By Holden Mostofsky<\/p>\n
Correspondent<\/p>\n
SCRANTON \u2014 On Wednesday, the Middle Atlantic Conference announced it will sponsor women\u2019s flag football, beginning in the 2026-27 academic year.<\/p>\n
Marywood University, which officially joined the MAC on July 1, is one of four schools that will participate in the MAC\u2019s inaugural flag football season. Albright College, Eastern University and Neumann University are the others.<\/p>\n
The Pacers women\u2019s flag football team completed its first season in April as an independent program.<\/p>\n
Women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons for its growth is its low cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a fairly cheap sport to start up,\u201d Marywood Director of Athletics Andrew Smith said. \u201cThere\u2019s not much in terms of equipment. It\u2019s obviously not like regular football where you need helmets or shoulder pads. You\u2019re looking at flags, footballs, uniforms, and maybe some practice cones and pennies.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The school is upgrading its facilities to not only benefit women\u2019s flag football, but its other sports as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of facilities, we\u2019re redoing our turf field right now. We\u2019ve added it as a sport there,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe do have a very nice grass field they can practice and play on if they want, but that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince joining the MAC, we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur position is part-time, and I would love for our roster to grow enough to make it full-time,\u201d he said. \u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But Smith believes Marywood can use its academic programs to help recruit a strong, competitive team.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor 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\u2019s already popular, whether it\u2019s Philly, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and even down to Florida and Texas,\u201d he said. \u201cWe get recruits from there because they don\u2019t have many flag football programs down there in colleges yet. It\u2019s expanding, but they don\u2019t have any options yet, so they\u2019re looking elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Admittedly, though, it will take time to build a competitive program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re being patient with it, and our hope is to build up year by year,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAlong 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\u2019s a great building process. Once we get to that point, we\u2019ll look at competitiveness. I would love to be able to compete sooner, but first it\u2019s about building a roster and building a team.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Still, the players who stayed remained optimistic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d Smith said. \u201cSo 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 \u2018Oh man, it would have been great to get that win,\u2019 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\u2019s still about growing the roster and the interest; it\u2019s not about wins and losses right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marywood is not the only local school with women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Smith is looking forward to having all of Marywood\u2019s sports be part of the MAC, not only women\u2019s flag football.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe nice thing about us joining the Middle Atlantic Conference is, first of all, it puts all of our sports under one conference umbrella,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWhen we were with the Atlantic East, men\u2019s golf was an associate member in the Massachusetts Athletic Conference, women\u2019s golf was in the Landmark Conference, so this brings all of our sports into one conference umbrella.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joining the MAC also means Marywood will have the opportunity to rekindle and stoke some local rivalries.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our former conference, the closest schools were either in New Jersey or Philadelphia,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBut this creates rivalries with schools much closer with King\u2019s, Misericordia, and even down to DeSales or Lebanon Valley, and I think it brings excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Holden Mostofsky Correspondent SCRANTON \u2014 On Wednesday, the Middle Atlantic Conference announced it will sponsor women\u2019s flag…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2300,178,180,179,726],"class_list":["post-246631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-college-sports","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}