Watch the Lawrence North Wildcats compete at the Circle City Classic.
One ticket gets you access to four football games:
- Girls flag: 10 a.m. Crispus Attucks vs. Arsenal Tech
- Girls flag: 11:30 a.m. Lawrence North vs. Ben Davis
- Boys tackle: 2 p.m. Warren Central vs. Pike
- Boys tackle: 7 p.m. Lawrence North vs. Ben Davis
All games will be played at Lucas Oil Stadium, 500 S. Capitol Ave. Tickets are available for purchase online via Ticketmaster. Tickets range from $16-$60.
Heavynne Beard grew up playing tackle football.
She started when she was 7, and was usually the only girl on her team. Not that her opponents noticed.
Beard could go entire games without the boys realizing who she was. It wasn’t until she took her helmet off that the young athlete stood out.
“I played middle linebacker, outside linebacker, corner, safety, D-line,” Beard said. “I used to always just be the one that just got the tackle.”
Beard wasn’t sure if she’d be able to keep up the sport as she got older. She made her school’s seventh grade team, but decided not to play. The boys around her were getting “bigger, tougher and meaner.” She worried she wouldn’t be able to compete.
But that was before she learned about a new sport the Indiana High School Athletic Association is considering sanctioning: girls flag football. The sport, which is gaining national momentum, is now played in more than 100 Indiana high schools.
Beard’s skills and football IQ caught the attention of Lawrence North flag coach Donny Mimms who recruited her to play a different position: quarterback.
Beard led the varsity team — as a freshman — through an impressive season last year. The LN team finished as runner-ups in the state tournament.
This year, the Wildcats say they’re coming for the title.
“Everybody’s just been talking … Everybody just wants to beat us,” Beard said, “And I’m just like, ‘now, we really gotta prove our point.’”
Becoming a new high school sport
Near and far, flag football is having a moment.
In July, Westfield’s Grand Park Sports Campus hosted the world’s largest youth flag football tournament, the NFL Flag Championships. On Sept. 26, for the first time, four high school teams including Lawrence North will play at Lucas Oil Stadium as part of the Indiana Black Expo’s annual Circle City Classic. Next year, adult players will step into the international spotlight as flag football makes its Olympic debut at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
The momentum comes as state officials weigh whether to officially recognize flag football as Indiana’s newest high school sport.
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The Indianapolis Colts organization first launched a competitive high school flag league for girls in 2023. Lawrence North joined the league a year later with support from the Irsay family’s “Road to 100” campaign — a $1 million commitment to support start-up needs for teams across the state.
The campaign’s namesake represents the minimum number of teams a sport must reach to be sanctioned by IHSAA. A sport must maintain at least 100 teams for two consecutive years before the association will vote to sanction it.
Since 2025, girls flag has been considered an “emerging sport” — a status IHSAA gives to developing programs that have shown promise toward becoming sustainable.
IHSAA Assistant Commissioner Robert Faulkens told Mirror Indy he’s confident the sport’s tenure as “emerging” will be short.
This year 113 girls flag teams are competing across the state. And, Faulkens said, IHSAA board members could vote on the sport as early as their next annual meeting this spring.
Faulkens likened the sport’s growth to girls wrestling, which was first sanctioned in 2024. He said both sports create an opportunity for girls to compete in a way they may have never considered.
“Initially, the girls were having to wrestle with the boys,” Faukens said. “The minute we decided to make it an emerging sport and it was just the girls wrestling girls, the numbers exploded.”
Sanctioning flag football would shift oversight of the girls’ end-of-year tournament from the Indiana Flag Football Coaches Association to IHSAA.
Mimms, the Lawrence North coach, has helped grow the game. As president of the flag football association, he regularly fields questions from coaches about rules of the game, transfers and refereeing.
“Everybody’s dialed in, doing what it takes,” Mimms said. “Girls want to compete. There’s no need to give them a watered-down version. They want the real thing.”
What’s different about flag
Girls on the LN team have fielded questions about the sport. They mostly tell people flag is just as athletic as tackle football — just in different ways.
The girls teams typically play 7-on-7 — without pads.
“I’ve always been into football in general, and I like being aggressive,” said Jada Akoforo, a senior defensive back. “So finding out there was a flag football team was exciting.”
The rules of flag football are similar to tackle. High school playing fields are smaller — 80 yards long instead of 100 — but the objectives are still the same: gain downs to score in the endzone.
Each varsity game is made up of two 24-minute halves. Instead of tackling their opponents, defenders pull flags from players’ belts to stop forward movement.
You also won’t see any kicking during this game. Instead of field goals after scoring in the endzone, flag athletes can play for a 1- or 2-point conversions. And instead of punting, players simply line up at their own 14-yard line to receive the ball for a new possession.
Athletes say this style of play — protecting their own flags and diving after an opponent’s — creates a different type of physicality. Speed and footwork become especially important.
It’s all part of what the girls learn when they join the team — some of them playing football for the first time. On a roster of 30 girls, a majority of the team are underclassmen. Only seven are returners from last year’s team.
“We’ve had girls come out in the beginning of the summer that just had two left feet,” Mimms said. “But they came and worked hard every day. And now, they’re getting it more naturally. They look better and they have more confidence because they bet on themselves.”
Like boys tackle football, the girls compete in the fall. That means, in many schools, teams share facilities.
At Lawrence North, the flag team will usually get the football field for an hour or two on Mondays while the tackle team reviews footage from the week before. The rest of the week, the girls practice on an open baseball diamond. They host home games from the soccer field.
The girls say they wish they had more time on the football field — but they find ways to make it work. In many ways, they’re lucky. Lawrence Township schools recently completed a multimillion project, which brought artificial turf baseball and soccer fields to the LN campus.
“Getting a new sport, you don’t necessarily get a new field to go with it,” Mimms said. “You have to figure out ways to plug in and just utilize the beautiful campus that we have.”
Finding ‘team sisterhood’
The LN girls have put up an impressive record so far this season, beating teams such as Lawrence Central, Pike and North Central. As of Sept. 23, the Wildcats have dropped only one game in the regular season, an away game against Warren Central.
Coaches preach mental toughness, and discipline is drilled into the team.
For every failing grade, girls run a lap. Talking or goofing around during practice? That’s another lap. Drop a pass? More laps.
It’s a level of accountability parents say they mirror at home and athletes say they welcome.
“Everybody needs to be yelled at and kind of like shocked back into reality,” Akoforo said. “That from the coaches — because we know it’s out of love especially — it just helps us to keep up and going.”
Coaches say they push the girls for more than just winning games. It’s about life lessons and, for some, opportunities after high school.
Six Wildcats received offers to play on college teams last year, Mimms said. Beard, the Wildcats quarterback, hopes to add her name to the list.
“My mom never got the opportunity to go to college,” she said, “so I do want to prove that I can do it.”
Even though expectations for the team are high, the girls make room for fun.
Home or away, the Wildcats’ distinctive “We The North” flag travels with the team. And the girls’ sideline cheers ring loud across the field. The team has even built a following on social media.
Videos from practice have picked up thousands of views on Instagram. The girls also use the platform to try out the latest TikTok dance trends. Assistant Coach Destiny Washington, who studied video production in college, edits the videos. Sometimes, she joins in.
“We get tons of followers from all around the country,” Washington said. “People like to see things that are real and things that they can relate to.”
A deeper motivation
For Kamari Evans, the team’s energy is a big part of what keeps her coming back to the team.
The sophomore wide receiver also runs track and danced when she was younger. She only decided to play flag after Beard recruited her.
Evans said she didn’t know much about the sport, but found it easy to jump right in. It was a different feeling from track, where the 15-year-old said she felt like she had to prove herself to fit in.
“In flag football, they help you prove yourself,” Evans said. “There is no judgment anywhere.”
For Evans’ mom, however, it took time to warm up to the sport. Rosalinda Sanchez said she worried flag would be too rough — the exact opposite of track and dance — but after watching the team play, she’s become one of the Wildcats’ loudest cheerleaders.
“Last year, I had to learn. I sat with one of the parents and I said, ‘What’s happening?’” she said. “This year, I know what I’m looking out for so I’m always yelling.’”
Evans, who is a team captain, said one of her biggest goals this year is to return to state. But what motivates her to play goes much deeper. She’s driven by a desire to prove anyone who doubts her abilities wrong.
She says she finds strength in her coaches and teammates. As a sophomore, she’s already thinking about how that same support can be extended to the next players to join the team.
“The team sisterhood is really good,” Evans said. “We’re always there for each other no matter what.”
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Mirror Indy reporter Carley Lanich covers early childhood and K-12 education. Contact her at carley.lanich@mirrorindy.org or follow her on X @carleylanich.
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