Gallatin hires Jason Fleury to lead inaugural girls flag football team

Gallatin High School has hired Jason Fleury to coach its first girls flag football team, giving the inaugural job to the man who helped turn a club-level idea into a roster that nearly reached two teams. The hire lands as Gallatin moves from interest to structure, with the first high school season set to begin in August.

Fleury’s connection to the program runs through his family. His oldest daughter, Annalise, will be a sophomore at Gallatin, and her interest in football pushed him to step in when the school needed someone to lead the new team. In the summer, he is guiding a fly-fishing lodge; when fall arrives, he will shift into building a program from the ground up.

That build starts with numbers, not slogans. Fleury said the club version of the team began with barely enough girls to field a roster, then grew by season’s end to the point where it was close to having enough players for two teams. After Gallatin posted on Instagram, 18 girls signed up in about eight hours, a burst of interest that gives the school a real base to work with and a clear test of how durable that demand is.

The job ahead is bigger than filling a depth chart. Fleury has to recruit enough athletes to keep the program viable, teach first-time players the rules and pace of a sport that is much different from tackle football, and turn a one-season surge into a pipeline that can outlast the novelty of a brand-new team. For a first-year girls flag football program in a state still building the sport, that means making the basics stick fast: registration, retention, and enough confidence on the field that the next class wants in before the season even ends.

Gallatin is not moving alone. Great Falls CMR held its first open field of the summer on June 24 after introducing girls flag football, another sign that Montana schools are adding the sport in more than one market at roughly the same time. Nationally, the sport has gone from experiment to expansion, with the NFHS saying 17 state associations had sanctioned girls flag football in 2026, six more were voting on sanctioning, and 15 others were running independent or pilot programs. USA Today counted 23 states plus Washington, D.C. as sanctioned at the high school level by the end of June.

That is the backdrop for Fleury’s assignment. If Gallatin keeps the momentum that produced 18 signups in eight hours and turns it into a full-season roster, the Raptors could become the kind of early Montana success other schools copy. If the numbers flatten out, the launch will stand as a warning that even in a fast-growing sport, the first coach has to build everything at once.