Charleston Southern and the future of D-I women's flag football

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Quick note: I am currently in State College, Pennsylvania, helping some journalism classes and doing some #research for future newsletters. I will return late Tuesday evening. If you’re in town, drop me a line! And if I’m a teensy bit slow responding to your email, that’s why.

Elite Yardage and Stat Tracking Built for Flag Football Programs

Halftime insights. Final stats ready at the whistle. No film rewatches. No paper chaos.

Blitz Board Stats gives coaches live, filterable game data they can use at halftime and complete, organized stats the moment the game ends.

Coaches and players get profiles that make it easy to promote performance, recognize athletes and share results across social media.

Organizations gain real-time leaderboards, team-level breakdowns and game-by-game visibility across every stat category.

So coaches can coach.

Athletes get seen.

Programs build credibility.

Flag football is live, and tackle football coming soon.

Learn more here! 

Last week, Charleston Southern announced it plans to do something it hasn’t done since 1993. The school plans to add a new varsity women’s sport to the department for the 2028 season.

That sport? Women’s flag football.

Interest in women’s flag football has exploded in the high school and college ranks over the past few years, and the NCAA added the sport to the Emerging Sports for Women program at the 2026 NCAA convention. But while many NAIA institutions sponsor the sport at the varsity, intercollegiate level, the vast majority of Division I programs that offer flag football do so as a club sport.

There’s no NCAA championship. No conferences that officially sponsor the sport. Yet.

As best as I can tell, 11 other D-I institutions have announced their intentions to sponsor women’s flag football as a varsity sport in the near future: Alabama State, Mount St. Mary’s, UT Arlington, Cal Poly, Fairleigh Dickinson, Mercyhurst, Long Island University, Manhattan, Mississippi Valley State, North Alabama … and Nebraska.

Those are not schools you’d typically think have a great deal in common.

So why flag football? And why now? And how is anybody supposed to piece together a conference schedule with participating teams so spread out all over the country?

I called up Charleston Southern’s athletic director, Jeff Barber, to find out.

Typically, one of the most common reasons for schools to start a flag football team is to boost student enrollment, which is one of the reasons why adoption has been stronger in the NAIA and with smaller colleges. Barber told me that while “you’re always interested in getting more students,” enrollment growth wasn’t the primary reason CSU wanted to add another program.

The institution wanted to add more athletic opportunities for women to ensure compliance with Title IX and evaluated multiple potential sports that could help it achieve those goals. But, according to Barber, there were several reasons flag specifically stood out.

You don’t need a 50,000-seat mega-stadium to house a flag football team ... or at least, not yet. The playing surface is a little smaller than a conventional tackle football field (40 by 80 yards), and many institutions already have several of those turf fields handy on campus. At CSU, for example, the school has identified an intramural field for the team’s home games. Other schools may use facilities originally built for soccer, tackle football practice, intramurals or other sports.

You also don’t need to purchase truckloads of specialized, expensive equipment, like you might for starting a hockey or lacrosse program. Flags, cones and cleats aren’t especially expensive, which means schools really only need to be on the hook for scholarships, support, travel and coaches. There are some logistical questions left to be answered (Barber noted that the school will need to find a good locker room solution), but nothing insurmountable or massively expensive.

Barber also noted that the support costs aren’t zero. The program hopes to have a roster of “around 25” athletes by 2028. Those athletes will be considered varsity athletes, just like CSU basketball or softball players, and thus have access to all of the academic support specialists, physical therapists, training tables and everything else that comes with being a D-I athlete. Depending on the program, existing staffers could absorb those costs, or they might require additional new hires.

When we spoke on Friday, Barber told me that “eight to 10 folks had already reached out” to show interest in the head coaching role.

Since there aren’t a bevy of other major programs competing at the varsity level in women’s flag football, Barber told me he wants to keep a very open mind about the profile of the right candidate. It could potentially be a GA or assistant coach of a current D-I football program (including perhaps a member of the current Charleston Southern football staff).

It also could be a high school coach. South Carolina does not sponsor high school girl’s flag football as a varsity sport (it is a “piloting” program in South Carolina), but many other states in the South, like Florida and Georgia, do sponsor it. Many other D-I colleges also have flag football programs operating at the club level, and Barber indicated he’d be open to coaches from that level too.

“We want to find the best person available,” he said. “Flag has become a popular sport at the JUCO and NAIA levels, so perhaps we’ll find a candidate there.” As a faith-based institution, Barber pointed out that the right candidate would also need to be comfortable in that sort of environment. But man or woman, D-I or NAIA, club or college, Barber is open to looking everywhere.

Of course, there could always be a candidate that comes out of left field.

“I’ll be the one to break this … Nick Saban called, and he’s very interested in coaching our program,” he said with a smile.

In the official announcement, CSU said:

I’ve noticed other press releases announcing programs have included similar language.

For what it’s worth, you need 40 varsity programs before the NCAA will hold an official national championship. Maybe we get to that point before 2028, maybe not. But I am aware of several other D-I institutions who are having serious conversations about potentially launching varsity flag programs. The biggest hangup, I’ve been told, generally comes down to travel and schedules. The more programs in any particular geographic region that start teams, the easier it will be for other teams in that region to add programs, as well.

Barber isn’t too worried about not having enough teams to play, although he declined to mention any other possible “expansion candidates” for future flag football programs.

The sport does have one major scheduling advantage over tackle football, though, one that might help an administrator sleep a little better at night. Unlike tackle programs, flag football teams can (and often do) play multiple games in a day, or at least over the course of a weekend. It’s entirely possible for multiple schools to travel to one location and set up some sort of multi-team event (MTE) to get multiple games. That way, schools don’t need to automatically budget for a dozen road trips a season.

“Charleston is a wonderful city, and I’m sure that many schools would want to come visit for a flag football tournament,” Barber told me.

He also noted that the process of starting a program from scratch feels a little bit like the COVID era. “There are times when you have more questions than answers,” he said. But he was very optimistic that the department has enough time to figure everything out.

Between the support of the NFL (which has meaningfully invested in growing the college game), the NCAA, other coaches, ADs and fans, there should be a lot of resources available to make sure everybody gets the equipment, support and infrastructure to not just survive, but thrive.

“We’re not doing this just to do it,” Barber added with a smile. “We want to win championships.”

Don’t be surprised if you hear about more and more schools joining that effort over the coming months. With affordable costs, high school talent and a growing coaching pipeline, it shouldn’t be too long before there are real championships to win.