Victoria’s Grange P-12 becomes first Australian team at NFL Flag Worlds

Grange P-12 College’s under-15 co-ed NFL flag team became the first from Victoria to reach the 2026 NFL Flag Championships, putting a Hoppers Crossing school program on the same stage as the sport’s biggest youth pipeline in Indiana. The Sport Science Academy group left for the United States after winning both the Victorian title and the Australian NFL FLAG championship.

Ten students from Grange were part of the trip, and the school’s qualification marked a clean break from the old map of flag football development. The team was headed to Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, for the championships held from July 23 to 26, where NFL FLAG described the event as the premier youth flag football tournament in the world and its third annual championships presented by Toyota.

The scale in Westfield showed why Grange’s place mattered. ESPN SportsCenter NEXT said 350 teams were competing at the tournament, with international divisions built into the schedule rather than treated as a sideshow. NFL FLAG’s July 25 recap said international champions were crowned during Day 3, and teams from countries including Australia were in the mix as quarterfinals and title games tightened the bracket.

That is the key shift for the sport: a Victorian school was not just sending a team to fill a spot, it was entering a global championship structure that now reaches well beyond the United States. For Australian flag football, and especially for a program from Hoppers Crossing, the trip offered a direct route from school competition to an international field that will only carry more weight as flag football moves toward its Olympic debut.