There was a buzz on the Waterbury campus even before the official announcement.
Some active Post University student-athletes reached out to administrators inquiring about the women’s flag football program to come, expressing their interest to get involved as the groundwork was still being laid. Planning to field its first team next spring, Post will be one of at least 65 NCAA schools offering the rapidly growing sport to women at the varsity or club level, and the first in Connecticut.
“It was kind of a no-brainer,” said Post University Athletic Director Karin Mann. “It’s another opportunity for us to provide more opportunities for female student-athletes. We have some really large-roster men’s sports and to be able to add something that’s obviously a unique offering and something that’s growing so rapidly, there was just a lot of opportunity there.”
Post hired Joseph Newman, its former sprint football coach, and Dominic Colavito, longtime director of the NFL Paul Panaroni Memorial Flag Football League in Wallingford, as co-head coaches earlier this month. The duo has been recruiting high school juniors and seniors, and college transfers, while Post looks into joining a conference for 2026 and begins to line up its inaugural schedule.
The NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics made a recommendation to add flag football as an emerging sport in February, and the hope is that Post will be able to compete at the Division II level in the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference (CACC) down the road. In order for a sport to be considered for championship status by the NCAA, there must be at least 40 schools sponsoring it at the varsity level and meet minimum contest and participation requirements.
The idea to get involved with flag football, which will be part of the 2028 Olympics for men and women, initially crossed the mind of Post’s senior associate director of athletics, AJ McNamara, during the pandemic in 2020.
One of his friends on Long Island was texting him videos of his daughter playing quarterback at the grassroots level, and the amount of participation impressed McNamara to the point where he did some research and began tracking the sport in 2022.
“We noticed a significant uptick in the amount of participation, we noticed an uptick in states sponsoring it as a varsity sport, we noticed an uptick in colleges and universities sponsoring it,” McNamara said. “So for us, like every other small private institution, we’re enrollment driven, so we saw it as a major growth opportunity for us. We feel like we’ve gotten ahead of it so we’re in a good place right now and we’re moving forward and we’re super excited about its future.”
Connecticut’s flag football scene
Several Connecticut high schools have added flag football teams, but the sport won’t be sanctioned by the CIAC until at least 20% of its members field a varsity team. Currently 15 different states have sanctioned girls flag football as a high school varsity sport and 17 – Connecticut included – have started pilot programs.
But there is no shortage of opportunity to play the sport in Connecticut.
More than a dozen flag football leagues affiliated with NFL Flag are located within a 25-mile radius of Hartford. Brandon Jubrey, a former Fairfield basketball player, created the CT Flag Football League in Windsor in 2018. It started with about 150 kids, but quickly expanded to become almost a year-round operation serving more than 1,100 kids in co-ed and all-girls leagues across five different locations in Windsor, Glastonbury, Portland, North Branford and Bloomfield. Jubrey has also created competitive and recreational leagues in Windsor for adult women that run in the fall and the spring.
Two of Jubrey’s girls travel teams – the high school age group and 14-and-under – have qualified for the NFL Flag Championships and will compete at the Football Hall of Fame in late July.
“My goal has always been to better the community, give kids, adults, families an active outlet, let them have some fun,” Jubrey said. “I think it’s just going to continue to grow and then at some point it’ll level off just like anything else. But I think it’s here to stay, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.”
Colavito’s league in Wallingford has about 360 kids and is the longest-running and largest NFL Flag league in America, he claims.
“It’s men, it’s women, and it’s here,” Colavito said. “The high schools will all pick it up. The CIAC, at some point, will get on board and do it… We’ll do it and next year another college in Connecticut will do it, they’ll all do it. But (we’re) super excited because we are the first, and it’s gonna spread.”
Building a program
The network Colavito has built from being involved with flag football for almost three decades has been crucial to Post’s initial recruiting efforts. Newman has taken on the “new school” recruiting method, using social media to connect with coaches from all over the Northeast – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts — in addition to Connecticut.
They’ve received interest from recruits as far away as Arizona and California, as well.
The goal is to get around 15-20 women on board for Post’s inaugural team and continue building off of it for the second year. At least three prospective players have been on campus for recruiting visits and they’ve heard interest from several others, including some current Post student-athletes who’ve exhausted NCAA eligibility in their relative sports.
“We’re trying to find girls who have played it, but we’re also not turning away girls that maybe haven’t played, but maybe they were a basketball player or a soccer player and they were under recruited and want to play college athletics,” Newman said. “I think in-state will be a lot easier to recruit once the CIAC can get enough teams to have a flag program.”
Post was eager to get involved early.
“We just wanted to have the foresight to sort of get on that train as it’s starting to leave the station,” McNamara said. “So we feel like we’re in a really, really good place.”