Chatting With NIRSA Executive Director Pam Watts About the Women's Flag Football Club League

Collegiate Flag Football recently spoke with Pam Watts, Executive Director at NIRSA, about the addition of the women's flag football club league for the 2026-27 academic year. NIRSA announced a partnership with the NFL in May, which will see additional initiatives as part of the two sides working together.

The NIRSA Women's Flag Football Club League is slated to begin in January 2027, with a championship event scheduled for April 2027. Since the original announcement, NIRSA has grown to more than 40 club teams and is expecting to add more teams in the coming months. Watts discussed the partnership with the NFL, some of the initiatives, expectations for the league and flag football, club funding tips, and whether NIRSA is looking for partnerships outside of flag football.

A very special thank you to Pam Watts and NIRSA for taking the time to discuss the women's flag football club league with Collegiate Flag Football! You can learn more about NIRSA's Club Flag League by visiting NIRSA's website.

What led the partnership between NIRSA and the NFL to start a dedicated women's flag football club league?

Pam Watts: "NIRSA has been in the flag space for decades at an intramural level. As we were watching the growth in high school, we've been in conversations with the NFL for several years, as well as RCX Sports, who runs NFL Flag.

We really believe that the Holy Grail for any sport is to have a varsity, a club, and an intramural opportunity on a college campus. We have been watching for the moment and the right partners to launch collegiate club flag. The NFL showed up as that right partner. It's a natural progression off this growth in youth and high school. We operate other club national championships, so we're the right partner for this.

NIRSA has been around 75 years, we've been running national championships for 25-30 years in other sports, and we're really excited to create this opportunity for women in flag."

What does the women's flag football club league look like in year one?

PW: "We're seeing incredible interest. Earlier this week, we already had over 35 schools signed up and more schools are signing up every day. We'll have some pre-league opportunities to play this fall in some of our existing structure, as we've been in this space for a while. When we launch in January, I think we'll easily be at 50 teams, if not more.

We're going to keep adding schools every single week. NIRSA is well-positioned to handle this because of the infrastructure of the schools involved. We've seen, even so far, the different types of schools. It seems like every school wants to get involved. The group of schools we're pulling together is some of the biggest brands in college athletics and has some of the best facilities in college athletics."

What are the longer-term goals, say for 3-5 years out?

PW: "We could see hundreds of teams. Flag is such a fun sport; it's an approachable sport. In the grand scheme of sports, it's one of the lower-cost sports to run. It doesn't have the expenses of ice hockey, for example, where it's a lot of equipment, ice time, things like that. In flag, it takes fields, flag belts, and officiating."

Do you have any concerns about being seen as the stepping stone for club teams who go on to become varsity, or is NIRSA embracing that?

PW: "We're happy to be part of the solution. As you're alluding to, when a university wants to start a varsity sport, they'll often want to start as a club to kind of gain that interest, that momentum, get some structure in place, and then convert it to varsity. We are super happy to be part of that.

Those clubs can convert to varsity and we'll probably form another club behind them. I think there's enough interest that we really will see, in a very short period of time, club, intramural, and varsity opportunities on a large number of college campuses in the US."

Can you expand a bit on the refereeing initiative? How can people get involved as a referee?

PW: "NIRSA has been doing officials development through college students for decades. Another thing we're really paying attention to, and also in partnership with the NFL and an organization called RQ+, is to grow the officiating pipeline. As the sport has exploded, if we don't also explode the officiating pipeline, we're going to run into some challenges, right? No officials, no games. We're really excited about that opportunity for students as well.

If they're a college student on campus, they need to go to the rec center. Campus rec departments hire hundreds of student employees and train them up as referees for a variety of intramural games. They then move n up to official club, high school, and things like that.

The refereeing landscape is pretty scattered, but early on, we talked with RCX, the NFL, and then RQ+ came on as a partner. This, in a lot of ways, is an emerging sport, and we have the opportunity to build the officiating landscape in a much more transparent, sustainable way.

We're partnered up with RCX, who has the youth space, and us and the NCAA in the collegiate space. Of course, the NFL and what they're doing to have a one-stop shop through RQ+ for all the officiating opportunities, all the different rule books, and all the different certifications, etc.

This is early days, and we're still building it out, but the long-term vision is that there's a one-stop shop. As you do get trained up, let's say in campus rec, and you're ready to move on to high school or club. As you move around the country, one of the problems with the officiating pipeline is that you may get trained up in campus rec. Then you move to wherever that first professional job is, or maybe you move back home, and you need to get reconnected to the assigners and opportunities in your area.

There hasn't been a one-stop shop option for that, so we have this opportunity to build it. We're going to do it first with flag, and presumably it will be successful, and then we may look to do it in other sports with other partners."

Are there any other flag football initiatives you can speak about?

PW: "We've started with women because we're seeing the explosion of growth in girls and high school, so we want to follow that momentum. I do think down the road we'll see men's leagues. Of course, there is going to be a men's team at the Olympics, part of the pro circuit, and we'll want to build out the club opportunities for men as well, but we'll do it for women first.

I also think that we may look to create a co-rec or coed club league. That's been a long-standing part of intramurals. Those co-rec teams may also want an opportunity to play interscholastically, which is the club opportunity."

What advice can you give to club teams for funding and resources?

PW: "What we see is a lot of alumni support for clubs. If you played club lacrosse 5 years ago, you want to support the current team. They do really well with that. They do well with some sponsorship, but it's one campus at a time, one club at a time.

NIRSA has had a really strong, what we call campus activations business, where we connect brands to college students through activations in the rec center. I can see some of those opportunities happening, connected with the leagues. We already have good sponsor support for the start-up costs of a club. They got to get organized, they need travel funds, they got to pay league dues, and they need a little bit of equipment. That's where some of the NFL support is going and we hope to secure some support from vendors for equipment and apparel.

More broadly, I think there are opportunities for brands to connect themselves with this bigger platform of the women's flag football league. NIRSA's been in the business of doing activations on campus, going back to the mid-90s. This is a turnkey thing for us to do with brands.

In each campus rec department, there's some kind of club sport professional that helps them with this continuity. They run fundraisers, they charge themselves dues, and they reach out to alumni. There have been examples of alumni coming in with significant funding for facilities, especially for some of the high-cost sports. Big university development officers are recognizing that this is a larger opportunity for some major gifts, which is cool. We like to see that.

I'd love to see the universities be in a position to support the clubs a little bit more with more funding. Club sports are student-led and there's a lot of student development that happens there. Well, that comes from things like fundraising, talking to alumni, and planning your own travel. That's where the development comes from, so we don't want to take too much of that away. At the same time, make sure they are well-resourced, so they are a sustaining club through time."

What do you envision flag football becoming in a decade, or 25 years down the road?

PW: "I think you are going to see it as a full gamut from youth all the way to pro to maybe even masters or post-pro, or whatever we want to call that. I think you're going to see the cradle to grave opportunities in flag. All of these individual areas are growing so fast, and this is where I really have to credit the NFL's leadership.

Over and over and over again, over the years, they keep bringing all the stakeholders together. It's this coordinated effort where everyone's in the room, everyone owns their part, and everyone is aware of what the other aspects of the game are doing. I think that is part of the reason it's growing so fast and why you'll see, in a relatively short period of time, all the opportunities to play."

Are there any plans to have additional partnerships for other sports offered by NIRSA?

PW: "I wouldn't say there are definitive plans, but as we're watching all the changes in the varsity landscape, and often when varsity sports are cut, they'll convert to club sports. So I think we're going to see a lot of change in the club sport environment.

There are a lot of good NGBs [National Governing Bodies] out there that operate the collegiate club version of their sports, and we operate for other sports, sometimes in partnership with NGBs and sometimes on our own. I do think there's an opportunity. I think we're going to see some growth in club sports over the next 5-10 years, as the collegiate varsity landscape changes.

NIRSA's interest is that we're the membership organization for everybody who works in campus recreation. When we're operating a sport, it's with those campus rep professionals connected to those students on a daily basis. I think there are opportunities for us to look at in club to do it well and to keep student first and student-athlete."

Is NIRSA looking to sponsor championships for other sports, such as pickleball?

PW: "We actually recently partnered with USA Pickleball and the APP to run their collegiate club tournament. We do that one together. We did that one together for the first time last March and are in a long-term partnership agreement with them to continue doing that.

It's a nice marriage of the experts from the NGB and those really trying to grow the sport with NIRSA's expertise about this collegiate club space, eligibility of the student-athletes, and the like. It is different than non-higher ed, and it's different from varsity, and there's real value alignment that we look to. We do tennis with the USTA [United States Tennis Association], and we've been doing that for over 25 years.

We currently run basketball, flag football, and soccer national championships, which we've been doing for over 25 years. We're always open to new sports and get calls from time to time. Sometimes they're sports that maybe aren't popular in the U.S. just yet. Probably 8-10 years ago, we were working with cricket, as they were trying to grow in the US.

It has to be the right alignment of what you value about the student-athlete experience and the sport experience, and organizations that can be sustainable in this environment. There are lots of organizations that pop up, for-profit, not-for-profit, that want to get a piece of the sports pie. We've been in it for a long time, and we're going to be in it for another 75 years plus. We're not one of these organizations that are going to come and go."