Ladies’s flag soccer is coming to a Division I program in Texas.
UT Arlington introduced Thursday that it’ll add the game as a full varsity program in 2027.
It makes the Mavericks the fifth NCAA Division I program to publicly declare it’s going to sponsor the game on the varsity stage. The others are Mount St. Mary’s, Alabama State, Lengthy Island and Mercyhurst.
UT Arlington is the primary Division I program in Texas so as to add the game on the varsity stage, and likewise the primary member of the Western Athletic Convention to take action. Two different faculties in Texas — Division III Concordia and NAIA Texas Wesleyan — additionally sponsor ladies’s flag soccer on the varsity stage, whereas two different WAC applications in Grand Canyon and Cal Baptist have it as a membership sport.
In a press release, UT Arlington stated its flag soccer program will play video games at Maverick Stadium, a 12,000-seat venue. Later this yr, this system will rent a training employees and start signing gamers.
For UT Arlington, the addition of a ladies’s flag soccer staff marks the primary time in 40 years that the Mavericks could have a soccer staff of any kind. Its males’s sort out staff was disbanded in 1985. That is additionally the primary time UT Arlington has added any sport since 2017, when the Mavericks started competing in ladies’s golf.
Ladies’s flag soccer is extensively seen as a rising sport and one of many fastest-growing in faculty athletics. Final month, the Division III Atlantic East was the primary NCAA league to play a full season of ladies’s flag soccer and cap it off with a convention championship.
It is going to be an Olympic sport in 2028 in Los Angeles, and the NCAA has advisable including it to its Rising Sports activities for Ladies program.
Presently, in keeping with the NCAA, about 65 faculties have flag soccer groups on the varsity or membership stage, however to be thought-about for championship standing not less than 40 NCAA applications might want to sponsor ladies’s flag soccer as a varsity sport inside 10 years. These groups would even have to satisfy minimums in video games performed and participant participation.
Earlier this week, Radford — a Division I program in Virginia competing within the Massive South — introduced it was including ladies’s flag soccer as a membership sport this fall “with plans to develop it into an intercollegiate varsity sport.”
Thus far, no faculty on the Energy 4 stage is including the game on the varsity stage, however Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen just lately stated ladies’s flag soccer is “one thing we must always all maintain a detailed eye on.”
