Why Flag Football Is Exploding: What It Means for Every Organization Trying to Build a Future Audience

There is a lesson hiding inside the rise of flag football, and it has almost nothing to do with sports. It is about what happens when a powerful institution stops optimizing for the present and starts genuinely investing in the future. It is about the difference between strategy and survival. And for those of us who work in mission-driven organizations, it is a mirror worth looking into honestly.

I come at this from an unusual angle. By day, I work as a fractional CFO for nonprofits, helping organizations in crisis figure out how to survive, and helping stable ones figure out how to grow. I sit on arts and culture boards. I care deeply about the long-term health of institutions that enrich communities. But I also coach flag football. My daughter's team, my son's team. I am out there on weekends watching kids fall in love with the game, and I am watching the infrastructure that made that possible up close. What I see happening in flag football is something most nonprofits would spend a fortune trying to replicate, if they understood it was even possible.

The NFL Was Not Always This Smart

For most of its history, the National Football League made decisions the way most large institutions do, reactively and with a relatively short time horizon. The gatherings of owners and executives were consumed by the priorities of the moment: collective bargaining agreements, player health disputes, salary negotiations, competitive balance. These were important issues. But they were fundamentally about sustaining the current product, not building the next generation of fans.

At some point, the league looked at its own data and did not like what it saw. American audiences were aging. Younger generations were not connecting with the sport at the same rate. The league's hold on domestic attention was not as secure as it looked from the outside. And that realization forced a harder question than anyone had been willing to ask: what does this league look like in thirty years if nothing changes?

The NFL responded with two significant bets. The first was international expansion, investing heavily in markets like the United Kingdom and Germany, where there was already a foundation of interest. That effort has produced real results, and it deserves credit. But it was built on existing demand. It was a good business decision. It was not a visionary one.

The second bet was more fundamental and more important.

What the RISE Program Actually Did

The NFL fully embraced flag football, and in doing so, completely inverted how the sport understood itself. For years, flag football existed on the margins. It was the thing you played when you were not big enough, fast enough, or tough enough for the "real" game. The league wanted nothing to do with it. That perception has changed so dramatically in the past several years that it is almost hard to remember how recent the shift is.

The numbers tell the story plainly. According to Sports & Fitness Industry Association data, flag football was the only team sport tracked that experienced growth in regular participation among kids ages 6 through 17 from 2019 to 2024, up 14% over that period, while baseball fell 19%, soccer dropped 3%, and basketball declined 2%. Today, approximately 7.8 million Americans participate in flag football annually. In 2024 alone, NFL FLAG welcomed more than 767,000 youth athletes across more than 2,500 leagues spanning 49 states. Girls' participation in NFL Flag grew 21% year-over-year in 2024, with YMCA programs up 31%. Flag football is now an Olympic sport debuting at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Through the RISE program and its broader flag football investment, the league built something that most organizations only dream about: a nationally coordinated, locally implemented infrastructure. Every sub-league in every market operates with consistent standards, consistent messaging, and a shared sense of purpose. This is not a collection of well-meaning programs that happen to share a logo. It is a system.

The message at the heart of that system was also a radical departure from how the NFL had historically presented itself. Football is for everyone. It does not matter how big or small you are. It does not matter what your gender is. It does not matter what your skill level is. When I am coaching my kids' teams, I see that message in action. Girls and boys and non-binary kids playing side by side, kids of every size and background, all of them building a relationship with the sport that will last the rest of their lives. That is not an accident. That is a deliberate, long-term investment.

The Science Behind the Play

None of this works without understanding something that the research on arts participation figured out decades ago. Participation drives long-term engagement. The National Endowment for the Arts' Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that adults who attended performing arts or visited museums as children were three to four times as likely to attend as adults, and that childhood arts exposure turns out to be a stronger predictor of adult arts participation than education, gender, age, or income. The correlation coefficient between performing arts attendance in adulthood and in childhood is 64.6%. The pattern is consistent enough that it is essentially a law of cultural engagement: if you want fans tomorrow, you need participants today.

The NFL understood this and built a strategy around it. The child playing flag football in a suburb of Cincinnati on a Saturday morning is a future season ticket holder. The NFL is not pretending otherwise. It is making a capital investment in that relationship, at scale, with patience and consistency, even though the return is two or three decades away. I watch it work in real time every weekend. These kids are not passive consumers of football content. They are playing. They are competing. They are forming an identity around the sport. That bond will not break easily.

The Mirror the Arts World Needs to Look Into

This is where I am going to step out of my lane as a football coach and back into my lane as someone who spends a lot of time inside cultural institutions.

Every major city in America has an opera company, a symphony, a ballet, a theater. Almost every one of them has an education program: a youth outreach initiative, a school partnership, a community engagement effort of some kind. There are people inside those organizations working incredibly hard on exactly this problem. They believe in what they are doing. The work is real.

But it is not coordinated. Not in any way that resembles what the NFL built.

National arts service organizations do important things. They convene leaders, share research, create networking opportunities, and give the sector a collective voice. And to be fair, they need to do those things. There are genuine short-term crises demanding their attention right now, and ignoring them is not an option. But the nature of that work means that the thirty-year question, who is the future audience and what are we doing today to build them, rarely gets the sustained focus it requires. The agenda stays reactive. And while the convening happens at the national level, the education and engagement work continues to be developed and executed independently at the local level, without a shared framework, without common metrics, and without the kind of consistent messaging that makes a national strategy actually function as one.

Worse, grant funding that was intended to support youth engagement frequently ends up as a subsidy for operating deficits. The education program becomes a revenue line. The mission becomes a mechanism. And the thirty-year investment in future audiences never really gets made, because everyone is too busy surviving the current fiscal year.

This Has Been Done Before. We Know It Can Work.

Here is what makes this frustrating rather than simply discouraging: the arts sector has already demonstrated that large-scale national coordination is possible. ArtPlace America brought together a $150 million collaboration among more than a dozen of the country's most influential philanthropic funders, including the Ford, Kresge, Mellon, Knight, Rockefeller, and Surdna foundations, alongside the National Endowment for the Arts and several federal agencies, and focused them on a shared vision for the role of the arts in community development. Operating from 2010 to 2020, the collaboration itself was remarkable. Getting that many major institutions to operate in concert, with a common framework and shared intent, is genuinely difficult, and ArtPlace accomplished it.

The model had real strengths, and it also had real limitations. The framing was often highly academic, which made it difficult to translate into practical systems that individual organizations could adopt and replicate. National marketing was largely absent, which meant the work never broke through to a wider public. Today, many people inside the arts sector are only vaguely familiar with what ArtPlace achieved, and almost no one outside it has heard of it at all. That is not a judgment on the quality of the work. It is a reflection of what happens when a coordinated effort lacks the infrastructure to communicate itself at scale. ArtPlace also had a predetermined end date, designed to sunset after ten years, which meant the moment it started to gain traction, the clock was already running out.

But the core lesson of ArtPlace is not its limitations. It is that coordination at this level is achievable. A relatively small group of funders aligned around a shared purpose can move an entire field. The capital exists. The philanthropic interest exists. The knowledge of what works exists.

So What Would This Actually Look Like?

Let me be direct about what I think needs to happen, because I do not think vague calls for collaboration accomplish much.

This cannot be led by the national arts service organizations. They are already doing essential work managing the crises in front of them, and asking them to simultaneously architect a twenty-year audience development strategy is asking too much of institutions already stretched thin. This needs to be funder-led. A consortium of major private foundations, significant individual arts philanthropists, and whatever government entities still have the mandate and the will to invest in arts and culture would need to come together, much the way the ArtPlace funders did, and make a collective commitment that is categorically different in scale and duration from anything the field has attempted before.

Not a ten-year initiative with a sunset built in. A twenty-year commitment, with an annual dedicated funding stream that is structurally insulated from the forces that typically derail long-term philanthropy: changes in foundation strategic priorities, shifts in government administration, and the impatience of individual donors who stop seeing results fast enough and redirect their giving. Those forces are real, and any honest version of this effort has to be designed to outlast all of them.

What would that investment actually fund? The equivalent of flag football leagues for the arts. After-school and weekend programs built around a consistent, replicable curriculum. Singing clubs, dance clubs, acting clubs, all rooted in the classical art forms that these institutions are built around. Parent volunteers serving as coaches and organizers, just as they do on flag football fields across the country every Saturday morning. Nationally designed, locally delivered, with the kind of standard operating procedures that make it a system rather than a scattered collection of good intentions.

But building the local infrastructure is only half the job, and the arts sector has a long history of stopping there. The NFL did not simply stand up leagues in every city and hope people would find them. It blanketed the country with marketing. This initiative would require the same level of commitment: a sustained, national campaign across television, radio, billboards, and digital advertising, all under a single umbrella brand, all driving toward a single call to action. Something as simple and powerful as "find your local group" or "make music near you." The point is that every parent driving to work, every kid scrolling on a phone, every family watching television should encounter this message repeatedly and know exactly where to go. National visibility is what turns a program into a movement. Without it, even the best-designed local infrastructure stays invisible.

And here is the part that I think the arts funding community needs to hear most directly: the goal cannot be to produce the next generation of performing artists. Too many of these initiatives are oriented around exactly that. Putting instruments in children's hands with the hope that some percentage of them will find their way to conservatories, to professional stages, to careers in the arts. That will happen anyway. There is no shortage of talent in this country, and the young people who are destined for performing careers will find their path with or without a nationally coordinated program.

What we are not producing, what we are actively failing to cultivate, is the future audience. The future ticket buyers. The future donors. The people who will fill seats, renew subscriptions, and write checks to keep these institutions alive in 2045 and beyond. That is who this investment needs to be for. Not the rare child who will grow up to sing on a professional stage, but the much larger number who will grow up to love the art form because they once participated in it, because it became part of their identity before the world had a chance to tell them it was not for people like them.

The NFL figured this out. ArtPlace showed it was organizationally possible. Now someone needs to be willing to take both of those lessons seriously and build something that lasts.

The best time to start was thirty years ago. The next best time is now.