Kansas Girls Flag Football is now recognized as an official high school sport. Title IX won’t ever look the same.
Just before something permanently changes, a certain kind of silence descends upon a space. When the Kansas State High School Activities Association voted 61 to 1 on girls flag football in late April, there was probably a brief period of silence before something louder took over. Something that had been developing for years in parking lots, gyms, and temporary practice fields throughout a state where football has always meant one thing, for one type of athlete.
That is now changing. Although Kansas is the 18th state to formally recognize girls’ flag football as a high school sport, the pace of this movement is anything but slow. Only three Kansas high schools had female flag football teams three years ago. There were 29 last fall. That’s something that’s catching fire, not slow growth.
Karli Harden, a sophomore at Wichita’s Maize South High School, presented her own argument to the KSHSAA. She is the type of athlete who accepts invitations without hesitation. She claimed that she was told as a child that football was exclusively for boys and that the response was consistently “no.” She transformed a nearly unanimous “no” into a “yes” as she stood in front of that association. That picture of a fifteen-year-old changing state policy out of sheer conviction is difficult to ignore.
It’s important to recognize how unique the Kansas City Chiefs’ supporting role in this game is. The Chiefs helped start pilot programs in schools that had never thought about the sport by donating equipment, jerseys, and money to organizations throughout Kansas and Missouri through their “Let Her Play” campaign. A petition was signed by almost 11,000 people. The Chiefs’ director of football development, Sheila Sickau, has been quietly and tenaciously advocating for years to change the way things are actually carried out. She discusses building a path from high school to professional leagues, college scholarships, and the Olympics. The 2028 Los Angeles Games will mark the debut of flag football. That is not a far-off future. That will be in two years.
The intriguing aspect of the Wichita situation is that Maize South didn’t even realize they wanted a team until the summer of 2025. Tom Perkins, the director of athletics, met virtually with the Chiefs in late June, cautiously accepted, and then watched as the excitement took over. One thing he is certain of is that the girls, not the administration, were the driving force behind this. That distinction is important. Programs that are passed down from above often feel like programs. There was a sense of movement to this.
In his first year of coaching at Olathe East, Blake Iles states it clearly. His team puts forth a lot of effort, takes competition seriously, and has up until now operated in a sort of administrative limbo between activity and sport. That gap is filled by sanctioning. It refers to all the infrastructure that goes into making something real, including financing, scheduling, officiating, and state championships.
Kansas girls will compete for a KSHSAA state flag football championship beginning with the 2026–2027 academic year. A few of them will apply for college scholarships using that. Some will play internationally or professionally in the future. Most will simply play the game they love and get the credit they’ve always earned. That should be sufficient. Perhaps that’s the whole point.
Under this new structure, Harden’s teammate Carre Kurth, a senior at Maize South, won’t win a state championship because she will have already left. She does, however, have some understanding of what it means to be first because she intends to play flag football in college. The path’s builders don’t always get to walk the furthest. That is a legacy unto itself.
