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Women’s flag football will become the 24th U Sports championship and the 13th women’s sport in Canadian university athletics.
Flag football will make its Olympic debut in 2028, and Canadian universities are stepping up to help develop players for the national women’s team.
U Sports and Football Canada announced a partnership to introduce women’s flag football as a pilot sport for the 2027-28 season. The announcement was made Wednesday at U Sports’ annual meeting in St. John’s.
As a pilot sport, women’s flag football will have a lower participation requirement and a five-year period to earn full-sport status within U Sports.
Pierre Arsenault, U Sports CEO, said the organization sees this as a key opportunity to expand football offerings for women. “We certainly are paying regular attention to gender opportunities, and in this, it did represent an opportunity to provide a football offering on the women’s side,” he said.
Football Canada has hosted a Canadian Collegiate Flag Football Championship for the last five years. In Quebec’s RSEQ conference, women’s flag football has been a varsity sport since 2021, with eight teams competing. The University of Montreal defended its title in Regina this past May.
Elisabeth Ashkar, a second-year quarterback from Blainville, Quebec, shared that this year was the first her team could officially call itself the Carabins varsity squad. “We’re going to get more resources, more funding with this incoming news,” she said. “Young girls right now are going to have a clearer path to playing flag football at the university level. It’s just more opportunities for girls all around the country to play a sport and continue practising it throughout their school years.”
Quebec players dominate Canada’s roster for the upcoming world championship in Duesseldorf, Germany, from August 13-16. Meanwhile, about 500 women compete in flag football at the club level across 14 Ontario universities in the Ontario Women’s Intercollegiate Football Association.
Samantha Hopkins, a defensive back on the national team and five-year football player at Western University in Calgary, hopes the sport’s new status means better practice schedules, improved medical support, and greater flexibility academically. “We’ve been fighting for so long to get recognized as a sport at Western and get assistance, have support from the university, because we knew that flag football was going to take off,” Hopkins said from a national team training camp in Montreal.
She added, “It’s so important to finally have this pathway. Now you have high school programs and then these high school athletes can get recruited into Canadian collegiate programs. We have a lot of flag talent, but it’s all going to the States because they’re the ones that have the programs, they have the funds, and they have this support. Now that we have this pathway, it’s a really great way to keep talent in Canada.”
This year’s world championship is the first qualifier for both men’s and women’s teams aiming for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Rachel Lessard, head coach of Canada’s women’s team, noted that over half the national roster headed to Duesseldorf are current university players. She expects university players to be part of the Olympic team if Canada qualifies.
“If we establish this in all the provinces, then they’ll get the same competition, they’ll play more five-on-five, well-organized, and also universities that are now starting up, there will be more services given to the athletes,” Lessard said. “It’s a big deal for us for the quality of our sport, the credibility of our sport. We’re going to the Olympics, so I feel we need something under the Olympics to bring those athletes up.”
Women’s flag football will be the second pilot sport after men’s and women’s tennis, which joined U Sports in 2023-24.
Arsenault explained that U Sports considers existing university participation when evaluating new sports. “There were a number of schools that were interested in pursuing this as a U Sports sport, and then ultimately just the growth of women’s flag football really across North America right now, to see the attention that it’s grabbing, the fact that it will be in the Olympics for the first time in 2028, we saw the ability for some real momentum around adding this as a U Sports sport.”
U Sports oversees nearly 15,000 student-athletes competing in varsity sports at 58 universities across Canada, from Victoria to St. John’s.
With files from CBC Sports