Marian University to add women’s flag football

Rich Palzewic

Staff

December 16, 2024

FOND DU LAC – As Hank Williams once sang, “Are You Ready For Some Football?”

Though Monday Night Football, the Green Bay Packers and the Wisconsin Badgers might first pop into your mind when one hears those words, Marian University in Fond du Lac recently announced it is adding a different version of the sport.

Coming to the field in spring 2026, the university announced it will offer women’s flag football as its 26th sponsored sport.

Flag football is a form of football that has players wear flags around a belt that are pulled off in lieu of traditional tackling.

Tony Draves, Marian athletic director and softball coach, said the university becomes the first four-year institution in the State of Wisconsin to add flag football and joins Bryant & Stratton (a National Junior Collegiate Athletic Association member) as the only schools in Wisconsin that offer the sport.

“The reaction has been great,” Draves said. “We’ve got a huge amount of resumes in the coaching search, and we’ve had a lot of people reach out in terms of, once we hire a coach, will the coach be doing clinics? They want us to come to their school for recruiting purposes. It’s really made quite a splash we’re hoping to capitalize on.”

Marian President Aaron Sadoff said adding flag football is exciting on a couple of different levels.

“At Marian, we love to do exactly what the Sisters of St. Agnes – who started Marian – want us to do, which is to be on the cutting edge and open up opportunities for people,” he said. “With being the first four-year university to add flag football in Wisconsin, not only does it (provide) us with an opportunity to give people an additional chance to play athletics and attend Marian, but it also opens up more opportunities for women.”

Secondly, Sadoff said adding flag football will impact Marian’s student body and enrollment.

“I was a public school superintendent, teacher and principal for 25 years,” he said. “People talk about what comes first, the chicken or the egg. At Marian, one of our main goals with being a private university based on Catholic values is that we’re really invested in creating amazing nurses, educators, business people and other professionals, but even more important is creating better people.”

Sadoff said adding flag football could bring in student-athletes from “all walks of life.”

“Hopefully, they get to Marian and think, ‘Whoa, this is really cool. I can really grow as a person,’” he said. “That’s just as important as creating professionals.”

Some help from the Packers

Sadoff said the university got serious about potentially adding flag football about two years ago.

Dr. George Koonce, Marian’s senior vice president for university relations (also a former Green Bay Packers player), Sadoff said, was a big help in making it happen.

“With George also being a trustee for the Packers, they were also interested in helping get things going, especially at the high school level,” he said. “We’ve gotten a lot of support, advice and information from the Packers. It was just a matter of just pulling the trigger and saying, ‘How can we do this?’”

Draves said the National Football League (NFL) has played a large role in the growth of flag football as well with the creation of NFL Flag.

The NFL Flag program currently includes more than 1,600 teams featuring more than 600,000 athletes across the nation.

“The Packers are doing a great job of investing in this at the high school level for young women, and that’s where you’re going to start to see pockets of colleges following suit because they have a recruiting base in their backyard,” Draves said.

Sadoff said women’s high school flag football “is on a whole different level.”

“From California to Florida,” he said. “I was in Savannah, Georgia, for a conference and talked to a high school employer/coach who also reffed some flag football games. He told me it’s insane how intense it is. It’s definitely not like the Powderpuff games you see at Homecoming.”

Gaining turf in Wisconsin

Draves said many colleges are considering adding flag football – including some in Wisconsin.

He said he’s already received several calls from college athletic directors around the state.

“In the next three to five years, (adding flag football at colleges) is going to explode,” Draves said. “We were trying to be one of the first to do it in our region because we’re very Division III heavy in this area of the country, and we wanted to be first to put our flag – no pun intended – in the ground.”

With Marian being at a small Division III, Draves said it’s easier to add a sport – especially one that has lower overhead costs.

“One of the reasons I enjoy being at a small school like Marian is because, with decisions like this, you can be agile with them,” he said. “There’s not a lot of red tape to go through. I just needed to convince everyone (associated with the university) that this followed our mission, would enhance our mission and was financially feasible. We were able to do these things.”

Draves said a national search is already underway for a head coach, with program play set to begin in spring 2026.

“I hope to have a coach named in the next few weeks before the holidays,” he said. “That way, the new coach can hit the ground running in January and start recruiting.”

The financials of adding flag football, Draves said, is relatively inexpensive.

“Flag football is very affordable,” he said. “Your major expenses would be a coach, additional athletic training services out of our support staff and then eventually travel.”

Draves said the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision in October 2023 to add flag football to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games also helped the university decide “the time is now.”

“I think the IOC’s decision to add flag football solidified what we already knew – the sport is going to explode,” he said. “We have a growing number of female athletes on the campus who are playing other sports who played flag football in high school. That also piqued our interest (to begin the program).”

Draves said most of the club sports at Marian are predominantly male, so adding women’s flag football made sense.

“We’re probably going to add three or four more sports in the next two years, but I think this is the one that is exploding the quickest – it makes sense,” he said. “Even though we don’t have a men’s football program, we love football on this campus.”

Growing in popularity nationally

At the collegiate level, Draves said there are at least 30 institutions that sponsor flag football, with Marian joining Midwest schools Rockford, Benedictine and Illinois Wesleyan.

He said two NCAA Division III conferences have already announced the addition of the sport in the United East Conference and Atlantic East Conference.

Currently, Draves said there are at least 13 states that offer flag football as a high school sport, with another 15 in various stages of pilot programs, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), including Wisconsin.

Come one, come all

Like Sadoff, Draves said he expects athletes from around the country and all walks of life to consider Marian for its flag football offering.

“Within three to five years, we hope to have a roster of 25-30 female student-athletes from all over the country,” he said. “At first, we’ll play more local colleges in probably a 10-game season, but as more colleges add the sport, I eventually see us playing about a 20-game schedule. Flag football is a sport you can play two or three times a week.”

With the low cost and small amount of equipment needed for flag football, Draves said adding the sport allows Marian to expand its geographic footprint.

“One of the things they’re finding in high school flag football throughout the country is the sport is reaching some underserved populations, and that’s a really exciting thing,” he said. “It’s become a sport throughout high schools all over the country that is appealing to demographics that haven’t always been involved in high school athletics, which is really what you’re looking to do when you start athletics.”

Though the addition is a great thing for the university, Draves said sports also bring in student-athletes who might not have considered the university beforehand.

“This is part of what small universities look to do in using athletics as an enrollment driver,” he said. “Yes, it allows us to expand our geographic footprint because we’re getting in on the ground floor with the sport, but it will also hopefully get more women from across the country – or locally – to come to Marian.”

‘Boomerang effect’

Not only does Marian hope to gain enrollment from the addition of flag football, Sadoff said, it could also potentially lead to those same individuals eventually deciding to call Fond du Lac home.

He said if a student-athlete enjoys their stay at Marian, that could also have a boomerang effect on others.

“This is simply Aaron Sadoff’s opinion, but I think we’ve been getting this all wrong,” he said. “You’ve heard about brain drain, and we’re worried about people leaving (the) area (after graduation). I have kids, but I think it’s unfair to think they will always stay in this area and not experience other parts of the country.”

Sadoff said he compares it to bringing your five-year-old child to (Walt) Disney World.

“After a while, it’s like, ‘Oh, look, a $10 soda. Oh, look, long lines and people yelling and screaming,’” he said. “When you go to Disney World, you have to see it through your child’s eyes. That’s what is so cool about Marian and Fond du Lac. We get people from California, Hawaii, New York City, Chicago and even the Netherlands. When they come to Marian, they’re like, ‘I love it here.’ Even though they’re not from around here, they start seeing things differently and end up staying – and then they tell their friends what a great place this is.”

Sadoff said student-athletes from different parts of the country also bring new perspectives.

“Maybe that’s through culture, having our families learn more about diversity or even leading to better restaurants and entertainment,” he said.

Sadoff said he thinks adding flag football could also help the university in its efforts to recruit in other sports.

“Soccer and ice hockey come to mind,” he said. “Now some of these girls might be thinking, ‘I could go to Marian for hockey or soccer and then also play flag football.’”