Brandon Heaney’s 13-year-old daughter Brighton started playing football in fifth grade in flag leagues with boys. She played other sports as well, but Heaney said football quickly became her favorite.
“However, looking ahead, there was no future for her to keep playing beyond eighth grade,” he said.
That’s because most recreational flag leagues end when kids get to high school. So, Heaney began formulating a game plan to start a flag football league for high schoolers last year when Brighton was still in seventh grade.
That’s when he discovered the Utah High School Girls Football Association had already started a league. So, Heaney called an audible and began working to form a team at the high school.
Heaney joined forces with Erin Miller, a behavioral intervention specialist at Park City School District who also coaches softball, to recruit students.
Both have football backgrounds. Heaney was a cornerback for Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2004 and a free agent draft pick for the Atlanta Falcons in 2005. Miller started playing flag football when she was six. After aging out of recreational leagues, she picked up the sport years later and has played tackle football professionally for 12 years, most recently on the Utah Falconz.
Miller said during the first practice, only eight girls showed up. But after the word got out at Park City and Wasatch High, the roster began to fill up.
“It was hard to tell players that were interested, ‘I'm sorry, but we can't accommodate,’” she said. “We're trying to build a program, and we need to work on developing players. We don't care about quantity, we care about quality.”
Now, 33 girls are playing under Park City High’s logo, though some are from Wasatch High School. Players are split evenly into two teams: Park City Black’s athletes are in eighth through tenth grade; Park City Red has eleventh and twelfth graders.
Most of Park City’s team members haven’t played football before, including Wasatch sophomore Hadden Millett. She joined the team because she plays basketball in the winter and also wanted a fall sport.
“It's a good sport that helps you in other sports as well,” she said. “If you don't have anything to do in this season, it helps with, like, footwork, coordination, speed.”
Millett plans to help start Wasatch High’s own team next year, along with the six other Wasatch players on Park City’s team.
Park City senior Renee Hebert is also a football newcomer, but was recruited from the lacrosse team, which is a spring sport.
“We came to preseason, and then that's when I found out I really love this,” she said. “We have improved so much as a team and I feel like it’s brought a change of perspective, I guess, that like girls can do boys' sports too.”
Hebert said through the team, she’s discovered a lot of opportunities and is exploring options to play after high school.
Coach Heaney is similarly excited for his daughter, who has more opportunities in football than ever before.
“She's always told me flag football is what she wants to do. I was like, ‘Well, Brighton, there's not an avenue for you to play it, you got to play lacrosse, because you could go somewhere in lacrosse,’” he said. “But now it's going to be an Olympic sport. More and more colleges are offering a program at the collegiate level.”
Flag Football will debut in the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Heaney said the National Football League will likely fund some sort of women’s professional flag football league in the future.
At the high school level, girls flag football is becoming more popular across the U.S. According to the NFL, over 30 states are offering programs and 17 have official state-sanctioned championships.
It’s not yet sanctioned in the Beehive State, but flag football leaders and players hope to get it there. Until then, Heaney said Park City High has been a model for other high schools.
“We are setting the tone for what needs to happen in the valley with what we're doing here, and it's just really cool to be a part of the epicenter,” he said.
That’s because Park City has provided its logo to the teams and has allowed the league to use its facilities for games even when Park City’s teams aren’t playing.
