Dresses and heels? Sure, at times, but girls are about far more than that in 2025, and what you’re seeing on the football field this spring proves it.

This past October, the OSAA approved flag football as an “emerging sport,” and this spring that decision was justified by the 47 different schools that are fielding teams.

That might come as a surprise to some, but for people who follow all of the games at the high school level, it’s a natural progression for girls who aren’t afraid to get physical.

Go to an area soccer, basketball or lacrosse game and get near the action, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s contact you might not expect, banter you might get a chuckle out of, and a level of competitiveness that leads to both.

It’s aggressive, undoubtedly athletic, and cutthroat between the lines, while remaining civil beyond them.

That’s the formula for football, and one that’s been working since the state gave the flag version a try two years ago.

In 2023, Oregon offered an inaugural tournament consisting of eight teams on a spring Saturday at Sherwood High School.

Last year, there were 32 participating teams that played up to a 10-game regular season prior to the culminating event held on the Nike campus in Beaverton.

And this year, that number has grown to 47 teams playing up to 18 games, with 16 of those teams qualifying for this year’s championship tournament scheduled for May 17, at Barlow High School in Gresham.

That’s not just curiosity, but rather a growing love for a game thought previously to be for “men.”

Talk to some of these girls and they’ll tell you they enjoy learning the rules, the strategy and the skills necessary to excel at a game they only used to watch from the sidelines. But they also love the physicality, which while tempered due to the flag aspect they’re playing, does still exist by way of the skills involved and the nature of what it takes to succeed and win – which they too want to do.

“A lot of the feedback I’ve gotten from the officials is how much the intensity has gone up,” Liberty head coach Rebecca Brisson said. “Last year it was like, people were just having fun. Now you can see even as the season goes on, just the intensity. The kids aren’t out there just to have fun – which they are – but they’re taking it more serious. And the coaches are really coaching strategy.”

The sport still needs three more teams to meet the metric required to become an officially sanctioned OSAA sport, but such is likely based on the exponential growth over the past two years.

This season, new 6A schools that threw themselves into the fray are Liberty, Forest Grove, Clackamas, Lake Oswego, Lakeridge, Sherwood, Tualatin, David Douglas and Willamette. Next year, Brisson said they expect a number of the Beaverton and Portland schools who’ve been watching closely from afar to get in the mix.

“We’re right on track,” said Brisson. “There were some of us that thought we would get to 50 this year, but we’re super pleased. It’s definitely starting to grow farther out and farther south. That’s huge.”

I think it’s great. While football is often thought of for the physical and sometimes violent nature of the game, the flag version allows people to show off the skills and athleticism frequently lost in the shuffle of the hard-hitting tackles that even in today’s climate finds itself front and center.

You’ve got to run, throw and catch to play football, along with use your head as a means of deciphering the strategy being used for or against you on the field of play. It’s fun, challenging and yes, even in flag form, physical for those who play it. But while in year’s past reserved for the boys, the girls now have something to say about that–and they’re saying it in cleats.

Jerry Ulmer contributed to this piece.