The new Upper School flag football team is composed of 27 students: 23 male and only four female players. There are no gender non-binary students on the team. The team is meant to be coed, so why is the gender balance so skewed? To answer this question, more needs to be understood about the flag football team in particular.
Athletic Director Brendan Blakeley said, “Flag football, up until two years ago, was not a state-sanctioned sport…it didn’t exist at high schools, but it did exist in outside clubs for younger kids and at middle schools.” This is why the Middle School has had a flag football team for five years. “If you were looking at it from a football perspective, the idea always was you would maybe play flag [football] as a kid, and then when you got to ninth grade at a high school that had tackle football, you put on pads and a helmet, and you play tackle football.”
The California Interscholastic Federation, or CIF, governs all high school sports in California. Seeing that flag football was gaining more popularity, the CIF added a girls’ flag football team three years ago so that there would be football leagues for both boys and girls.
“Up until last year, we would have our men’s soccer team play in the fall,” Blakeley said. Since the school has no men’s tackle football, “that was the main sport for boys in the fall,” he said. The men’s soccer team has now moved to winter, leaving a gap for the fall sports season. The School’s Athletics Department decided to add co-ed flag football as a replacement.
When asked why the team is so overwhelmingly male, Associate Director of Athletics Stephen Flynn mentioned cultural aspects. “Football has historically been associated with boys and men. Professional and college football are overwhelmingly men’s sports, and the television, radio, and social media coverage surrounding football reflects that,” Flynn said. Because football is an overwhelmingly male-dominated sport, flag football probably seemed more appealing to male students. “This is a co-ed program, and we hope that over time, our participation becomes more balanced,” Flynn added.
Senior Amiya Bhalotra is one of the few female students on the flag football team. “I thought it would be fun to try a team sport for my senior year,” she said. “I knew that there wasn’t going to be a lot of girls signing up, and I wanted to kick-start some representation.” Despite the ratio, Balhotra said that the team is very inclusive. “I don’t feel that it’s a particularly misogynistic team at all, which is good.”
As this is the first season of Upper School flag football, the program is still developing. The program is taking initiatives to get more girls on the team. “Making sure our female and gender non-binary athletes are well represented and visible to the rest of our student body will be one of our goals with this new program,” Flynn said. The Athletics Department plans to meet with the girls on the team to figure out how to bring more women to the program.
Both the Athletics Department and girls on the team agree that they want to balance the ratio. “I think that women should and will continue to partake in this sport, because they can and they should,” Bhalotra said.