Georgia Tech hosts first girls flag football camp, Milton wins tournament

Milton High School left Georgia Tech with the first title from the Brent Key Girls Flag Football Classic, and the win told the bigger story as much as the scoreboard did. Georgia Tech hosted its first-ever 7-on-7 girls flag football camp and tournament, a move that put the Yellow Jackets in front of one of the fastest-growing corners of Georgia high school sports.

The event was built around Brent Key’s football program at the John and Mary Brock Football Facility in Atlanta, and it fit into Georgia Tech’s broader summer football slate. The Yellow Jackets’ Brent Key/Corky Kell + Dave Hunter 7-on-7 Classic is scheduled for June 9, 10, 11 and June 16, 17, 2026, giving the school a bigger platform to bring high school teams onto campus and build relationships before scholarship-era competition fully arrives.

That is the part worth watching. Georgia has already become a proving ground for girls flag football, and the Atlanta Falcons say the state became the fourth to sanction it as an official high school sport in 2020 after a pilot that started with 19 Gwinnett County schools in 2018. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and Falcons say 323 Georgia high schools will partner to support the sport in 2026, with 27 schools offering girls flag football for the first time. In other words, the pipeline is no longer a concept. It is a map.

Milton’s win matters because it came from a program that already lives near the top of the sport. The Eagles were the 2025 state runner-up, falling 21-20 to Blessed Trinity in the title game, so this was not an underdog surprise. It was another reminder that Milton has become a standard-bearer in Georgia girls flag football, and that it can still finish the job when the setting shifts from state brackets to a college campus showcase.

For Brent Key, now in his third full season as Georgia Tech’s permanent head coach after taking over in 2023, the event was about more than filling a calendar slot. It looked like the first draft of something larger: a college brand reaching down to high school girls flag football now, before the sport’s next level fully takes shape. Georgia Tech did not just host a camp and a tournament. It positioned itself inside the sport’s future.