Winthrop adds women’s flag football team for fall launch

Winthrop University Club Sports has lined up a women’s flag football team for the fall, giving the Rock Hill campus a real entry into a sport that is moving fast from youth fields into college athletics. The program will operate as a club sport, not a varsity team, but Winthrop framed the move as a fit for a city that calls itself Football City USA.

Athletic director Chuck Rey said the launch honors the region’s football heritage while creating room for female student-athletes. That matters in a market where roster access can be the difference between a player getting a place to compete and a player staying on the sideline. For Winthrop, the club structure also gives the school a quicker, lower-cost way to build a schedule, test interest and start recruiting in a sport that is still expanding.

The school had already signaled the idea in a strategic planning document that called for recognizing club sports that compete regionally or nationally to extend the university’s brand presence, along with interviewing prospective women’s flag football coaches. Rey, who was appointed Winthrop’s athletic director on June 24, 2022, is now the face of a launch that connects the campus to the city around it.

The timing lines up with a bigger national shift. The NCAA added flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women program in January 2026, saying the sport has been one of the fastest-growing in the country at the youth, high school and collegiate levels. NCAA materials said at least 40 schools planned to sponsor women’s flag football at the varsity level in 2025-26, with as many as 60 projected for spring 2026.

The pipeline is already widening below college, too. NFL FLAG said girls’ flag football is now offered at the high school level in 38 states, and more than 100 colleges and universities had women’s flag football programs in 2026. In Rock Hill, city recreation programs already offer youth flag football, giving Winthrop a local base to draw from as the sport grows.

Winthrop is a Division I Big South Conference school, but the move comes through club sports rather than varsity athletics. That makes it a practical first step for a program that could become a recruiting foothold in the Southeast, where schools are beginning to build real pathways for women’s flag football before the varsity race gets even tighter.