In the first year the sport was offered to athletes, Hellgate Girls Flag Football made a statement: it was not to be overlooked. Quickly, the team captured the attention of many students with their tenacious and unrelenting nature, overcoming barriers like years of experience leveraged on them by other teams across the state, until making it to the state finals.
As part of a statewide push, Hellgate and many other high schools introduced flag football teams for the first time this fall. Out of all of these fledgling teams, however, only one challenged Glacier, a school with years of flag football experience behind them, in the state finals. It all comes down to the community and passion behind Hellgate’s team.
When the prospect of playing flag football was offered, many Knights jumped on the opportunity. Senior Gianna Passuccio, a receiver on the team, said, “It was a new sport for me, and it was a sport I was playing for fun. It was low stress, and I knew that going into it, so I was excited for that.”
“Flag football was super exciting, because you don’t usually get to start high school sports halfway through your high school career, and a bunch of new, cool people joined it, and I think it was just a great community to be a part of,” junior Elan Toretti, a rusher, said.
“I think Hellgate has a really unique demographic of kids, where, looking at the prototype of a player that we’d need, I thought Hellgate would lend itself well to that, just in terms of hardworking kids,” Maddie Keast, an assistant coach for the team, said.
However, there were some challenges getting the team started.
“I think we definitely found it challenging having enough people to play, and having a big enough team… so it was definitely hard to find people who were willing to put in the work, but we definitely did overcome it by the end of the season,” Toretti said. “We had a lot of people show up halfway through the season, and really put in the most effort they could.”
As the team found its footing, though, they began excelling, and building off of the mistakes they made along the way. Passuccio highlighted a game against Sentinel that the team lost, using their failure as motivation to improve throughout the season, eventually coming back to play Sentinel in a game the Knights won.
The youth football programs that are being pushed for across the state are definitely making their mark on high school sports, cementing a future for flag football.
“I think there’s a lot of interest in the younger grades, especially in elementary and middle school,” Toretti said. “I think that the program is going to be great.”
Keast said she plans on staying with the program in the future.
“I’d love to be a part of it for as long as I’m able to,” she said. “I think, obviously, the caliber of all of the teams around the state is going to continue to get better… with youth flag football programs being in effect in Montana, I think it’ll inevitably translate to the high school level.”
Keast went further, hypothesizing that the gap between male football players and female football players will continue to shrink. “I think kids will begin to define their role similar to male football players. They’ll establish themselves as a defensive player, an offensive threat, or quarterback, and have kind of an idea of their role prior to entering a season,” she said.
This fall was an exciting time for fall sports. While sports like football and volleyball took much of the spotlight, flag football was possibly the most exciting development in the future of Hellgate athletics this year. With the trajectory, talent and energy on display this season, it is undeniably a sport to keep an eye on in the future.