Howard-Suamico youth flag football team earns national championship berth

Howard-Suamico’s 8-and-under team is headed to the national stage after a climb that began with a painful lesson in what elite flag football demands. Four years ago, Josh Tufnell brought a new Howard-Suamico squad to the NFL FLAG regional tournament and watched it get overwhelmed by the speed and discipline of top-level play. That lopsided loss did not stop the program. It became the starting point for a deeper build, and now the Huskies have a national championship berth to show for it.

The proof of that growth showed up again at the Green Bay Packers-hosted NFL FLAG Regional Tournament on May 30 and May 31, when Howard-Suamico placed three teams in the field. That kind of turnout matters because it points to a program with a real pipeline, not just one standout age group. Howard Suamico Youth Sports Association says its flag football program serves children ages 3 to 14, giving players room to learn spacing, pace and decision-making long before they reach the 8U level that punched the ticket to nationals.

The destination is Westfield, Indiana, where the third annual NFL FLAG Championships Presented by Toyota will run July 23-26 at Droplight Grand Park Sports Campus. The championship games are set for Sunday, July 26, and organizers say more than 350 boys’ and girls’ teams will take part. NFL FLAG says the sport now has more than 20 million players across 100-plus countries and six continents, while Grand Park is described as a 400-plus-acre complex with more than 30 multi-purpose fields. Howard-Suamico’s rise is arriving in the middle of that larger surge.

The bigger story is not just that the Huskies qualified, but how they got there. The program kept returning to tournament play, kept giving younger players a path into the sport and kept building enough depth to put three teams into the Packers regional. A Packers regional page has also advertised a $5,000 travel grant for teams advancing to the championships, adding a practical reward to the competitive one. Howard-Suamico’s trip to nationals now reads like the payoff for years of repetition, growth and trust in the process, the kind of blueprint other youth programs are trying to copy.