GUILDERLAND — Girls who want to play flag football for Guilderland will have to wait at least a year.

The superintendent cited budget constraints when pushed this week by parents and a flag-football player about starting the program this spring.

The sport, supported with grants from National Football League teams and Nike, has recently grown rapidly in the state.

In flag football, athletes — frequently girls — stop play not by tackling an opponent but rather by pulling a flag from an opponent’s waist band. Being a no-contact sport, flag football favors speed and agility rather than muscle and power.

And it allows girls to participate in a sport that has been nearly exclusively male.

 The New York State Public High School Athletic Association will host its first Flag Football State Championship in June in Cortland, one of three sites that applied to be the venue; the others were Buffalo and Long Island.

Last spring, 185 programs within the NYSPHSAA membership participated in a full season, making them eligible to compete for the championship.

The rise in popularity nationwide has been swift. According to NYSPHSAA, there’s been a 63-percent increase in participation between 2019 and 2022 with 15,716 girls playing varsity flag football for their high schools in the 2021-2022 season.

In New York, the Bills, the Jets, and the Giants have formed a coalition to help support and create flag football programs for schools around the state.

The sport has caught on at the college level, too, with both the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and the National Junior College Athletic Association declaring flag football an emerging sport.

And, the International Olympic Committee has voted to allow flag football to be added as an Olympic sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Alice McCann, who played flag football with Guilderland Pop Warner, told the school board on Feb. 13, “We were supposed to be the feeder program for the high school … Me and my friends were very excited.”

When the school didn’t field a team, Alice said, “I know a lot of people were disappointed.”

But, she’s not giving up. She likened it to the gamers who were able to push for an Esports team and said, “We can make a lot of … girls’ football dreams come true.”

Alice’s mother, Rachel McCann, also addressed the board, saying flag football was her daughter’s passion. “So I’m showing up and I’m making a plea that we move this forward,” she said.

Of the 15 schools competing in Section 2, only Guilderland and Averill Park are not forming teams this year, McCann said, noting that Christian Brothers Academy as an all-boys school is not eligible.

“Especially given the high taxes in our district, myself and other parents do not understand why our girls would not have similar opportunities as our peers,” McCann said.

She also said, “More than anything, involvement in sports teaches invaluable life skills, makes for stronger college applications for those who want to go, and can teach people to make connections and work better together.”

Another parent, Michael Parker, the father of two daughters, wrote a letter to the board, advocating for the sport.

“I have no doubt that Guilderland had enough interest to field a team,” Parker wrote, noting that his 15-year-old daughter had “eagerly filled out the interest form.”

 Parker went on, “I find it, therefore, baffling that Guilderland’s athletics administrators passed on this opportunity for our girls to be a part of something unique. It sets a very poor example to these student athletes, who are told on the one hand that the district is committed to equity, while being literally sidelined from participating this year due to what I can only imagine is either laziness or gross incompetence.”

Superintendent Marie Wiles told the board members she had shared with them last December that the NFL was offering “a small amount of grant money to kick off the flag football program this spring.”

Wiles went on, “We’re in a very difficult budget cycle and we have lots of needs in many areas of the organization, including athletics.”

The Feb. 13 board meeting featured a presentation on the cuts that Guilderland may be facing to its Foundation Aid from the state as it faces a gap in next year’s budget.

In the fall, Wiles said, school leaders, including the athletic director, “provided for us a pretty substantial list of things that they would like to have funded for next year, including a wrestling coach for our girls’ team; many, many assistant coaches for our existing teams; the creation of modified volleyball for our existing program as well as we have uniform needs and just the increase of costs.

“So for us to add flag football in this year, we would be ultimately saying that that need is going to jump ahead of all the others,” said Wiles.

Every other program in the district, including the new Esports team, Wiles said, “all had a year lag of planning, prioritizing, weighing all the various priorities that we have, not only within athletics but also across the whole board.”

While Wiles said, “at this point, the schedule is done,” she also said flag football is “a high priority for next year.”

Board member Blanca Gonzalez-Parker asked how much a flag football program would cost, and if volunteers could fill the gap.

“No matter what, we still need to pay coaches,” said Wiles, estimating the cost to start a flag football program at $10,000 to $12,000.

“In the end,” said Wiles, “we felt it was fairest to our existing programs and to the overall process that we use to make really tough decisions about what ends up in the budget to put it in the queue for next year.”