Caldwell hires Ted Evans to lead women’s flag football rise

Caldwell University turned to Ted Evans on July 6 to lead women’s flag football into its first full varsity season, putting a longtime Paramus High School coach and teacher in charge of a program that is still being built from the ground up. Evans will guide the Cougars when they begin play in Spring 2027, a hire that immediately signals Caldwell wants more than a warm body on the sideline.

That is the point of this move. Evans did not arrive as a pure football specialist detached from the schoolhouse or the local pipeline. At Paramus, he coached football and basketball, taught sports marketing and financial literacy, and built the school’s first flag football team in 2023. He was named the New York Jets Girls Flag High School Coach of the Week Game Changer in April 2023, an honor that came with a $2,000 donation to support the Paramus flag football program. For a college team starting from scratch, that is a real credential: he has already recruited, taught, organized and grown the sport at the place where he worked every day.

Caldwell also pointed to results. Evans compiled a 20-15-2 record over four years at Paramus and took the Spartans to two SFC playoff appearances. Paramus finished 2026 at 6-5 and won four of its last six games, a sign that the program was not just surviving but trending in the right direction under his watch. That matters for Caldwell because the first few roster cycles will be about identifying players, teaching fundamentals and establishing habits before the Cougars can worry about wins and losses in bulk.

The university has been laying the groundwork for months. On Nov. 12, 2025, Caldwell announced women’s flag football as its 17th varsity sport for the 2026-27 academic year and said it would become the sixth New Jersey four-year institution, and the only NCAA Division II school in the state, to sponsor the sport at the varsity level. In December 2025, Caldwell joined a newly formed Eastern College Athletic Conference women’s flag football league backed by a $1 million grant from the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation in partnership with the New York Jets.

The bigger regional picture is moving just as fast. The Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference said in August 2025 that five member schools planned to sponsor women’s flag football by the 2026-27 academic year and that at least 65 NCAA schools were already sponsoring the sport at the varsity or club level in 2025. Caldwell said seven CACC institutions were scheduled to compete in Spring 2027, giving Evans a real competitive lane as he begins building the Cougars’ first roster and setting the tone for the program’s earliest years.