By Hannah Keyser, CNN
San Francisco (CNN) — When Austin Sheepo first told his girlfriend that he plays on his high school flag football team, she was a little confused.
“Isn’t that a girls’ sport?” she asked.
They attend different high schools, and at her school, “they have a real football team and a girls’ flag football team,” he said.
Real Football: The kind where kids tackle each other; the kind with violence, an unrivaled dominance in the cultural psyche, and concussion concerns. Real football is the stuff of Friday night lights, and the subject of concerning studies about C.T.E. even in young athletes.
Real football has “the risk of injury that I think people want to watch,” according to Sheepo’s teammate, Briggs Cline.
And at Lick-Wilmerding High School, an elite private prep school in San Francisco, the parents won’t let their sons play Real Football. Instead, Lick-Wilmerding offers fall flag football, as part of a coalition of six schools in the area that formed a league to provide a safer (and cheaper) alternative to the quintessential American high school sport. For boys.
The boys on Lick-Wilmerding’s flag football team — which dominates its local league, 25-1 over the last two seasons with a pair of championships — understand the compromise they’ve struck between safety and love for the sport.
“It’s almost like a toxic relationship,” Sheepo, the team’s quarterback and a senior who has played his last high school snap already, said. “You want to get as close to football as you can without actually playing football.”
But Sheepo’s girlfriend is correct, at the high school level flag football is overwhelmingly a girls’ sport. He and his teammates are among the only 825 boys around the country who played high school flag football last school year, compared to 68,847 girls on high school flag football teams, according to The National Federation of State High School Associations.
Girls’ participation is booming — between the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, 25,000 more girls signed up for high school flag football and it was offered in nearly 1,000 more schools — in a trend that’s garnering significant coverage and celebration. But over that same span, the number of boys playing flag football actually decreased.
Meanwhile, more than a million boys played tackle football last school year.
‘My parents were like, ‘Nope’’
Sometimes, the boys of Lick-Wilmerding wish they were among them.
“I always wanted to play tackle,” Sheepo said. He’s tall and athletic, a star basketball player as well. When he was in middle school, coaches at other high schools tried to recruit him for football. He was enamored with the idea. “And then my parents were like, ‘Nope.’”
“Football is, by far, my favorite sport and I’ve always wanted to play,” said Oliver McCulloch-Juilland, another senior on the team. “But my whole life, my mom, she’s just really big on not letting me get concussions and stuff.”
“My dad played tackle football growing up, and I played it a bit at family gatherings,” said Cline. “But then, when I was a kid, I got too many concussions. I’ve always wanted to play football. So flag football actually lets me play football.”
Even though they’re conceding the dangers of traditional tackle football through their actions, the goal at Lick-Wilmerding is not to deny the existence — or omnipresence or even appeal — of the NFL. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Their coach, Davion Fleming, was a running back and