By Isabella Ying
Did you know that flag football is one of the fastest growing youth sports in America? According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, participation increased by 60% in schools last school year, and this year, Lovett is one of 45 Georgia high schools eagerly joining the fold.
Currently, over 2.4 million kids under the age of 17 play flag football in the U.S. In 2020, Georgia became the fourth of 14 states to sanction high school flag football. Over 620,000 youth athletes play NFL Flag across all 50 states, comprising over 1,600 teams.
As one of those athletes, I wanted to report on the start of Lovett’s inaugural season.
Everyone I spoke to was clamoring to share their own perspectives. ”Wait, put me in the interview,” senior Shelby Morris pleaded after tryouts. (Ladies, ladies, one at a time.)
Shelby is one of the captains of the flag football team this year, working alongside Kai Labarrie. She certainly has high expectations for us: “We’re gonna beat everyone, and we’re gonna win sta…” She cut herself off there, perhaps so that she would not jinx us.
“Mmm… actually, we’re gonna be great!” Shelby finally proclaimed.
While Shelby and Kai will be guiding us from the field as captains, we have another figure to guide us from the sidelines. Coach Tathyana “Blaise” Pauling will coach the Lions flag football team this season. She joined the Lovett community this past June, and began four-on-one workouts throughout July to prepare us for the season.
The two of us convened on Mathis field before one of those four-on-one workouts, right after school was dismissed.
I have gotten used to Coach Blaise’s fiercely bubbly personality throughout late summer, and her personality was further reinforced when she enthusiastically revealed her coaching philosophy for Lovett flag: “Look good, play good, it’s all good.”
Then, she added, “I also believe in having a fast, fierce, and fearless team so that way every time we play against somebody, we step on the field, we know that we are defending the den.”
Coach Blaise expects that this season, we will “grow together as a whole, and just build that environment and that chemistry on campus.”
There are promising indicators of the team being able to gel. As freshman Micah Ingram said after tryouts, her favorite part was “how encouraging everybody was and how when people would do something, there would be a bunch of applause.”
Coach Blaise is already very impressed with the girls she will be coaching this season. She made particular note of the girls’ responsibility and bravery for trying an unfamiliar sport and committing fully to it.
“Every day you guys go home, study, learn, come back with a new skill that I taught 48 hours ago, and it is obviously a lot better than it was two days ago,” she said. “I love that.”
Still, she acknowledges the challenges that come with the excitement. “We’re the new kids on the block at Lovett,” she explained. “The challenge that we’re encountering is how we fit into Lovett athletics, where is our place going to be, what mark we’re going to leave.”
But Coach Blaise is “always up for the challenge.”
She certainly hopes the school gets behind the team and joins it!
“Give it a try,” Coach Blaise advises. Plus, “the good thing about flag football is that a lot of sports are translatable.”
She has big goals for the team this season. Like, for example, “to have fun while we’re learning and while we’re growing together, I am learning to build a program.” Also: “we’re going to the Benz,” or as you may know it, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where the state championship game will take place in December.
Beyond this season, Coach Blaise has aspirations for lower school, middle school, and JV teams. She also hopes to give her girls scholarship opportunities and see them grow and succeed at the next level, with many Division One and Two schools already implementing flag football programs.
Although flag football is new to Lovett, it may not be as new to students as they might have originally thought. For example, football has always been an important part of quarterback Savannah Jones’s childhood.
Savannah, a junior, grew up watching football with her family and throwing the ball with her dad, which is why “it just made me excited when I found out there was a flag football team and it was something new to try, so I thought I’d try it out.”
Beyond simply trying it out, Savannah is excited about getting to learn a new sport and meeting people that she has never played with before, after playing soccer her whole life.
When she started playing flag football, she had not expected it to be so aggressive because it is a non-contact sport. “You wouldn’t expect people to be bodying each other, but they are,” she said. Luckily, the aggression in soccer translates well to flag football, in addition to footwork and endurance aspects.
Savannah’s role as quarterback is not an easy one. It entails “getting to know all your teammates and building trust with them because you just have to kind of know, as a quarterback, everyone’s playing style.“
As a part of a young team, Savannah finds “getting to grow with the team as it develops” an amazing, although new, feeling. It is especially unique that “nobody plays on a club team or anything, or has really had much experience with it. We all get to learn it at once, and then we get to grow with each other.”
That way, at the end of the season, they can look at it and “say we’re a lot better than we were when we started,” she said. She encourages other people to try flag football because “it can really be a sport for anyone.”
Overall, enthusiasm has been high from students, parents, faculty, and administration. “We’re going to dominate. We’re going to win,” freshman Kai Whittle reassured us.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of the momentum of flag football is that it will make its Olympic debut in a scorching Los Angeles summer in 2028. So who knows, future Olympians may be among us.
