Jaguars turn July into flag football showcase with girls tournament

The Jaguars are opening their July flag football run with 17 Northeast Florida high school girls teams at Jacksonville University, where Jaguars PREP will stack round-robin games, a tug-of-war contest and playoff action into one day. The Nike Girls Flag Summer Tournament is set to run with opening remarks, games from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., tug-of-war from 4:15 to 5 p.m. and playoff competition from 5 to 8 p.m., turning the campus into the month’s first major stop.

The girls tournament has become one of the clearest signs of how the Jaguars are widening the sport’s base. Jaguars community materials say the event has drawn 16 girls flag teams and more than 400 female athletes from northeast Florida and southeast Georgia in recent years, with Choctawhatchee High School winning a recent tournament and SE Bulloch High School taking the tug-of-war title. This year’s 17-team field gives the event its largest footprint yet in the notes provided and adds another layer to a program designed to keep families and first-time players coming back.

The push continues July 18 at the ARTS campus on Lusso Lane, where the Jaguars and Global Leadership Academy will unveil a new football field with a ribbon-cutting set for 9:50 a.m. A $200,000 NFL Foundation grant helped finance the field, and the opening will be followed by an inaugural youth football camp for about 120 students. That gives the Jaguars another entry point for young players, this time with a new playing surface attached to the brand.

Three days later, the franchise and Baker’s Sporting Goods will host High School Media Day at the Miller Electric Center. Jaguars community materials say the invite-only event will bring together coaches and student-athletes from more than 60 schools across Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, with the media portion held in the Team Meeting Room and teams arriving in waves between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. The format gives high school players an NFL-style platform before the summer’s biggest national test.

That test comes July 23-26 at Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, where the Jaguars will send 11 teams to the NFL FLAG Championships. Seven of those squads are Jaguars Elite teams, and the 14U boys return as defending champions after a 13-0 win over Showtime in last year’s title game in Canton, Ohio. Brysen Wright was named tournament MVP, and Dalton Motes completed 18 of 23 passes for eight touchdowns across two championship-day games, numbers that show why the Jaguars’ pipeline now reaches far beyond Jacksonville. Jaguars communications say Jaguars Elite athletes are selected from across 38 counties, a reach that makes July less a calendar of events than a full development cycle.