Wakefield tops North Carolina preseason girls flag football Super 10

Wakefield High School opened at No. 1 in USA TODAY Sports’ North Carolina preseason girls flag football Super 10, and the Wolverines got that spot after finishing 27-0 and winning the fall championship in 2025-26. Updated Aug. 3, the list put Wakefield at the top of a state that is no longer treating girls flag football like a novelty.

That matters because North Carolina changed its own status quickly. The North Carolina High School Athletic Association voted May 6 to sanction girls flag football as a varsity sport beginning in the 2026-27 school year, making North Carolina the 22nd state to sanction the sport at the varsity level. More than 150 schools were expected to compete in the first sanctioned academic year, a number that gives the Super 10 real weight because it now measures the top of a much larger field.

The path to that point had been moving for months. On March 6, 2025, the NCHSAA was still surveying member schools about participation after declining to sanction the sport at its December meeting, even as girls flag football participation in North Carolina had already doubled from the 2022-23 school year to the 2023-24 school year. By the time the sanctioning vote passed in May 2026, the public hierarchy around the sport had become impossible to ignore.

The Carolina Panthers and the David & Nicole Tepper Foundation helped speed that rise. The two said they had committed more than $2.5 million since 2022 to expand girls high school flag football across the Carolinas, beginning with a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools pilot that launched four years earlier with 19 schools and 500 athletes. The Panthers also said the CMS girls championship returned to Bank of America Stadium on May 18, 2025, where the Palisades Pumas beat the Butler Bulldogs 12-6 for a second straight title. That kind of staging matters: it turns a developing sport into one with visible stakes, a championship setting and programs that can point to hardware.

Nationally, the growth has been just as sharp. NFHS data showed girls flag football participation more than doubled from 2022-23 to 2023-24, reaching 42,955 girls, and On3 later put the 2024-25 total at nearly 69,000. With flag football set to make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games, Wakefield’s No. 1 ranking is more than an early-season label. It is the first public marker of the standard North Carolina teams will chase next.