Raise the Flag

Sacred Heart helps pioneer a future for women in football

From the spring 2026 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Max Dickstein

Key Highlights

• Sacred Heart University launched a women's flag football club team as part of the inaugural ECAC Women's Flag Football Intercollegiate League, placing the University among the early leaders in collegiate women's flag football
• The program reflects the explosive national growth of women's flag football, fueled by expanding youth participation, NFL investment and the sport's upcoming debut at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles
• The New York Jets and the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation helped launch the ECAC league through a $1 million grant supporting the growth of collegiate women's flag football

Before flag football became one of the defining sports of the 2020s, before she became the inaugural coach of Sacred Heart’s pioneering team, Kate DuBois played powder puff football, a century-old tradition that has opened the male-dominated game of American football, slightly, to generations of female athletes.

During the brief powder puff season each fall, girls divide into teams—usually juniors versus seniors, sometimes a matchup of crosstown rivals, or blondes versus brunettes—to play flag or touch football. The gender reversal is often staged during homecoming weekend. Funds raised go to charity. Boys may act as cheerleaders on the sidelines. Like its disposable cosmetic applicator namesake, powder puff then gets set aside.

DuBois, 43, could not have foreseen that those brief autumn exhibitions would one day lead to a job offer last fall from Ray Mencio, Sacred Heart’s executive director of campus life & club sports.

^{Field General | Coach Kate Dubois and the Pioneers joined a new collegiate women's flag football league during a period of explosive national growth for the sport}

A New Set of Pioneers

At Sacred Heart, club sports are not an intramural activity; they’re serious competitive outlets for athletes who might otherwise be playing a Division I sport, and a significant means of student recruitment and retention for the University.

After Mencio hired DuBois, her table at an activities fair attracted the women who are now known as the team’s “Original 7.” Among them: senior captain Dayna Mercogliano ’26, who stars at receiver and defensive back; Victoria Zurawski ’27, a 5-foot-7 linebacker; and Makayla Bloom ’29, the left-handed freshman quarterback and pass rusher.

These athletes are leading the game’s growth. Nearly 70,000 U.S. high school girls played flag football in 2024–25, a more than threefold increase from 2021–22 levels. This makes sense: Flag football can be played in almost any season, it’s exciting to watch, it’s inexpensive to field a team, and it’s safer than its brute-force forebear. “All you really need is a flag and a ball,” Bloom says.

Indeed, from proliferating youth recreational leagues and travel teams to the NFL’s investment in a new professional flag league to the sport’s debut at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, flag is football’s future. Industry observers expect flag participation to surpass that of tackle football in the coming years.

Yet one level of the sport lagged behind the others: college athletics—“the one group that was late to the party,” says Dan Coonan, the commissioner of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).

No longer.

Coonan, eager to organize a league for competitive teams in the Northeast, found a willing partner last summer in the New York Jets, a longtime supporter of the women’s sport in New York–area high schools. The Jets’ Betty Wold Johnson Foundation established a $1 million grant to fund the new ECAC Women’s Flag Football Intercollegiate League. (In May, Marymount University became the first-ever winner of the ECAC/Jets Flag Football championship trophy, nicknamed “The Betty.”)

When he learned of Coonan’s plans for an ECAC league, Mencio called Coonan and got Sacred Heart’s fledgling club on board. Suddenly, the Pioneers joined a coalition of regional teams competing for a spot in a championship tournament to be held at the Jets’ practice facility.

^{Dayna Mercogliano '26}

During a Zoom call in December, Mencio and DuBois announced that the just-formed SHU club would join a league to compete for a championship. Players logged on expecting a routine update; then came the bombshell news. Had they not been muted, the call might have erupted; instead, players’ faces lit up across the screen. “You are truly the Pioneers and setting the model for collegiate flag football,” Mencio told the team that night.

Zurawski had a major exam the next day, but she had to call her dad with the news. “He’s a huge part of this,” she says. “I feel like a lot of the reason I joined is because of him.”

Bloom says facing new teams in the ECAC league, with their varied talent and schemes, is “almost like watching film in real life.” The league, already the subject of a media day at MetLife Stadium, national press coverage and two documentaries in production, will expand. Next season, Coonan says, the league will jump from 15 to 30 teams competing for The Betty, with the final tournament played in MetLife.

When it comes to women’s flag, everything seems to grow “exponentially fast,” says Mercogliano, recently named Sacred Heart’s 2025–26 Sportswoman of the Year. And the Original 7 now form the core of a team of nearly 30 women.

Into the Big Time

“I started playing because my next-door neighbor asked me if I wanted to play football catch,” says Mercogliano, 21. “I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ We were 5.”

From first grade to eighth grade, Mercogliano’s father found her a spot on an all-boys flag team in Staten Island, one of the game’s geographic strongholds.

“It’s the best sport ever,” says Mercogliano, a senior exercise science major who will return home to study physical therapy at the College of Staten Island. “Give it a few years and it’s certainly going to be a Division I sport.”

^{Catch Me If You Can | Veteran receiver Dayna Mercogliano '26 eludes Penn State Schuylkill defenders during ECAC/Jets flag football league action. Mercogliano has competed in flag football since age 5, when a next-door neighbor asked her to play catch.}

Indeed, in January 2026, the NCAA added flag to its Emerging Sports for Women program, a step toward broader varsity recognition nationwide. In 2015, SHU’s Executive Director of Athletics Judy Ann Riccio oversaw the conversion of women’s rugby from a club sport into a varsity program. “We’re always looking at opportunities to allow our students to compete,” Riccio says. “Flag football is the latest iteration of that. There is a high likelihood that it will get to championship status.”

Misfits Assemble

The Pioneers are not just veterans of powder puff and flag football. The roster is an assemblage of athletic exiles from other sports, including swimming, dancing, softball, and soccer.

“A big appeal with our team specifically is that it’s a very new sport,” says Zurawski, a former first-team all-county swimmer out of Newton, NJ, who had hoped to find a new athletic outlet in college. “So, girls who have never played before were a lot more confident coming into a team that’s just being established—a lot of the people around you are also coming from different sports or have no experience at all.”

Zurawski grew up rooting for the Jets with her dad, not playing the game. Bloom, from Waterbury, spent Sundays watching Giants games with her father and uncle, both former football players.

“They’ve always known that I’ve shared this passion for the game,” says Bloom, 18.

For most of Bloom’s life, that passion had been limited to cheering from the couch or the stands. Women’s flag football has changed that.

“They’re really excited that I’m able to translate it,” Bloom says. “The fact that I can now play in the same way they did, it’s almost like a full-circle moment for them—to keep it going, in a way, the tradition of football.”

The team’s center, Palmer Calvey, is an Irish step dancer. “Both dancers and centers are under pressure,” DuBois says. “All eyes are on a snapper, and they have to be the first to execute their job without a mistake before a play can continue.” Other teammates bring skills they formerly employed when playing softball, soccer, or volleyball.

As her newcomers learn routes, coverages, and reads during practice, DuBois says the joyful approach of players like Bloom is emblematic of the team’s contagious sense of belonging. “She learns, she makes mistakes, but she always does so smiling,” DuBois says of Bloom, her young leader. “She always looks like she’s having so much fun. It doesn’t matter my mood going there. I always leave happy. They love the sport; I love the sport.”

Adds Bloom: “The community it builds is just so underrated compared to other sports because it truly is a team sport.”

^{Crossover Athletes | The new club attracted a ragtag mix of players, from seasoned flag football competitors to converts from other sports and activities}

The Future of Football

Football, a 2026 book by essayist Chuck Klosterman, is a collection of essays probing the contradictions of American football, a game of ritualized violence accepted as family entertainment. “Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value,” he argues. But Klosterman addresses flag football fleetingly: “5-on-5 flag football is now an Olympic event,” he acknowledges. “But tackle football does not work as a hobby.”

Given that women’s flag football may represent the next ethical evolution of the game, Klosterman errs in dismissing it as a hobby.

“I think the women are really proud of it,” says DuBois, leading a post-powder puff generation of players like Mercogliano, Zurawski, and Bloom who are remaking the game around speed, intelligence, and creativity.

Zurawski, 19, a linebacker majoring in psychology with a business minor, is not, she notes, “a gigantic man who can tackle whatever’s in front of me."

“Because we’re not tackling, you need to showcase a lot more ability,” she says. “To make a stop, to pull a flag, you have to be quick. You can’t just throw yourself at somebody. There are penalties for that. So, you really have to be skillful and calculated in your movements.”

If Klosterman’s subject, traditional football, mirrors America’s past and present, then women’s flag football foretells its future—competitive, strategic, and open to all.

“It’s unreal to watch Vic get a great flag pull, or when Dayna twists her hips to lose two defenders,” Bloom says. “The spin moves, getting low on their hips, just flying away. Even in practice, everybody stops and says, ‘Wow!’”