Benicia’s Samantha Segle leaps to make a catch over the middle to score the first touchdown for the girl’s flag football team during a 26-6 win over California High School on Thursday. (Chris Riley/Times-Herald)
With no active team to play on, Benicia High School junior Samantha Segle’s love for football started — and stopped — at her family’s television.
That all changed on Thursday night.
Although Segle has played other sports at the high school level such as soccer, she’ll now go down in history for Benicia. In the first half of the school’s first-ever girls flag football game against California, Segle caught the first touchdown in Panthers’ history with a 30-yard reception thrown by quarterback Katy Nichols.
The opportunity for such a moment came this past spring, when California approved a plan to make flag football a girls’ high school sport amid soaring popularity of the game and a push to get more female athletes on the field.
The move by the California Interscholastic Federation — the statewide body that governs high school athletics — made flag football an official sport for girls in the nation’s most populous state for the upcoming 2023-24 year.
At Benicia, it all led to Thursday night’s 26-6 victory.
“It felt great to throw the first touchdown pass,” Nichols said. “It felt like, ‘Hey I can throw a football and it was exactly how we’ve done it in practice for a few weeks now. And Sammy (Segle) made a great catch!”
Growing up, Nichols loved watching her mom’s favorite team, the 49ers. But she never envisioned herself playing football until last spring. Segle felt the same way.
“When I first saw the the post on Instagram asking for tryouts I thought, “This sounds like so much fun and something exciting and fun to do with all my friends. I knew it was a great opportunity and it was with Coach Rod (Rodrigo Escalante) my soccer coach so that made it even better.”
Escalante is the head coach of Benicia’s team, but the squad has a lot of help as it goes through a learning process of figuring out the new quirks of the game. Although this is football, there are many things different from the traditional game tackling sport.
There is, of course, no tackling. Instead a player is “down” when her flag on the left or right side of her waist is pulled and thrown to the ground.
Instead of a first-and-10 situation, the girls need 20 yards to gain a first down. The field is also smaller. Although assistant coach Javier Martinez said the width of the field is always 40 yards as opposed to a regular-sized football field that is 53.3 yards. The length of the field is 80 yards as opposed to 100 yards for a regular-sized football field, but Martinez said that the length can change and actually be smaller, as short as just 50 yards.
Think of it as the Fenway Park of football.
Other different rules include a play being called dead immediately on a fumble, teams always going for two points after a touchdown (there are no goal posts), there are no kickoffs and there are no direct snaps. The center flips it underhand to a quarterback usually stationed two or three yards behind the center. The quarterback is only allowed to run with the ball past the line of scrimmage just once every fresh set of downs.
The game is a 7-on-7 matchup as opposed to 11 on 11 and the contest consists of two 20-minute halves with a running clock. The clock is stopped at the two-minute mark of each half, at which point the game goes back to regular football rules where the clock is stopped on incomplete passes, players going out of bounds or timeouts.
People were learning on the fly. At one point the chain gang only consisted of one person instead of the needed two people (one to spot the ball, one to spot a first down). Other players were pulling an opponents’ flag but then walking back to the huddle with it instead of throwing it down immediately to spot the end of the play.
Still, when the game ended, Rodriguez said there were more things to be happy with, while adding there is still room for improvement.
“I think tonight was amazing and I’m glad it’s over,” Rodriguez said, with a big laugh. “I had so much anxiety before the game, just hoping everything would go right. After the first play, I settled in a little more and felt we were prepared.
“Things we need to work on are our signals,” Rodriguez continued. “A lot of times you would see the other team sending two players rushing on our quarterback and we weren’t ready for that.”
Benicia did seem ready to play immediately on defense, starting with Hailey Hartman’s interception on the second play of the game. A few plays after the school’s first takeaway, Nichols connected with Segle for the first touchdown in school history.
Segle caught her second touchdown pass from Nichols in the second half, this time from 15 yards out to make it 14-0. Nichols threw a third touchdown pass — this one to Rylee Jarmin to make it 20-0. Jarmin later threw a touchdown pass to Segle, collecting her first scoring hat trick.
The move of flag football as a sanctioned sport at the high school level adds California to a growing list of states that have included the sport in high school athletic programs, such as Alabama and Nevada. New York state’s public high school athletic association took a similar step this week and expects to host the first state championship for girls flag football in the spring.
Benicia is the only school the Times-Herald regularly covers with a flag football team. However, this season’s start with Benicia comes amid a surge in interest in flag football among younger players in recreational leagues and burgeoning support from the NFL and teams such as the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, which have been running a pilot high school league for girls in Southern California.
Girls are allowed to play tackle football if they choose. In 2017 Jourdan Dominique Isom played offensive lineman for the Panthers’ junior varsity team.
The NFL Youth Flag Football League in Vallejo — also called the Coach Sarna League — also recently finished its second year of existence. This past spring, over 540 registrants joined the league, making it the biggest youth league in Vallejo. The league has 54 teams and 90 volunteer coaches involved, and last year was named one of the Top 5 New Youth Flag Leagues in the United States by the NFL.
According to Ken Sarna, the nonprofit league has donated nearly $70,000 in scholarships for people to play flag football. Not only are there more female players participating, there are also more special needs kids playing the sport.
In the decade leading up to 2018-19, the number of girls playing flag football in U.S. high schools doubled to 11,000, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
Benicia High principal Brianna Kleinschmidt said interest in the sport was great from the start. Although there are 22 players on the Benicia roster, approximately 50 people tried out for the team.
“I have to credit the whole team for playing well tonight,” Nichols said. “The whole team played super great, especially the defense. I didn’t expect us to pull this all off tonight so well, but we did. I have a lot of faith in my team and it was great to play with a lot of my friends tonight.”
Benicia’s next game is Wednesday at home against Casa Grande and Antioch.
Travis Burnett
A pioneer in the flag football community, Travis helped co-found the Flag Football World Championship Tour, FlagSpin and USA Flag. Featuring 15+ years of content creation for the sport of flag football, creating and managing the largest flag football tournaments on the planet, coaching experience at the youth and adult level as well as an active player with National and World Championship level experience.
