Marywood University athletics announced that it would be adding its 23rd varsity sport: women’s flag football.

Though the team will begin in spring 2025 as a club, it is anticipated that the program’s debut season will be the 2025-26 campaign.

The earliest rumblings of women’s flag football wasn’t until the 1970s, when the North East Women’s Football League began in 1971. The popularity of the sport hadn’t truly blossomed until recent years, with the NFL Flag Football program being a key contributor to the sport’s growth. The rapid expansion of the sport has led to the Olympics adding it to the list of events taking place in summer 2028.

Marywood will participate in the Atlantic East Conference for flag football, though this isn’t a new area for the conference. The AEC became the first NCAA conference between Division I, II or III to sponsor women’s flag football, during the 2023-24 season. The conference will have its first varsity status season begin in the spring.

Marywood’s Director of Athletics and Recreations Andrew Smith attributes the conference’s expansion to uncharted territories as a main factor.

“We’ve been mulling it over for the past year or so, I would say,” Smith said. “The Atlantic East Conference was at the forefront of it with the NCAA.”

The Pacers will join the likes of usual conference members, like Marymount University, Immaculata University, Neumann University and Centenary University, as well Eastern University and Holy Family University, who was the most recent school to announce joining the conference for flag football, back in July.

Adding a new sports program isn’t anything new for the university, as Marywood introduced esports in 2021. Before that was the addition of men’s and women’s rugby in February 2017, though it’s since been switched to a club team. Smith believes that Marywood’s new sport could be a reason the university’s student body grows.

“We’re looking at this because of the growth at the high school level as being a recruitable sport,” said Smith. “We’re looking at it as a sport where we can bring in those five to seven kids per year that otherwise wouldn’t be looking at Marywood.”

Though there is plenty that the athletics department has to do between now and the team’s debut season, the roster is beginning to be formed, starting with graduate student Josephine Sorce, a captain for Marywood’s women’s soccer team in her final season as a Pacer. Though she’ll only be around for Spring 2025, she is still excited for what the new program had for Marywood.

[The women’s soccer] team has talked about how it’s been added to the conference last year,” Source said. “Ever since we saw that, we wanted it to come to Marywood. I know a bunch of us have done like the powder puff games in high school, so we just really enjoyed it.”

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