How do you get kids to put down their Xbox controllers? Introduce them to some team bonding and football that doesn’t involve any tackling.
Over in Westport is a fairly new organized flag football league for grades K-8 run by coaches Todd Nunes, Joey Moniz and Sam Blevines, a few local guys with soft spots for kids and a passion for sports.
“We play almost all year-round,” Nunes said. “Some of the coaches that work with me, we put together kind of an elite competitive team. That’s the gist of what we’ve been doing in hopes to get the kids out of the house and keep them active, keep them healthy and just give another option in this area.
The league utilizes the old Westport High School soccer fields on Main Road. Roughly 50 children are signed up so far.
“The biggest thing, when you’re brand new, is getting those endorsements and trust to the people, just getting the word out there,” Nunes said. “Once it starts going, it’ll pick up from there. We’ve had a lot of kids that would not normally play sports come and play, and we train them. We’re also getting kids that aren’t as athletic and they would never tackle, but parents have been signing them up and we put them with the instructional, and depending on what you have, depending on the talent that you have, is kind of how you have to run each program. Most importantly, we want to make sure kids have fun more than anything.”
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As the program expands, the Westport League hopes to compete against surrounding towns and cities such as Bristol, Portsmouth, Somerset and Seekonk.
“Ideally, each age group would have five teams,” Nunes said. “That’s what our goal is. It won’t happen right now, probably next spring when we have to get everybody on board. For now, we just try to secure as many teams as we can and give them a good experience and then we’ll always submit our indoor leagues for the winter season.”
Although the current Westport team is dominated mostly by boys, it’s important to mention that it’s still a coed league with a good amount of participating girls already on board and room for more.
Parents, if this sounds like something your kids would be interested in trying, you can check out and register on the website.
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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.
