By Rachel Bachman
Last year Nike Inc. reached out to two high school football
powerhouses in Tampa, Fla., and sent personalized bags for each
athlete stuffed with free jerseys, cleats, socks and gloves. The
shipment to Matt Hernandez, coach of the Alonso High Ravens, was so
large that "the FedEx guy asked if it was a fraud-type situation
because so many boxes were coming to a residential house."
Outfitting winners is a longtime strategy at Nike. But the gift
bags held something outside the typical team-issued gear: sports
bras.
Alonso and Robinson High Schools together have won seven Florida
state championships -- in girls flag football. The teams are the
faces of a $5 million campaign by Nike and the NFL, launched in a
commercial last week, to bring the sport to every high school in
America. As of Monday morning it had 3.5 million views on
YouTube.
"Big corporations want to recognize women's sports," said Katie
Kemp, a senior wide receiver and safety on the five-time champion
Robinson High girls flag team.
There's an even more compelling reason, however, that the
nation's top sports apparel company and its dominant professional
league might want to boost a relatively small sport that barely
existed two decades ago. As interest in tackle football fades,
girls represent a mammoth market to boost the number of players and
viewers of the nation's most popular sport.
The NFL remains the top broadcast draw in sports. But average
NFL viewership fell 7% during the 2020 regular season, and the
league's core audience of men aged 18 to 49 has at times shown
signs of wavering.
At U.S. high schools, rising concern over the effects of
concussions has contributed to a 9% drop in football participation
in a decade, a loss of more than 100,000 athletes, according to the
National Federation of State High School Associations. That was in
2018-19, before a pandemic-altered season that many coaches worry
will cause some players to never come back.
Yet tackle football remains the nation's most popular high
school sport with more than 1 million athletes. And in part because
of football's large squads, 1 million more boys than girls play
high school sports overall. While co-ed flag football for children
has grown with a big push from the NFL, girls' high school flag has
lagged behind. As of 2018-19, about 11,200 girls nationwide played
it.
The NFL and Nike aim to narrow the football gap. They're
dangling donations of up to $100,000 in product to state athletic
associations that offer girls flag as a sport or initiate pilot
programs this year. A Nike spokesperson said the initiative was
geared at giving girls more opportunities, noting that girls start
playing sports later than boys and drop out sooner.
Schools in California, Michigan and the District of Columbia
already have teams for girls, and the Alabama High School Athletic
Association is considering adding the sport .
Individual NFL teams have joined the push to leverage existing
interest in girls flag football.
The new Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers have hosted
girls players at their facilities. In 2018 the Atlanta Falcons
funded a 19-team girls high school flag football pilot program, and
by 2020, 91 schools across the state fielded teams. In December,
Georgia joined Alaska, Florida and Nevada in holding official girls
flag football state championships.
The New York Jets recently announced they're pairing with Nike
to create an eight-team girls high school flag league to start play
in New Jersey this spring.
The number of girls playing on boys' tackle high school football
teams has roughly doubled in a decade, but is still relatively
small at about 2,400.
Nike and the NFL's interest in girls' flag acknowledges the
declining societal acceptance of tackle football, said T. Bettina
Cornwell, who heads the Department of Marketing at the University
of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business, in an email. Cornwell
added that the popularity among younger audiences of UFC and
e-sports adds "pressure to imagine how things will play out if
changes are not made today."
An NFL spokesperson didn't respond to a question about eroding
viewership. Increasing female participation in football is a
priority, the spokesperson said. The NFL's partnership with the
small-college National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics,
meant to encourage the growth in women's flag teams, "was
developed, in part, because of the NAIA's ability to onboard a new
varsity sport quickly," the NFL spokesperson said. The NFL gave 13
schools $15,000 stipends to launch teams this year, according to
the NAIA.
High school girls flag football in Florida has grown to about
300 teams from Tallahassee to Pembroke Pines. At Tampa's Alonso
High, not only do more girls play flag football than almost any
other girls sport -- about 40 total on junior varsity and varsity
-- but the flag team is a draw for spectators, too, Hernandez said.
During the team's state title-winning seasons, 2018 and 2019, it
ranked only behind Alonso's tackle football team in tickets sold to
home games.
Between the flag team's existing popularity and the Nike ad, "My
classmates, they think it's the coolest thing ever," said Elise
Christensen, Alonso High sophomore linebacker and center.
Katie Kemp of Robinson High grew up playing a range of sports
and her older sister, Emily, persuaded her to join her on the flag
football team. Last season their younger brother, Casey, served as
a team manager.
"Probably playing the sport has increased my interest in
watching (football), because I know what all the positions are, and
I know what's going on," Katie Kemp said.
Teams in Florida play seven on seven, no tackling, and follow
the other rules laid out by the National Intramural-Recreational
Sports Association.
"Getting other states to use the same consistent rules will be
how the sport really expands," said Joshua Saunders, coach at
Robinson High. Hernandez of Alonso High said a tight-knit community
of coaches helped foster girls flag football in Florida, and that
he hopes the Nike commercial spurs its spread nationwide.
"One thing that we've kind of said in our small coaching group
is, it would take a big backer to get behind the sport, and once
that happened, it would explode," he said. "And I think that's what
we're seeing."
Write to Rachel Bachman at Rachel.Bachman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 09, 2021 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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