really where our focus is.”

Matt Troha, assistant executive director of the IHSA, said this could be the key to girls flag football’s success in the state. 

“I think it’s going to spread, spread quick,” Troha said of the activity. “Personally, I think it will be an IHSA sport in the coming years.”

A sport needs to have participation from about 10% of Illinois’ approximately 800 high schools to be approved as an IHSA sport. That comes out to about 70 schools across the state. Girls flag football is the newest sport on IHSA’s radar, while lacrosse was the most recent sport to have been granted varsity status. 

Troha explained that many emerging sports, like lacrosse, originate in suburban schools and often struggle to catch on at urban institutions due to a lack of resources. But because Chicago is leading the charge for girls flag football in Illinois with backing from the Bears, it may have preemptively eliminated the biggest obstacle to expansion.

With more than two dozen new teams joining the CPS league for the 2022 season, Maxwell, of Back of the Yards, has already begun getting her squad ready to defend its title. And while she will be losing several key players to graduation this year, including Gallardo, she ultimately hopes to repeat the girls’ experience, rather than their victory. 

“We had teachers who are other coaches who would come to games and say, ‘I’ve never seen our girls have this much fun playing a sport,’” Maxwell said, “so I think it’s a great opportunity.”

Alyssa Haduck is a sports media graduate student at Medill. You can follow her on Twitter at @Alyssa_Haduck.