St. Joseph’s College of Maine adds first women’s varsity flag football program

Saint Joseph’s College of Maine announced women’s flag football as its newest varsity sport on June 12, making the Monks the first collegiate program in Maine to sponsor the sport at the NCAA level. The team will be the school’s 21st varsity sport, with competition set to begin in spring 2028 and the athletics site already flagging the program as “Coming Spring of 2028!!”

The timing matters because Maine had no varsity women’s flag football model before this move. Saint Joseph’s is now searching for a head coach, and the college plans to spend the 2026-27 academic year on staffing, recruiting, scheduling and community engagement before the first snap. That gives high school players in Portland, Standish and across the state a new destination that did not exist a month ago, and it gives the program a chance to build a roster and schedule from scratch rather than inherit one.

For women’s sports in Maine, that is the real breakthrough. The immediate effect is on recruiting and opportunity: players no longer have to leave the state to find a varsity path in a sport that has been growing fast at the college level. Maine Girls Flag Football, founded in 2020, says it has grown to more than 160 athletes across elementary, middle school and high school divisions, and Saint Joseph’s announcement gives that pipeline an in-state college endpoint for the first time. If the program takes hold in Standish, it will also force other Maine colleges to decide whether they want to be followers in a sport that is clearly gaining ground.

The national picture already points that way. The NCAA added flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women program in January 2026, after at least 65 NCAA schools were sponsoring the sport at either the club or varsity level in 2025. NCAA materials say an emerging sport has to gain championship status within 10 years or show steady growth toward that goal, and women’s flag football is also on the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic program. At the small-college level, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics sanctioned women’s flag football as a varsity sport in 2021, turning it into a real competitive lane rather than a novelty.

Saint Joseph’s is not just joining a trend. It is setting the first precedent in a state that had none, and that usually changes the conversation faster than any marketing pitch ever could.