When the Ohio High School Athletic Association officially sanctioned girls’ flag football on June 24, coaches across Greater Cincinnati celebrated it as a symbol of growth in the sport. After expanding from just 20 teams in 2023 to 162 in 2026, becoming Ohio’s newest sanctioned sport is the next step toward established legitimacy.
Before the OHSAA stepped in, the Cincinnati Bengals ran girls flag football in the West and the Cleveland Browns ran it in the East. The Bengals hosted the flag football championship for Cincinnati-area teams in 2024 and 2025, as well as a regional championship in 2026, with competing teams following the NFL franchise’s flag rulebook.
While coaches who spoke to The Enquirer expressed gratitude for the Bengals, the North Star was always being recognized by the state.
Jabreel Moton, athletic director and head coach at Woodward High School, said his team sent cards to the OHSAA asking to sanction their sport as early as spring 2025.
In spring 2026, OHSAA organized its first girls flag football championship in Canton and will be fully involved for the 2026-27 school year.
The Bengals remain in the picture. Taylor Conklin, Cincinnati’s director of community engagement, said the team will meet with the OHSAA in late August to further discuss how to proceed with the 2027 season.
OHSAA Director of Media Relations Tim Stried said there could be some structural changes to girls flag football for the upcoming season, but nothing has been finalized. Logistically, what sanctioned flag football means is still mostly up in the air. Top coaches around Cincinnati are optimistic it will bring greater consistency across the board.
“It means we are among the other sports in the OHSAA,” said Desmon Gault, Mount Notre Dame head coach. “It means that we’re going into a new territory as far as the rules go, as far as everybody playing on the same platform.”
Headed into Ohio’s first full season of sanctioned girls flag football, here are some of the biggest questions that coaches still have.
Will questions about playing rules get answered?
In the waning moments of the 2026 OHSAA state semifinals, Mount Notre Dame’s quarterback took a knee to run the clock down, her team up 21-19 against Cleveland-area school Grafton Midview. It’s a standard rule in tackle football practiced in Cincinnati-area flag football. But according to Gault, one of Grafton’s coaches challenged the play, delaying the game by several minutes.
Mount Notre Dame ended up advancing to the state final anyway, but the inconsistency in rules practiced by schools across the state was a common frustration among Cincinnati coaches.
Badin head coach Mike Sebastian said Cincinnati referees were stricter about defenses’ physical contact with the opposing quarterback than Cleveland ones were. He also said Cincinnati referees called more illegal forward passes (passes caught behind the line of scrimmage) than Cleveland in 2025, but the two regions became more consistent with each other in this area in 2026.
Sebastian said he believes his team dealt with a level of physicality they didn’t experience at home, causing them to struggle (Badin fell 6-0 to Macedonia Nordonia in the state quarterfinals). Before state, Badin had won the Cincinnati-area regional title.
“Just a little bit of different ruling there, which does make a big difference,” Sebastian said. “If you don’t know that they can do that, and all of a sudden (they do), that would hurt in a few instances.”
Woodward’s Moton and Purcell Marian head coach T.J. Bailey said they didn’t experience these discrepancies, as neither school played in the state tournament, but Bailey said physicality was an issue during Purcell Marian’s first season in 2026 because a lot of the referees it faced only had experience with tackle football.
Officiating controversies likely will still remain, as does in all sports but coaches are optimistic that OHSAA sanctioning flag football will bring greater consistency across the board in terms of rules.
The Bengals and Browns both have their own 24-page USA Football rulebooks listed on their flag football websites, though they are virtually identical in content. Neither rulebook has information on quarterback kneeling, and their penalty guidelines are identical. OHSAA’s tackle football Officiating Gold Book is 64 pages with subsections on the “victory formation,” where kneeling takes place, and several guidelines on penalty enforcement.
According to the OHSAA’s flag football guidelines for 2027, a playing rule book based on the National Federation of State High School Associations flag football rule book will be made available in late 2026.
“It makes (the game) more uniform across the board when it comes to gameplay,” Gault said of an OHSAA rule book. “It puts everybody on the same playing field, so that when we go to the playoffs, we’re not looking at different rule books to see which applies and which doesn’t.”
How will a fixed girls flag football schedule impact the sport?
Sanctioning flag football across Ohio gives the sport a concrete and earlier timeline. The first day of coaching/tryouts is set for Feb. 15, while games are allowed to start March 5. By contrast, competition across most Cincinnati schools began in late March or early April during the 2026 season.
Sebastian said the earlier start could overlap with the girls basketball season. The end of the basketball state tournament is set for March 13, 2027, while Badin’s final game of the 2025-26 season was Feb. 28. Despite OHSAA’s timeline, he said he still plans to begin flag football practice in early March.
Flag football’s start date is similar to that of softball, girls lacrosse and track and field. Meanwhile, other winter sports like swimming and diving and gymnastics end in either late February or early March, but at least a week earlier than basketball concludes.
Gault’s Mount Notre Dame ran offseason training sessions to work on flag football fundamentals through the school’s partner, Black Sheep Performance. There were virtually no restrictions on how these practices could operate while flag football was not sanctioned, but now these sessions will be limited to groups of four players at once.
Coaches think these restrictions may also mean that possible fall scrimmages organized to acclimate girls into a new sport will be barred. Under OHSAA rules, teams are limited to two scrimmages a season.
However, several coaches tell The Enquirer they anticipated the sport would be sanctioned eventually, so they’re not too concerned about making significant adjustments once the 2026-27 season rolls around. They also welcome the possibility of increased parity that a uniform schedule will bring.
“Anytime you’re putting in rules that everybody has to abide by, and they’re clear cut as far as rosters and practice times and things like that…that would make it even for everybody,” Bailey said.
Will the girls flag football playoff structure and game limit change?
There are several other off-the-field rules coaches want implemented, as OHSAA has greater jurisdiction over girls flag football.
Moton said he hopes the OHSAA will increase the maximum number of regular-season games from 12 to somewhere between 16 and 18 games. He said flag football games last 40 minutes with two halves, compared to tackle football’s 60 minutes with four quarters. Typically, flag football games go by quicker than tackle football games. OHSAA’s regular-season maximum for tackle football is 10.
With more games, Moton said he would have more opportunities to schedule stronger competition beyond the team’s conference schedule. Woodward plays in the Cincinnati Metro Athletic Conference, but the top flag football teams in the area are in the Greater Catholic Leagues, such as Badin and Mount Notre Dame.
“Being in just 10 to 12 (games), it puts our teams at a disadvantage of getting the live game reps that we really need to excel,” Moton said. His team fell to Walnut Hills in the second round of regional playoffs.
Coaches are also monitoring playoff structuring and possibly expanding from two regionals ahead of state championships. Gault said he believes adding more regional sites would ensure girls do not suffer fatigue from extensive travel during the state tournament. Sebastian said he is pushing for four regionals and divisions of competition based on student body size to prevent large schools from competing against smaller ones in the playoffs.
Meanwhile, Bailey said he hopes the early rounds of the competition can be moved closer to downtown Cincinnati, giving an opportunity for more families from inner-city schools like Purcell Marian to attend (in 2026, these rounds took place at Badin).
Will sanctioning flag football grow the sport in Ohio?
OHSAA sanctioning girls flag football is part of a nationwide trend to recognize the sport. So far, 23 states have sanctioned it, with 19 doing so in 2023 or later. In May, the NCAA recommended the sport be elevated to championship status by spring 2028.
Starting in 2027, girls flag football will appear on the OHSAA website, including a statewide schedule of every game. The buzz of OHSAA’s inaugural state championship brought televised media coverage, with the momentum of the tournament possibly growing as it becomes more established over time.
But beyond publicity, coaches think being sanctioned could bring more legitimacy to flag football, potentially leading to more high schools adopting the sport over time. The sport has already ballooned in reach both in and out of Ohio, and being sanctioned may expand that reach.
“Some of the newspapers…they just didn’t cover (flag) football because they didn’t think it was going to stay around,” Sebastian said. “Now in a second or third year, they realize ‘wow, it is big,’ and I think OHSAA accepting that will help with that.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: OHSAA sanctioned girls flag football. What’s next?
Reporting by Yanyan Li, Cincinnati Enquirer / Cincinnati Enquirer
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Yanyan Li, Cincinnati Enquirer | USA TODAY Network
