Five West Hills schools making their marks on flag football fields this spring

Rich Johnson is growing more patient by the week.

And he can attribute that, in part, to his role as head coach of Bishop Canevin’s girls flag football team.

“One of the girls asked me one week, ‘What is a down?’” Johnson recalled recently after watching his Crusaders compete on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Montour High School’s Thomas J. Birko Stadium.

“That’s like the basis of football.”

Montour Spartans vs. Bishop Canevin Crusaders - 4/13/2025 (Photos by Mike Longo Jr.)

Questions like that one help remind Johnson, who also coaches the Crusaders’ varsity tackle football team in the fall, that not everyone – boy or girl – who walks into Bishop Canevin knows even the basic terminology associated with a game many take for granted.

“What it teaches you is patience – and that everybody doesn’t know everything,” Johnson said.

He’s reminded of that on a regular basis.

“I tell the ladies every single week, ‘You’re my running back,’” he said. “Then we get in the game and I say, ‘You’re the running back.’ And they don’t know where that is.”

It’s been a learning curve for Johnson’s players and in fact for many of the players who suit up each week for teams in the Steelers High School Flag Football League. The league started in 2022 with six schools but has grown to 50 this season, including five from the West Hills: Bishop Canevin, Montour, Moon, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and Sto-Rox. All compete in the league’s Western Division along with Aliquippa, Ambridge, Quaker Valley, Seton LaSalle and West Allegheny.

Montour Spartans vs. West Allegheny Indians - 4/13/2025 (Photos by Mike Longo Jr.)

In the eastern half of the state, the Philadelphia Eagles have been instrumental in growing the sport.

Girls flag football has gained credibility and legitimacy in a relatively short time, thanks to the involvement of the Steelers and Eagles, as well as the PIAA’s decision last September to sanction it as a varsity sport starting in the fall of 2026. Steelers President Art Rooney II applauded that decision.

“We are excited to see such a groundbreaking moment for the future of girls’ flag football,” Rooney said at the time. “It has been great working with the Eagles to accomplish a successful ruling that will now give young girls the chance to compete at a state level.”

Joe Lofton, the Steelers’ football development manager, said it’s taken some work, but he’s pleased to see how the fledgling girls sport has grown since its birth in 2022.

“The challenge is you’re unveiling a new sport and you have to create awareness,” he said. “And you not only have to teach people how to play it, but coach it.”

To that end, the Steelers league in conjunction with USA Football and the Pittsburgh Flag Football League began launching flag football coaching clinics, camps and conferences. Since 2022, the local league has seen steady growth and overall in Pennsylvania, more than 100 schools are fielding teams.

Lofton said according to the NFL, roughly half the girls playing flag football have never played another varsity sport. “So, the game is developing new athletes,” he said. “But you can tell some of the girls play other sports – soccer or softball, for example. And some of those same skills can transition to the game of flag football.”

Until flag football became a legitimate outlet, most girls who wanted to play football had only the opportunity to play in powder puff games, one-off events that might take place once a year.

“We wanted to provide the girls with an actual season and play against other districts,” Lofton said. “It’s a chance to compete, but more importantly to have fun.”

Spartans Sofia Fleck heads upfield after a huge catch against Bishop Canevin in flag football action at Montour high school. (Photo by Mike Longo Jr.)

For players like Sofia Fleck, the sport provides an opportunity to be part of a team, something she found missing to a degree while competing as a track and field athlete at Montour.

“I used to do team sports when I was in middle school – basketball, soccer, volleyball,” she said after a recent Montour game. “Track is kind of an individual sport, and I wanted to get more of the feel of a team. I wanted to go out and be more athletic, and I wanted another sport. It’s my (senior) year and I wanted to see what I could do.”

Fleck, a team captain, said she’s been impressed with how her team has done in its first year of existence. “Coming out with two wins today – I think that’s really impressive for us, especially because a lot of these girls never had a ball in their hands before,” she said. “I think we’re really pulling through.”

Sophomore Aryanna Camardese, one of Fleck’s teammates, said she played in a powder puff game at Montour last year and found it to be a fun experience. She said it’s been even more fun this year because it’s not a one-shot deal.

“We improve week to week – every practice we’re improving,” she said. “We’ve gotten a lot better.”

Camardese said she hasn’t found it too difficult to pick things up. “If you learn the plays and put in the work, it’s really not that hard to learn,” she said.

It can be challenging from a physical standpoint, though. Montour coach Ally Dietz said that technically speaking, flag football is a noncontact sport.

“But I’ll tell you right now there’s definitely non-purposeful contact,” she said. “It’s a very aggressive game that requires a lot of agility.”

Dietz said her team hasn’t had any serious injuries, just a few rolled ankles, bruises and kicks to the shins. Players don’t wear pads similar to those worn in tackle football. They are required to wear mouth guards and they can wear soft helmets or elbow pads.

“During games, girls get on each other big-time,” she said. “It’s a noncontact sport but you have to be ready for a little bit of contact.”

Dietz, in her first year of teaching health and physical education at Montour, sort of fell into her current role shortly before the season began, as she saw an email about the open position and jumped on it. She had planned to help coach track, but she took the flag football position on top of her track work.

Montour Spartans vs. Steel Valley Ironmen - 4/27/2025 (Photos by Mike Longo Jr.)

Dietz said her family background helped prepare her for the job; her dad coached youth football, and her brother played at Hampton High School and just finished playing at Washington & Jefferson. “Our whole family would go to the games,” she said of watching her brother play at W&J. “It was an every Saturday thing.”

Dietz said when she told her dad she was taking on the Montour coaching position, he was “super intrigued.” She said he has been a help in terms of strategizing from week to week, and she has other resources as well, including social media and a student assistant coach named Max Carelle, who has played a fair amount of flag football growing up and “knows the rules inside out,” Dietz said.

Dietz said she started out with four basic plays that Carelle suggested and each week she’s been “tweaking” the playbook. “My dad has chimed in – he’s helped me think things through more,” she said. “He has a football brain through and through. That helps big-time.”

Our Lady of the Sacred Heart first-year coach Nick Militzer also has family help, as his older brother, Donnie, serves as his assistant. Donnie is the head coach of OLSH’s tackle football team and Nick serves as his assistant there.

Nick Militzer said there’s plenty of room for creativity in designing an offense for the sport, which features seven players on a side on a field that’s 53.5 yards long. Games feature two 18-minute halves with brief halftime intermissions. The clock runs until the final two minutes of the game.

“Our offensive coordinator has been having fun drawing up different things,” Militzer said. “It’s kind of nice – with our girls in particular, some of them didn’t know a lot, but they’ve picked up things up quickly.

“Even if they didn’t fully understand the terminology we use as football coaches, as soon as they got on the field and started doing it, that competitiveness has come out of them. That’s been good.”

OLSH is playing its second season, and this year has about 20 players – or about seven more than last year. One of this year’s players, Meg Sweeney, has drawn interest from St. Vincent, one of the area colleges that fields a flag football team.

“When I told the team about it, they were pretty excited,” Militzer said. “It’s a pretty cool thing for her to be the first (OLSH) player on a recruiting visit.

“It’s exciting to be on the ground floor of something like this, and to see it take off.”

Moon Area is the wily veteran of the group, having fielded a team for four seasons, and Tigers coach Mike Muraco said he tries to take advantage of that. “Some of our girls have been on the team for several years,” he said. “And just like anything, the more time you’re on the field, it’s obviously beneficial.”

Moon Area Tigers vs. Ellis Tigers - 4/27/2025 (Photos by Mike Longo Jr.)

However, Moon lost more than a half dozen seniors from last year’s team so that’s made this season a bit different, Muraco said. “We know where things should be because we’ve been doing this for a little bit,” he said. “But trying to get some newer girls up to speed on where we they can be is the challenge.”

Muraco called the sport itself “phenomenal” and said given football’s popularity in America, it’s been unfortunate that up until recently, essentially half the population has been shut out of playing the game. That’s all changing with flag, which has been around for a long time at the youth level, is making gains at the college level and will make its Olympic debut at the 2028 summer games in Los Angeles.

“It’s nice that it’s meeting in the middle at the high school level here,” he said.

Moon Area Tigers vs. Oakland Catholic Eagles - 4/27/2025 (Photos by Mike Longo Jr.)

Shomari Phelps, the athletic director at Sto-Rox, said he’s been pleased to see how his school’s program has progressed under third-year coach Lauren Ferrgonio. In addition to having about 20 girls on the varsity team, Sto-Rox is also introducing younger girls to the sport.

“We’re not competing at the middle school level, but they’re interested,” Phelps said. “We want to do some work with them so they can start learning now before they get to the next level.”

Phelps said it’s important for girls who might not be interested in other sports like basketball or track to have a competitive outlet. And the fact that some colleges might offer partial scholarship aid is a bonus.

“It definitely offers a lot when it comes to being able to maybe further their education or develop a sense of belonging and being part of a team,” he said.

Phelps said he wouldn’t be surprised to see the whole community jump on the flag football bandwagon once it becomes a sanctioned sport.

“We’re going to get some home crowds,” he said. “People in western Pennsylvania love their sports, and this is one they’re going to latch onto and help it grow.”

May 4 Schedule (All games at Quaker Valley High School)

• Ambridge vs. Montour, noon
• Montour vs. Seton LaSalle, 1 p.m.
• Bishop Canevin vs. Moon Area, 3:30 p.m.
• Sto-Rox vs. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, 3:30 p.m.
• Aliquippa vs. Bishop Canevin, 4:30 p.m.
• Sto-Rox vs. West Allegheny, 4:30 p.m.
• Our Lady of the Sacred Heart vs. Moon Area, 4:30 p.m.