Ladies’s flag soccer is coming to a Division I program in Texas.
UT Arlington introduced Thursday that it’ll add the game as a full varsity program in 2027.
It makes the Mavericks the fifth NCAA Division I program to publicly declare it should sponsor the game on the varsity stage. The others are Mount St. Mary’s, Alabama State, Lengthy Island and Mercyhurst.
UT Arlington is the primary Division I program in Texas so as to add the game on the varsity stage, and in addition the primary member of the Western Athletic Convention to take action. Two different colleges in Texas — Division III Concordia and NAIA Texas Wesleyan — additionally sponsor ladies’s flag soccer on the varsity stage, whereas two different WAC applications in Grand Canyon and Cal Baptist have it as a membership sport.
In an announcement, UT Arlington mentioned its flag soccer program will play video games at Maverick Stadium, a 12,000-seat venue. Later this 12 months, this system will rent a training workers and start signing gamers.
For UT Arlington, the addition of a ladies’s flag soccer group marks the primary time in 40 years that the Mavericks may have a soccer group of any kind. Its males’s sort out group was disbanded in 1985. That is additionally the primary time UT Arlington has added any sport since 2017, when the Mavericks started competing in ladies’s golf.
Ladies’s flag soccer is broadly seen as a rising sport and one of many fastest-growing in school athletics. Final month, the Division III Atlantic East was the primary NCAA league to play a full season of girls’s flag soccer and cap it off with a convention championship.
It will likely be an Olympic sport in 2028 in Los Angeles, and the NCAA has advisable including it to its Rising Sports activities for Ladies program.
At present, in accordance with the NCAA, about 65 colleges have flag soccer groups on the varsity or membership stage, however to be thought of for championship standing at the very least 40 NCAA applications might want to sponsor ladies’s flag soccer as a varsity sport inside 10 years. These groups would even have to satisfy minimums in video games performed and participant participation.
Earlier this week, Radford — a Division I program in Virginia competing within the Massive South — introduced it was including ladies’s flag soccer as a membership sport this fall “with plans to develop it into an intercollegiate varsity sport.”
To this point, no faculty on the Energy 4 stage is including the game on the varsity stage, however Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen lately mentioned ladies’s flag soccer is “one thing we must always all hold an in depth eye on.”
