A person could be forgiven for assuming that flag football might lack the grit and intensity of its tackle counterpart. But the girls on the field at Boston College’s Alumni Stadium Thursday night quickly proved otherwise.
At the 2025 Patriots Girls High School Flag Football Championship, the five-on-five games were fast-paced. Fans of the eight teams, who had traveled from across the state, screamed and rattled cowbells from the stands. For one night, a stadium typically home to the BC Eagles played host to a sport that’s growing rapidly in Massachusetts.
The league, backed by the New England Patriots Foundation and the Kraft family, launched in 2023 with just eight teams. By the following year, it had swollen to 23. This season, there were more than 50 throughout the commonwealth.
Dani Callahan, the community relations manager for the New England Patriots, credits that growth to the region’s deep love of football.
“Once we got it started, we knew it would explode. We didn’t know exactly how, but I think once people caught wind of it, they were so excited to be a part of it,” she said.
Flag football more broadly has seen a major boost in recent years. It will make its Olympic debut in 2028.
Earlier this year, the NFL launched its Flag 50 campaign, an effort to get girls’ flag football officially sanctioned as a varsity high school sport in every state. Callahan said the Patriots are eager to support that effort.
“It opens up amazing opportunities for female athletes and that’s ultimately what we want,” she said. “We want this game to be accessible to all.”
One of the players seizing those opportunities is Sophia Lafontant, the quarterback for St. Mary’s High School in Lynn. She’s also played on Team USA’s junior squad and was named MVP on Thursday.
Her goal is to play flag football in college.
“It means a lot that maybe some other girls, younger girls, maybe even girls older than me look at me and think, ‘Oh, I want to do that one day. Oh, I want to join the sport,’” she said.
Lafontant led St. Mary’s to a dramatic 20–13 win over Leominster High in a championship game that could have come straight from a movie script.
Leominster’s Jaliany Santiago, who has committed to play flag football at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky, went down with an apparent injury but pushed through the pain to help keep her team in the game.
Ultimately, St. Mary’s made key defensive stops, and Lafontant stayed calm in the pocket to seal the win, earning the team its second straight title in a rematch of last year’schampionship game.
Even though girls’ flag football isn’t yet officially recognized by the state’s governing body, Thursday’s contest had all the intensity and drama of a state championship. St. Mary’s head coach Terrell Patterson hopes that with eventual approval from the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, the sport will gain even more support and visibility.
“I think we’d be able to have some consistency with good fields, good venues. Then I think that also will draw national attention to universities to recruit in the state of Massachusetts that has grown [this] into a high school sport,” he said.
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