As a little girl, Melinda Nguyen knew she loved football. Anthony Nguyen, her older brother by three years, would watch NFL games on Sundays with her and their dad in their Wheaton home. As a family, the Nguyens would cheer for Anthony’s flag football team, which played at Roberto Clemente Middle School.
Melinda eventually noticed that the only girls she saw on TV and at Anthony’s games were cheering on the sidelines. So she decided in elementary school that she would become a cheerleader in order to get closer to football. “I would go watch Anthony’s flag games, and I was probably around 8 or 9 years old, and the girls were cheerleading, and the boys were playing football, so I thought, I guess I need to be a cheerleader,” Melinda says.
As fate would have it, Melinda never got a chance to don a cheerleading uniform. Anthony’s flag football coach asked Melinda to play on an all-girls flag football team when she was about 9, as long as her parents would give their permission.
Fast forward 24 years, and flag football has arrived. You may have noticed the NFL’s halftime spot during last year’s Super Bowl starring Diana Flores, 24, the quarterback of Mexico’s national women’s flag football team. That choice wasn’t made lightly. “Flag is a terrific opportunity because it’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s inclusive,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer, told Ad Age. “Anyone can play, and they can play anywhere. So we decided to take our biggest marketing moment of the year and focus on flag, and on all the girls and women who are driving this game forward.”
Last year, organized participation opportunities for flag football surpassed tackle football globally for the first time, according to the International Federation of American Football (IFAF), the global governing body for American football. About 2.4 million kids younger than 17 are playing organized flag football in the United States, and millions more participate globally, the IFAF says.
In October, the International Olympic Committee approved flag football to be included in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
“Flag football is the great equalizer,” Anthony Nguyen says. “In tackle football, size matters. For flag football, you can be smaller and do extremely well against tall, strong, powerful people. This is one of the main reasons why flag has exploded internationally—people who are undersized, including women, can do well.”
In 2021-2022, about 15,700 girls played high school flag football, an increase of 40% from 2018, according to the NFL.
The NFL has driven much of the interest in flag football. NFL Flag, the league’s official flag football program, was born in the early 1990s, when the NFL launched a global health and wellness initiative called Play Football with the goal of making football accessible for all children, no matter their age, size or gender. In 1994 the first youth camp series was launched at the New England Patriots’ stadium, and children were introduced to the rules of flag football and taught how to play. Today, NFL Flag counts more than 1,600 teams and 600,000 players, both boys and girls, ages 4-17 in all 50 states.
Other organizations also have been boosting the popularity of flag football. The International Women’s Flag Football Association hosts the Key West Women’s Flag Football/Flag-A-Tag International Kickoff that launched in 1992 with five women’s teams from the United States. By 2023, 26 women’s teams from Guatemala, Honduras, Morocco, Jamaica, the United States and beyond participated in what’s now known as the Kelly McGillis Classic International Female Flag Football Championships.
Melinda Nguyen, for one, has been cheering these developments. Now 33, she’s the head women’s flag football coach at Kansas Wesleyan University, one of 23 schools that provide the opportunity for women as a scholarship-eligible collegiate sport offered through the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).
After joining that flag football team at the age of 9, Melinda followed in her brother Anthony’s footsteps and stayed in the sport until she was 14, the oldest a player could be in their league at the time. As a boy, Anthony could transition to tackle football, which he did.
That was not an option for Melinda. Instead, she became a varsity cross-
country runner and played powder-puff football at Northwest High School in Germantown. At 16, Melinda was introduced by Anthony to the women’s flag football team formed by the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) at the University of Maryland in College Park, and the members invited Melinda to play.
“The thought that there would be a field of all Asian women playing flag football was mind-blowing to me,” says Melinda, who is Vietnamese American. “That group of girls was the reason why I went to University of Maryland.” As a freshman, Melinda met players on the Filipino Cultural Association (FCA) women’s flag football team, and they also recruited her to play with them.
One of Melinda’s FCA teammates was Siani Wong. Now a 32-year-old chemist who works in Beltsville, Wong had played volleyball at Springbrook High School in Colesville, and she found flag football relatively easy to pick up. “I grew up playing softball and volleyball,” Wong says, “and the hand-eye coordination I needed was there from those experiences.”
Wong says she had always been into NFL games and even played fantasy football. “But I did not know I could play [football] when I was growing up as a girl in the area,” she says. “Having the opportunity to play in college, with a lot of people who came from similar backgrounds, connected me to the game in a different way. I learned about the game, understand specific plays and know when they should be called.”
Nguyen and Wong agree that an added attraction of flag football has been its popularity among other Asian Americans. Anecdotally, at least, the sport has a particular draw for that group.
The Nguyens have found that many first-generation Asian immigrant parents want their children to succeed academically and are reluctant to divert hard-earned income into extracurriculars—especially activities that might mean increased medical bills. “My mom was worried we would get hurt playing football,” Anthony Nguyen says with a chuckle. “She used to say to me, ‘Anthony, Americans are bigger, like a thumb, and you’re little, like a pinky.’ ”
Lytton Xu, whom Anthony coached in tackle football when Xu was in high school, had a similar experience. “There were not a lot of Asians playing tackle football when I was playing at [Montgomery] Blair High School, and my parents did not originally want me to play because of the likelihood of injuries that can come from the contact,” says Xu, now a 25-year-old restaurant manager who lives in Silver Spring. “However, flag football is a great medium to enjoy the game. You learn the same footwork and movements with less chance of injury.”
As Xu grew into an adult, he and Anthony became friends. Xu played flag football at the University of Maryland and continues to pursue his passion for the game, playing recreationally on a flag football team in Rockville and another in Northern Virginia.
After playing flag football for the FCA and VSA teams, Melinda Nguyen coached for them from 2013 to 2016. A few years later, she started coaching with the DMV Diamonds, the Washington, D.C., team in the professional Women’s Flag Football Network, as a part-time gig while teaching first grade in Montgomery County Public Schools. When the school year ended in June 2022, she realized she wanted to coach full time and be the person issuing scholarships to girls in a sport she hadn’t been sure had a place for her as a child. Nguyen’s Kansas Wesleyan team regularly scrimmages against the women’s flag football team at Hesston College, also in Kansas. Its head coach, Max Switzer, 32, shares Nguyen’s passion for the game and knows what the toughest challenges are like—including recruiting. “Flag football is not offered as a high school sport in Kansas, so we need to put on camps to get women out who are interested,” Switzer says. He and other coaches also recruit talent by going to various NFL Flag invitationals.
“California, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon, Maryland, Pennsylvania—particularly the Philadelphia area—New York, Alabama, Georgia and Texas are states where flag football is catching on like wildfire,” Switzer says. “Some states have NFL teams that anchor the sport and provide some investment and access to the sport, but others are growing the game without the help.”
In Maryland, the Baltimore Ravens approached the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association about starting high school flag football programs, according to the Baltimore Banner. This past August, Frederick County led the state in having the first high school girls varsity flag football teams, with the Ravens providing grant funding that supports coach stipends and transportation. The Washington Commanders also collaborated with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in launching a youth flag football league in Prince George’s County this past fall, with games in Landover. Representatives of Montgomery County Public Schools did not respond to questions about whether that school system, too, may be introducing flag football anytime soon.
Switzer predicts that in five years the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) will have Division I and II women’s flag football teams. The Division III Atlantic East Conference already has announced plans to be the first NCAA conference to offer varsity female flag football with an anticipated start date in the spring of 2025, joining the ranks of the NAIA, which started in 2020, and the National Junior College Athletic Association that started in 2023.
Having seen his sister fight for opportunities to play as a kid makes it especially fulfilling for Anthony Nguyen that she’s now, just over 20 years later, issuing scholarships, recruiting girls and promoting opportunities that she never imagined would be possible. “It has come full circle,” Anthony says.
Jennifer Tepper lives in Rockville, Baltimore and Lake Roberts, New Mexico. In her freelance work, she focuses on writing about the various ways people find joy.
Flag Football 101
The most important rule in flag football: no contact allowed. Instead of physically tackling an opponent to the ground, defenders “tackle” the ball carrier by removing one or both of the flags attached to a belt and hanging from their sides.
Some other flag football basics, per NFL Flag:
- Teams play five on five.
- Games consist of two halves, usually 15 to 25 minutes long.
- The clock stops only for halftime, timeouts (each team has three) or injury.
- The quarterback isn’t allowed to run with the ball unless it was handed off first. They can run behind the line of scrimmage, but they can’t gain yardage.
- Laterals and pitches aren’t allowed—only direct handoffs are permitted.
- There are no fumbles. Instead, the ball stays in possession of the offense and is spotted at the location of the ball carrier’s feet when the fumble occurred.
- The ball is dead when the ball carrier’s flag is pulled, the ball carrier steps out of bounds, a touchdown or safety is scored, the ball carrier’s knee hits the ground, or the ball carrier’s flag falls off.
- Players can’t obstruct or guard their flags.
- About 2.4 million kids younger than 17 play organized flag football in the United States.
- About 15,700 girls played high school flag football in the 2021-2022 academic year, an increase of 40% from 2018, according to the NFL.
- 26 women’s teams from Morocco, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, the United States and beyond played in the Kelly McGillis Classic International Female Flag Football Championships in 2023.
- Today, NFL Flag counts more than 1,600 teams and 600,000 players, both boys and girls, ages 4-17 in all 50 states.
This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.