Marywood to compete in MAC women’s flag football – Scranton Times-Tribune

By Holden Mostofsky

Correspondent

SCRANTON — On Wednesday, the Middle Atlantic Conference announced it will sponsor women’s flag football, beginning in the 2026-27 academic year.

Marywood University, which officially joined the MAC on July 1, is one of four schools that will participate in the MAC’s inaugural flag football season. Albright College, Eastern University and Neumann University are the others.

The Pacers women’s flag football team completed its first season in April as an independent program.

Women’s flag football is one of the most rapidly growing sports in the country. At the 2026 NCAA Convention, it was formally added to the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program. It will make its Olympic debut at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

One of the reasons for its growth is its low cost.

“It’s a fairly cheap sport to start up,” Marywood Director of Athletics Andrew Smith said. “There’s not much in terms of equipment. It’s obviously not like regular football where you need helmets or shoulder pads. You’re looking at flags, footballs, uniforms, and maybe some practice cones and pennies.”

Not only is equipment cheaper, but travel is as well. In flag football, when teams play against each other, they often face multiple opponents in a single day at one site.

The school is upgrading its facilities to not only benefit women’s flag football, but its other sports as well.

“In terms of facilities, we’re redoing our turf field right now. We’ve added it as a sport there,” Smith said. “We do have a very nice grass field they can practice and play on if they want, but that’s really up to the coaches and the team to decide where they want to do things. But they will be playing mainly on our turf field.

“Since joining the MAC, we’ve invested over $400,000 to add a press box, bleachers, a new scoreboard, a new sound system, and the turf field was redone this summer, which has a huge logo on it now, so the university has made an investment into that.”

Currently, Marywood is conducting a search for a head coach. Smith hopes that the next hire will have a full-time position with the program.

“Our position is part-time, and I would love for our roster to grow enough to make it full-time,” he said. “A lot of schools that are adding the sport are adding full-time coaches for it, with hopes of getting rosters upwards of 20 to 25 kids, even though only seven a side play.”

Many of the flag football players are dual-sport athletes. The challenge right now is to find athletes who will make flag football their primary sport.

But Smith believes Marywood can use its academic programs to help recruit a strong, competitive team.

“For us at Marywood, the good sell is that we have some unique majors like architecture and our health sciences, and aviation management, which can draw kids from outside the area where it’s already popular, whether it’s Philly, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and even down to Florida and Texas,” he said. “We get recruits from there because they don’t have many flag football programs down there in colleges yet. It’s expanding, but they don’t have any options yet, so they’re looking elsewhere.”

Admittedly, though, it will take time to build a competitive program.

“We’re being patient with it, and our hope is to build up year by year,” Smith said. “Along with the interest we have in class, if we can get five commits a year, and get up to 20 kids within four years, I think that’s a great building process. Once we get to that point, we’ll look at competitiveness. I would love to be able to compete sooner, but first it’s about building a roster and building a team.”

The team’s first season was a challenging one. Some dual-sport players decided to focus on their other sport and injuries caused the team to forfeit games. The Pacers finished 0-16, but only played eight games and were shut out in five of them.

Still, the players who stayed remained optimistic.

“The girls that are on the team were very positive, and some other people on campus saw the camaraderie on the team and have joined since then,” Smith said. “So next year, I expect another challenging year, not roster-wise, but just competitively. We were close in a couple of the games, and we were like ‘Oh man, it would have been great to get that win,’ just to get it out the way. But it was more about overcoming some of those injury hurdles and getting through the season this year. So next year, we obviously go to compete a little bit more. Obviously, we want to win, but to me, it’s still about growing the roster and the interest; it’s not about wins and losses right now.”

Marywood is not the only local school with women’s flag football. Keystone College also completed its first varsity season this year and had a 4-9 record as a member of the United East Conference. The Lady Giants recently announced the hiring of Rosselys Bare as head coach.

Smith is looking forward to having all of Marywood’s sports be part of the MAC, not only women’s flag football.

“The nice thing about us joining the Middle Atlantic Conference is, first of all, it puts all of our sports under one conference umbrella,” Smith said. “When we were with the Atlantic East, men’s golf was an associate member in the Massachusetts Athletic Conference, women’s golf was in the Landmark Conference, so this brings all of our sports into one conference umbrella.”

Joining the MAC also means Marywood will have the opportunity to rekindle and stoke some local rivalries.

“In our former conference, the closest schools were either in New Jersey or Philadelphia,” Smith said. “But this creates rivalries with schools much closer with King’s, Misericordia, and even down to DeSales or Lebanon Valley, and I think it brings excitement.”