‘Wildest imagination.’ Women’s flag football in Olympics is more than dream in Charlotte

Excitement around football was there, but there was no opportunity for women.

Mary Kate Bula, now a Charlotte resident and assistant coach of USA Football’s Women’s Flag National Team, knew she wanted to play the sport at a young age. She even signed up for a coed league before high school, where she was the only girl on her tackle team and among just a few to play flag football.

“Anytime we talk about this, I get chills,” Bula said with a smile before a practice at UNC Charlotte Thursday afternoon. “It’s just so cool. Because I remember not even knowing about the USA team for flag football, and then finding out about that and being like: ‘Oh wow, that’d be really cool to play.’ And then I played, and now it’s like: ‘Oh, now I’m coaching, and we could possibly go to the Olympics.’

“It’s a dream come true. It’s the wildest thing I could have ever imagined to happen in my life.”

Flag football, which has already launched in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, was added to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles last October.

Like Bula, that announcement was a once-unfathomable moment for Amber Clark — who already became a NCHSAA state champion in both basketball and track and field before football ventures of her own.

“As a young girl who wanted to always play the sport, it was like my wildest imagination to go play it,” Clark said. “Now I get a chance to coach it. I get a chance to play it at the highest level — hopefully get a chance to play at the highest, highest levels. It just means the world.

“It was a moment of — we’re texting our group chats going crazy, parents are sending me messages, it was just an amazing feeling. It just feels great to have that goal to reach now.”

Girls have always wanted to play football

Bula, a Rockville, Maryland, native, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area’s athletic hotbed. Whether it was the NFL team now known as the Washington Commanders, or some of the highest-ranked high school teams in the country, people liked attending football games.

It was a similar story for Clark, a native of Winterville in eastern North Carolina who is on USA Football’s Board of Directors. Her brothers and cousins were all around her age, and they played Pop Warner youth football throughout her childhood. She learned and fell in love with the game just from watching them play it.

“I often use the phrase ‘rocket fuel,’” Scott Hallenbeck, CEO and Executive Director of USA Football, said in an interview. “I’ve probably been involved for 20 to 30 years in sports, and I’ve never seen a discipline of a sport scale as fast as girls’ to womens’ to vertical and flag. It’s just stunning.

“A lot of it just has to do with the mere fact that — girls have always wanted to play the sport, right? And now there’s this incredible opportunity.”

Watching football to playing to coaching

Bula’s father and brother both played high school football at local sports powerhouses in the D.C. area. Whenever anyone in her family would grab a ball from the garage, it would usually be a pigskin.

She knew she loved football — and even went on to play it in college. Bula won three National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association regional flag football championships while at Towson University, a Division I school north of Baltimore in her home state.

A defensive back on two U.S. women’s national team squads, Bula won a gold medal in Jerusalem, Israel, in 2021 and a silver medal in 2022 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Long before that, Bula was among a handful of girls who had even expressed interest in flag football. It was just a sample of athletes who played other sports, but there was a small group inclined.

A tackle team was formed, as well. But she couldn’t bring in other teammates.

“No girls played,” Bula recalled. “I was the only one on our tackle team. It was an opportunity, but no one really took it. And then once you get to high school, there is nothing. There’s not an opportunity there.”

“I like defying the odds”

Clark became a state champion in multiple sports during her high school career at South Central in Winterville, south of Greenville. A 2011 basketball state champion, Clark’s 4x100 teams won N.C. track and field state titles three times in 2008, 2010 and 2011.

A long and triple jump athlete at University of North Carolina, Clark went professional following her successful career in Chapel Hill. She was an MVP candidate with the Atlanta Steam in the Legends Football League before winning an international flag football gold medal in Charlotte last year.

“I like defying the odds,” Clark said. “If you tell me I can’t do something, I’m gonna figure out how to do it 10 times as good as you thought I could do it.”

More girls are playing, and flag football is an Olympic sport

Flag football officially joined the International Olympic Committee’s lineup for the 2028 games in Los Angeles last October, roughly three months after a festival in Charlotte helped the sport continue gaining momentum.

Girls’ flag football is now sanctioned as a varsity high school sport in 11 states, with many more launching pilot programs. Women’s flag football already has a collegiate championship and scholarships at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) level.

The number of girls playing flag football between ages 6 and 12 has skyrocketed by roughly 222%, according to USA Football research over the last decade, including nearly 130,000 participants, in addition to a 44% increase in participation among girls ages 6 to 17.

Hallenbeck, the USA Football CEO, has been leading governing bodies pushing tackle and flag football. The International Federation of American Football held Flag World Championships in Panama in 2018, when Hallenbeck suggested sitting down with the IOC to try and make tackle football an Olympic sport.

Tackle football featured too many players to become an Olympic sport right away — opening a path for flag football, which features fewer competitors on the field at once, along with giving both men and women opportunities.

“This is a legacy moment for me, quite candidly,” Hallenbeck said. “I worked for the U.S. Olympic Committee way back in the ‘90s, dating myself. The fact that the NFL is so supportive, the International Federation has some 70 countries in the world that are playing ‘American football.’

”Really about two years of working really intently with the IOC and a lot of different parties. All the sudden it happened. We couldn’t have scripted it any better, couldn’t have anticipated it any better. It’s a dream come true.”