Jets highlight Ridgewood's third straight New Jersey girls flag title

The Jets put Ridgewood’s run in front of a much wider audience on July 10, when the team posted a highlight package from the sixth annual New Jersey Girls High School Flag Football State Championship it hosted. The June 14 title game at Kean University matched Ridgewood against Bayonne, and Ridgewood walked away with its first back-to-back-to-back crown as New Jersey girls flag champions.

The video release mattered because it pushed the state final beyond a single school result and into the Jets’ larger football platform. Girls flag football in New Jersey moved into official varsity status statewide on May 4, when the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association voted to sanction the sport, and the Jets said nearly 160 high schools were expected to field teams the next season. The franchise also said it had helped drive sanctioning for the third time, underscoring how long it has worked to place girls flag football inside the state’s mainstream high school sports structure.

The scale of the sport has changed fast. NJ.com reported in May that New Jersey girls flag football had grown from 16 teams in its early days to 173 teams by that point in 2026, a jump that helps explain why a championship highlight package from an NFL team carries weight. What used to play like a niche showcase now has enough teams, coaches and players to sustain a real postseason ladder, and the Jets’ coverage gives that growth a larger public stage.

The championship day also included a youth development layer at Kean Alumni Stadium. The Jets said they hosted a clinic for 125 girls ages 6-12 before kickoff, and another team note said more than 85 girls in that age range attended a related clinic there, with Demario Davis’ daughters among the participants. That kind of pipeline matters for a sport still building habits, numbers and familiarity with families across the state.

Ridgewood’s title adds another chapter to a program already shaping the sport’s early history. The school had become New Jersey’s first back-to-back girls flag champion after the 2024 season, and the June 14 win over Bayonne extended that standard into three straight championships. With the Jets amplifying the final, Ridgewood’s latest finish landed as both a trophy and a marker of how far girls flag football has moved in New Jersey.