After Title IX investigation, Minneapolis schools hope flag football proves its progress

The Minneapolis school district is using a citywide embrace of girls flag football this spring as a way to help address its Title IX troubles.

Tasked to raise its participation rates in girls sports after a 2023 Title IX investigation into the equity of its athletic programs, the state’s fourth-largest school district adopted flag football across all seven of its traditional high schools and began play in April in a new statewide league.

Minneapolis girls get a booming new sport to play, and the district gets its participation numbers closer to equal opportunity — a win-win? The district hopes so, and it has over 200 girls helping by passing, catching and pulling flags.

“I think that it‘s a great way to build our program because Camden already has a great men’s program,” Camden High junior Kaylynn Caldwell-Johnson said after her team’s first game. “So I think having the girls [team] is really going to uplift Camden as a whole.”

That‘s the districtwide goal, too.

At the close of the Vikings’ four-team pilot high school flag football league last summer, the NFL franchise looked to introduce the sport to more schools for this spring’s season.

“We’re looking for creative ways to close the gap,” Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) athletic director Antony Fisher said. “The Vikings have always had goals of expanding into the high school arena, so a conversation ensued of, ‘How can we help one another?’”

In February 2023, families of high school softball players criticized the district for the condition and availability of fields for MPS softball teams. A federal Title IX investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also found that participation rates for female athletes were lower than those of male students at Edison, Camden, North and South high schools.

At the start of this school year, MPS entered into a public agreement with the OCR and committed to seeking equity.

Administrators like Minneapolis South athletic director Amy Cardarelle, whose South team fields 15-20 flag football players, are aware that the OCR’s changing priorities under President Donald Trump’s administration could impact how much federal feedback MPS receives on its efforts.

“Just because there might not be the federal watchdog for it doesn’t mean we don’t want our girls having the same opportunities,” Cardarelle said. “They need the facilities. They need the financial support, the equipment, the coaches, all of that. You can’t just give up on it because there isn’t the watchdog.”

The guidelines of Title IX, adopted in 1972 to ban sex-based discrimination in any federally supported school, seek to ensure athletic participation opportunities for female and male students are “substantially proportionate” to enrollment and align with the underrepresented gender’s “developing” and “demonstrated” interests, per the OCR.

The OCR found that, in the 2021-22 school year, 55.2% of the district‘s 4,324 athletic participation opportunities were on boys teams, 44.8% for girls. At the time, the district‘s total student enrollment was 50.5% boys and 48.9% girls.

That put the districtwide disparity between enrollment and participation at 4.1 percentage points, highest at Edison (16.2), North (11), South (8) and Camden (7.5). Roosevelt, Southwest and Washburn reported participation proportional to their gender splits.

“The district would have needed to have provided approximately 347 more female participation opportunities to achieve [equity]” without cutting boys programs, the OCR’s resolution letter said.

MPS reported that 206 student-athletes are signed up for flag football districtwide this spring, an average of 29 girls per school.

Nationwide, across high schools and colleges, large tackle football rosters can tip the scale in favor of boys participation and must be balanced by consistent participation in sports like girls volleyball. That balance, however, can depend on the interest level and youth sports experience of students.

“Minneapolis wants to offer lacrosse to our girls, and then are surprised when they don’t play lacrosse or hockey,” North flag head coach Tom Lachermeier said, citing two sports in which Minneapolis schools form a districtwide cooperative team.

“They think just by offering it to high schoolers, they’re going to do it,” Lachermeier said. “But the problem is, if you want girls to do that, you have to start when they’re 5.”

The addition of flag football made sense for a few reasons — one being that a number of girls were already interested in football at schools like North, where the tackle program has reached the state tournament eight times since 2014.

“These girls have grown up watching their brothers and their uncles, and some of them already played tackle football,” said Lachermeier, who is also North’s tackle football offensive coordinator. He saw enthusiasm for a flag football tournament at North’s annual field day last year. “This is an accessible sport that you want to do.”

Edison flag coach Tywon Nash said four girls on the school’s team previously expressed interest in playing tackle football for the Tommies.

The district already had nine middle schools participating in a flag football program, also in partnership with the Vikings. The players who began in sixth grade would be entering high school this year.

A majority of the girls, though, are trying the sport for the first time.

Proof of high demand, Fisher said, is demonstrated by the creation of additional junior varsity flag football teams to provide more playing time in the small five-on-five format.

“That‘s a testament to our school athletic directors, coaches and communities for rallying together,” Fisher said.

While flag football is not yet sanctioned by the Minnesota State High School League — one of the Vikings’ future goals — the sport is recognized by the National Federation of State High School Associations and is popping up in smaller college conferences and, in 2028, the Olympics.

“This isn’t just something that we decided to say, ‘Hey, we just pulled it out of a hat.’ … We really see the upside,” Fisher said.

The $600,000 the Vikings are putting toward the 51-team league is helping cover the cost of coaching stipends, jerseys and equipment. That made adopting this specific sport quickly feasible for a district attempting to erase an annual $75 million budget deficit, as opposed to spending thousands of dollars to build new athletic facilities and add sports that require expensive gear to achieve proportional participation rates.

“[The Vikings] made it really easy to try to start the program up,” Cardarelle said. “This didn’t cost the district, per se, like an average sport would, and that was a big bonus.”

Fisher opted not to publicly comment on what he said were “ongoing” actions the district is taking to address facility improvements, such as the case of softball fields and locker rooms.

Minneapolis’ schools compete in one seven-team district. On Sundays, all seven teams gather at one rotating host school and play two games each.

“I’m happy that they made a Minneapolis league,” Nash said. “I kind of like how they kept it in the city.

“The girls are already talking trash,” he added with a laugh.

At their first Sunday jamboree, hosted by Washburn in April, friends from different schools took photos with one another and compared bumps and bruises. Many of the athletes know one another from local youth sports, or their MSHSL sports teams, which are often pitted against one another in a citywide conference.

“It is fun, just playing against people you know,” said Roosevelt senior Ana Cecilia Walker. “And then it gets more competitive, getting to play them more than once.”

Flag football may not entirely fill the participation gap for girls in the district. In some situations, though, flag will serve as a gateway sport.

“A lot of our freshman girls — like these two,” said Lachermeier, pointing to a pair of players walking across the Washburn track, “just told me, ‘I’m playing [flag] next year, and I’m going to play volleyball.’

“Especially at the JV level for us, our ninth- and 10th-graders, a lot of them have not played a sport for North,” he said. “But now they’re going to not just do this, but they’re going to play volleyball in the fall. So I think it gets them over the hump.”