Read: This year, Cleveland Muny League is growing and offering girls flag football.

Tens of thousands of boys have been schooled in the fundamentals of football by the Cleveland Muny Football League, the city’s top juvenile sports organization for children ages 5 to 15, for nearly eight decades. Some of these boys, like Troy Smith and Desmond Howard, are destined for greatness in the NFL.

Muny plays a welcome audible this year.

The league is preparing to create its first-ever girls-only flag football division, following a growing national trend in athletics. This year, the Garfield Bulldogs and the Richmond Heights Conquerors, two of Muny’s east side teams, will introduce two all-girl teams. And not simply coed teams like in previous years.

“To tell the truth, there’s a general demand for flag football,” Conquerors lead coordinator Steven Green said to Scene. “Because a lot of parents started being afraid of tackle, flag was always seen as an alternative.”

“And because it’s high-paced, it’s attractive to the girls,” he stated. They do, after all, play baseball. They follow one another. Why not raise a flag in addition?”

The Muny League was first established in 1946 as a youth sports program funded by the city. It has since expanded, with a record 3,000+ players signing up for the 2022 season. Coaches, coordinators, and alumni all know Muny for being a real football bootcamp and for being a unique coming-of-age community that knows how to keep youngsters out of trouble.

And that expansion of the bootcamp comes at the perfect time: flag teams will compete for the first time in the history of the games in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The president of the International Federation of American Football and one of its main advocates, Pierre Trochet, attributed flag’s popularity in Los Angeles to its egalitarian nature—that is, the absence of harsh hits. According to Trochet, who spoke with NFL.com, it’s “America’s number one sport, in its youngest, most accessible and inclusive format,” noting its “extraordinary growth” among females.

However, the sport’s ascent into formal territory among children isn’t taken as seriously in Northeast Ohio. Ever since the establishment of the Northeast Ohio Flag Football division in 2021, both educators and spectators have pushed for the sport’s classification as a “sanctioned varsity sport” in the Ohio High School Athletic Association, the premier state organization of its sort. The sport is already sanctioned in eleven other states.

Since then, a number of sports groups, including the Cleveland Browns and Mentor High School, have worked to have OHSAA recognized.

“In order to become an emerging sport,” a leaflet published by Browns on the topic states, “the sport itself must function and run solely on its own, without additional financial support, before it can be considered.”

The Muny League aims to introduce flag football for both boys and girls deeper into the mainstream. It is extensively financed by grants from the city of Cleveland and $30,000 a year from the Browns, a sum that councilman Mike Polensek deemed embarrassingly low.

Naturally, it also served as a sort of springboard for Muny’s director of sports, Jason Dunn. The growth of high school girls club teams in the area, which went from 27 in the 2023 season to 51 teams this season, is indicative of future developments, in his opinion.

“But to sustain that [growth] long term, you have to have a feeder,” Dunn stated. “And that feeder is going to be us. We wish to contribute in the Northeast Ohio area.”

The girls’ flag teams, according to Dunn and Green, will begin play soon after the summer tackle season concludes in September.