An NCAA committee advisable on Wednesday including flag soccer to its rising girls’s sports activities program, a major step towards it turning into an formally sponsored championship sport in all three divisions.
The NCAA stated a minimum of 65 colleges are already sponsoring flag soccer at both the membership or varsity degree, with extra transferring in that course. With a push from the NFL, flag soccer additionally has been added to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Video games.
The NFL has vigorously promoted flag soccer for a number of years, together with beginning a worldwide ambassador program in 2022. Domestically, the league and its groups have been pushing for flag soccer to be sanctioned as a varsity sport in excessive colleges across the nation.
As soon as within the NCAA’s rising girls’s sports activities program, flag soccer would want a minimal of 40 colleges sponsoring it on the varsity degree and meet minimums in video games performed and participant participation to be thought of for NCAA championship standing.
The NCAA’s rising girls’s sports activities program was created to assist facilitate extra alternatives for girls and provides colleges extra alternatives to sponsor groups.
The final sport to maneuver via this system was girls’s wrestling, which was accepted final month to change into the NCAA’s 91st championship sport. The primary girls’s wrestling championship will probably be held in 2026.
5 different sports activities are at the moment in this system: acrobatics and tumbling, equestrian, rugby, stunt and triathlon. 5 sports activities have beforehand emerged from this system to earn NCAA championship standing: rowing (1996), ice hockey (2000), water polo (2000), bowling (2003) and seashore volleyball (2015).
(Photograph: Isaiah Vazquez / Getty Photographs)
