The 11-player Benedictine University flag football team sat in a stretching circle just outside the walled turf field at Naperville Yard indoor sports complex on Feb. 28.
The players had just wrapped a two-hour practice, during which coach Caroline Schwartz stood on the field behind the offense with an iPad, relaying plays for them to run. For the final 45 minutes, a group of six Benedictine male athletes joined to give the Eagles some outside competition.
As they debriefed from the practice, Schwartz and the players talked about what was to come in eight days — how to play clean and handle trash talk, how to have “the mind of a goldfish” to forget the mistakes they know will come.
The Benedictine women have long been athletes, but for most of them, playing flag football is still very new. And on Saturday night, they’ll have a completely new experience in the sport.
Benedictine and Rockford will compete in the first women’s college flag football game in Illinois when they meet at 6:15 p.m. Saturday inside the Chicago Bears’ Walter Payton Center on the Halas Hall campus.
The Bears expect about 300 fans, including family and friends of the athletes, high school and college coaches and Bears staff. Bears player personnel coordinator Ashton Washington is slated to speak with both teams before the game.
The game is the next step in the rise of girls and women’s flag football in Illinois that started a few years ago at the high school level.
“It’s super crazy because my life two, three years ago was only basketball,” Benedictine quarterback Marilyn Myrick said. “I never would have thought I would have been in this spot right now.
“It’s going to be crazy that little girls can watch it and they can be like: ‘Wow, I can actually do that. This is actually a big thing that people are doing.’ It’s going to be super cool for everybody just to see.”
Rapid growth
The Bears have been a key catalyst in getting girls and women’s flag football off the ground in Illinois.
The NFL franchise and Chicago Public Schools first introduced girls high school flag football with a 22-team league in 2021, and the Bears added a state tournament in 2022.
“Our goal and our guiding light, our North Star in all of this, has been this idea that we want to grow the game of football and make it accessible to everyone,” said Gustavo Silva, Bears manager of youth and high school football. “We want to make the game more inclusive, and that’s going to make the game obviously more diverse but, most importantly, more equitable. Girls flag football fits that perfectly.
“When we looked at the landscape of what youth and high school football looked like, there was obviously a key missing demographic, and that was girls and women. We said, ‘Wow, this is an opportunity that we can’t wait on any longer.’”
In 2024, flag football became an Illinois High School Association sanctioned sport, with 154 teams participating in the first state series. Fremd won the inaugural IHSA state championship in October. At the time, the IHSA said it anticipated the number of teams participating could grow to more than 200 by 2026.
The next step in the growth of the sport is giving those high school athletes somewhere to play in college — especially considering flag football will be part of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics recommended last month that flag football be added to the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program in all three divisions. The committee noted at least 65 NCAA schools sponsor the sport at the varsity or club levels. The national number climbs higher when factoring in NAIA and junior college programs.
In order to be considered for NCAA championship status, an emerging sport must have at least 40 schools participating at the varsity level and meeting contest and participation requirements. Women’s wrestling is the most recent example of an emerging sport that earned championship status, with the first championship to be held in winter 2026.
Rockford and Benedictine are the only women’s flag football teams in Illinois playing this year, but Aurora, College of DuPage, Illinois Wesleyan and North Park have committed to fielding teams in the future. The Bears also have worked with Purdue-Northwest in Hammond, Ind., to plan for a team.
While fewer colleges than high schools field teams, Silva expects the same type of rapid growth.
“I expect it to be very similar to what happened in high school,” Silva said. “We’ve done the outreach and really see that there’s a lot of interest, especially when they’re seeing the amount of girls that are playing at the high school level.
“I think that if we had this conversation a year from now, we will be somewhere around maybe a dozen schools (in Illinois) that are committed or in the process of starting a team.”
Rockford, Benedictine and the Bears have held weekly meetings for the last month or so to plan the first Illinois college game, which Rockford coach Tim Trevier said has been “well thought out.”
Silva said that from the start of the first high school initiative, there has been a push to build a community within the sport in Illinois so that coaches can bounce ideas off each other or players can pass on their knowledge at clinics to help build the game.
“I felt this in high school, too, like even our biggest rivals, before and after the game, they’re part of our family,” Schwartz said. “Between the whistles we were enemies, but outside this we’re all doing it together.”
Building the programs
As the first two Illinois college programs, Rockford and Benedictine are in different stages of growth.
Rockford asked Trevier to launch its flag football program in the fall of 2023, and he had about eight months to recruit players to his first team. He has a roster of 20 players, 18 of whom had flag football experience and nine of whom are from out of state.
Schwartz was a teacher and the flag football coach at Lane Tech, and she agreed to join Benedictine part time last spring in addition to those duties. She left her teaching job in January to join Benedictine full time.
Most experienced players already had committed to schools by the time Schwartz started recruiting last year, but she did persuade Myrick, a former Bolingbrook player, to come aboard. Schwartz and Myrick had traveled together to Canton, Ohio, for an NFL flag football tournament.
Saniya Shotwell, a former Oak Park-River Forest player who played a season at Pratt Community College in Kansas, also transferred and now plays running back, wide receiver and safety.
Those were Schwartz’s two recruits with experience. She began searching for anyone on campus who was interested in playing, telling them she would teach them the game. She landed some soccer and rugby players and track athletes who wanted to try a second sport. Shotwell also has been a big help.
“Her personality is so outgoing and big, and she’s literally standing in rooms and being like, ‘Do you want to play flag football?’” Schwartz said. “So that’s kind of how this year has come together.
“We just had no idea what it was going to look like, if we were going to have enough people to play. And here we are with 11 and we’re happy. And we’re still recruiting.”
‘We deserve to be seen.’ Inside Lane Tech’s quest to capture the sport’s first IHSA girls flag football title.
Eventually Schwartz would like to get to 15 to 18 players, at least enough to practice seven on seven. But despite the rushed timeline, she’s happy Benedictine started the team when it did.
Both coaches have faced challenges as they’ve tried to build their programs from the ground up.
Schwartz has loved building the playbook, taking ideas from YouTube and NFL games to add to what she used at Lane Tech. But her biggest challenge has been juggling the schedules of the players, who didn’t all realize they would be college athletes at the beginning of the school year. She has to manage their classes, jobs and other sports with her practices.
Trevier has gotten his schedule down, getting his players to do offseason lifts and study tables — and even 6 a.m. practices once the season started. But he said the logistics of organizing a team’s first season have been difficult, from scheduling to plotting out his team’s transportation to three out-of-state tournaments.
Most of Rockford’s schedule consists of tournament play. The Regents will host one weekend of group play and then travel to Kentucky, Michigan and Alabama on consecutive weekends for similar tournaments.
He hopes by next season there will be enough Illinois teams to schedule more individual games and trips.
“This is (one of) the fastest growing sport(s) in America,” Trevier said. “People are taking notice. We’re just trying to do our little bit here to keep it going in the right direction.”
Being the first
Shotwell still is in awe of the request.
She was volunteering at a showcase at Halas Hall when a girl identified her as one of the first three Illinois recipients of a flag football college scholarship, which the Bears celebrated in 2023. The girl asked for Shotwell’s autograph on a mini football.
“I will always remember that that girl wanted me to sign her ball,” Shotwell said. “It made me feel important. I’m like, ‘Oh, my god, I’m doing something.’ Like, ‘This program is fresh.’
“It’s inspiring, it’s thrilling, it’s fun and it builds a community. You meet so many different people. I don’t even know how to put it into words how much I love it.”
Trevier called his players “pioneers” and “trailblazers,” and coaches said both teams’ players appreciate what participating in Saturday’s game means to the growth of the sport.
There’s also a newness to it — and maybe even a pressure to the moment — that can feel challenging.
“I think we’re all going to be nervous,” Trevier said. “I’ve been stressing: ‘Nervous is good. Moving forward, you just can’t be scared.’”
Myrick hopes she and her teammates don’t get in their heads so much that they forget how to execute what they’ve been practicing.
“Obviously you want to win, but I just want us to be able to apply what we’ve learned in practice to the game,” Myrick said. “Because everybody’s new. It’s new for me, too, because this is a different rule book. So everybody’s going to be learning.”
Rockford safety Gina Neils, who played in high school for the first New Jersey flag football champion, said charting a path for an emerging sport is a lot of “trial and error.” Teams and players have to give themselves grace as they make mistakes.
But it’s also thrilling.
“Sometimes it feels like life’s a movie,” Neils said. “It’s a very exciting thing, being able to see girls do something they didn’t think they could do (because) football was only a boys sport. Girls are starting to get recognized for it. It’s been a very fun and, in a way, life-changing experience.”
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