Ready or not, flag football is coming to Tuolumne County.
The NorCal Flag Football League of Tuolumne County (NCFFL) will kick off this spring at a cost of $175 per player. It will welcome boys and girls between third and eighth grade to participate in an eight-week season beginning April 12 and culminating in a day of single-elimination playoff games to crown a champion.
Founded by Summerville High assistant football coach Shane MacDonald and Bears Athletic Director Mike Rouse, the league is the first of its kind in the county, according to MacDonald.
“We didn’t have any flag football around here,” MacDonald said. “We felt there was a need in the area, and we just decided to come together and figure out how we could get kids signed up and playing.”
MacDonald said he and Rouse secured funding for the league from Chicken Ranch Casino, which paid upwards of $2,200 for the necessary equipment, including flags, jerseys and footballs.
The league is filling up quickly with kids from across the county. Of the 162 total slots across three divisions, there is currently space for 20 more 3rd- and 4th-graders, five more 5th- and 6th-graders, and 30 more 7th- and 8th-graders.
The idea to found the NCFFL in Tuolumne County came after MacDonald saw the success of similar types of leagues in Southern California. His son participated in the highly popular Friday Night Lights Football (FNL) — a flag football program with leagues in 21 locations across the bottom half of the state.
For competitions, Summerville’s Thorsted Field will be broken down into three, smaller fields to allow for six different teams to play at a time.
“It will be officiated. There will be referees, a running clock,” MacDonald said. “There is going to be a long list of rules that each coach gets — these are rules that I basically kind of modified, but adopted, from the Friday Night Lights League.”
MacDonald stressed that while both he and Rouse are connected to Summerville High School, the NCFFL will be an entirely independent venture from the high school.
“We are going to play at Summerville High School, just because we have pretty easy access to that facility on Friday nights,” MacDonald said. “This is not a recruiting mission, this is an advocate mission for the sport.”
The league is in contact with local elementary schools, MacDonald said, and plans to have teams conduct their once-weekly practices at the school closest to them.
Parents of players can use the league’s buddy list to try to keep friends and family together, or can enroll together as a team to ensure they will play together.
“You can sign up a whole team of your own,” MacDonald said. “Kids that are individually signed up are going to be put on a team with other kids in that age range.”
“We are going to try to keep it regional,” he added. “We don’t want kids from Columbia to be on the same team as a kid from Twain Harte, and then one of them has to try to figure out how to get to practice.”
Like many recreational youth sports leagues, the league will need volunteer coaches for each team, according to MacDonald.
“These things survive off of volunteers and volunteer coaches,” MacDonald said. “The success of this type of league depends on getting moms and dads of these kids to sign up as coaching staff.”
An alternative, or a pipeline?
Rouse and MacDonald’s announcement of the youth league comes just weeks after the latest attempt to ban youth tackle football in California, Assembly Bill 734, failed.
Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to veto Kevin McCarty’s bill, which would have banned kids younger than 6 from playing tackle football in 2025, expanding to kids 10-and-under in 2027 and up to 12-and-under by 2029.
Eleven-man tackle football did see a slight increase in participation numbers this past year, going from 84,626 players in the 2021-22 season to 89,178 in 2022-23, but participation in the sport has declined dramatically since 2015, when 103,725 students played tackle football, according to a CIF survey conducted last year.
While MacDonald said he would never advocate against tackle football, the reality of opposition to the sport, particularly in California, necessitates contingency plans.
“There are people out there that advocate for no-tackle,” MacDonald said. “Let’s just say you are successful. What is the alternative? We are trying to create the alternative.”
While flag football can be a contact-free alternative to tackle, MacDonald also said it can help remove barriers to entry to the existing sport — helping kids who might not otherwise try the sport learn the skills needed to play tackle football safely and effectively.
“I have seen kids go out and play flag football and next thing you know, they know how to run,” MacDonald said. “They know how to avoid getting hit, because they have avoided getting flags pulled. They know how to catch.
“To have a sport where it is so much easier for a concerned parent or a concerned kid to say, ‘Well this is much safer, let’s put you in this.’ The next thing you know, they realize, ‘Man, I am really good at this, and this is something I want to continue to do.’ ”
Developing the next generation
The California Interscholastic Federation council voted unanimously to make girls flag football an official high school sport early last year. In its inaugural season, flag football became one of the fastest-growing sports in the state.
“The CIF has done well in implementing this as a competitive sport in high schools,” MacDonald said. “Almost from the word go, it has grown, even to very local schools in the Valley where they have teams already competing. My understanding is that it is supposed to come to our area.”
While neither Sonora nor Summerville high schools fielded a team this season, and there has been no official announcement that either plans to in the near future, MacDonald said he hopes their league will help introduce girls from the county to the sport and support the development of quality players.
“That came into the conversation between Mike and I,” MacDonald said. “It would be great to have girls teams, but it would be so much nicer if we could field those teams with girls who have been playing the sport since they were in third grade.
“There is a big difference between someone who has been playing a certain sport since they were 9, versus getting into high school and going, ‘Oh, now this is an option. Let’s see how good I am now.’ ”
