Flag football offers Alaska student-athletes a fun, competitive alternative

For Olyvia Mamae, flag football is a fun outlet for training that became a way to rekindle her love of sport.

Kali Hibbert uses her time playing quarterback to hone her skills as a point guard on the Dimond High basketball team.

While few student-athletes count flag football as their main athletic endeavor, it has developed as a fall alternative for hundreds of girls in Alaska.

Hibbert is a senior at Dimond and plays point guard on the school’s girls varsity basketball team. She is also the starting quarterback on the flag football team.

“I’ve always liked football,” Hibbert said. “I’d pass the ball around with my brothers when I was younger, and I always watched it. But when I found out I was able to play in a real game instead of actually putting pads on, I thought it’d be fun to do.”

Speed is a key component to the game but so is the ability to distribute the ball, which is why basketball players tend to make for the best quarterbacks in flag football, according to Kathleen Navarre, a longtime flag football coach at Dimond.

“Point guards make good quarterbacks,” Navarre said. “They understand plays and are great distributors.”

Hibbert believes her skills on the hardwood transfer well to her responsibilities on the football field.

“Both require leadership in a way,” she said. “I’m able to talk to my team and memorize plays and usually I know where to put people and know where people should be.”

Mamae, a senior at Bettye Davis East High, is a track star by trade and the reigning state champion in the girls 100- and 200-meter dash. She was named the 2021 Alaska girls Gatorade Player of the Year as a junior, when she also won a state title in the 100 hurdles.

Flag football helped kick-start her return to competition after she was stuck in a sort of COVID hibernation.

“For me personally, a lot of mental issues came up with COVID,” Mamae said. “I kind of stopped eating, I kind of stopped wanting to do anything physical, and I just wanted to stay home. It was definitely a hard time because getting back out here felt like a chore at first until I had to rekindle my love for sports.”

She believes that her background in track and field gives her an edge in flag football, especially when it comes to getting to the edge of opposing defenses and upfield in a hurry.

“When you get to the sideline its kind of like a 100 meter dash, you’re just sprinting as straight as you can,” Mamae said. “I always forget to cut in because of track. You don’t get disqualified like you do in track for going outside your lane. I try to cut in a lot, but a lot of times I get so focused I just need to run straight.”

Her speed helps her close quickly on ball-carriers from her safety spot and eliminate angles even though she admitted understanding angles took a while to grasp.

“At first I was like ‘Why can’t I just go to where she’s at right now?’ but flag is a game of angles. You have to go to where they’re going,” Mamae said. “My speed helps, because if I’m so far in the back, I can still get that angle and am still fast enough to catch up to that girl.”

Navarre was Dimond’s first head flag football coach and built the program into a perennial powerhouse. She was at the helm of the program from 2006 until 2020, when she retired from teaching, but she is still a member of the coaching staff as the defensive coordinator.

After Chugiak and Bartlett met up to decide the first three conference championships, Navarre and the Lynx went on to claim five of the next six from 2009 to 2014.

“We’ve been pretty successful since we’ve got the system going,” Navarre said.

Navarre said there has been some negative stigma involved in flag football because some programs believe it will pull away their top athletes from other fall sports.

“It doesn’t,“ she said. “What it does is that it gives the volleyball kids that get cut, they come out, it gives soccer girls that maybe aren’t doing anything in the fall except maybe playing (competitive club league), they come out and are phenomenal flag players.”

She said it also gives the kids who didn’t think they were cut out for sports an opportunity to find something they’re good at.

“You can find a spot for anyone,” Navarre said. “Of course speed is huge, but you don’t have to be the fastest or the smallest or the most athletic to find a role in the flag football team.”

Dimond regularly recruits players that play basketball, softball and soccer to come out for flag football, and it’s a big reason why they have won four of the last five conference titles and are poised to win their third consecutive crown this year.

Mai Mateaki is a junior at Dimond and one of the Lynx’s best players on both sides of the ball. She is a soccer player foremost and is a four-time champion having won back-to-back titles in both sports in each of the last two years.

She was inspired to play flag football by her sister, who also played for the Lynx, and a desire to find something productive to do after school when she’s not playing soccer competitively.

“She did it, so I did it,” Mateaki said. “The practices are really boring, but the games are fun, and I get to do something after school. It was either this or cross country and I’m not going to run in a circle.”

Navarre believes that soccer players make the best defenders.

“They know how to make, they know how to get to where the girl is going and not where they are at,” she said. “They understand what it means to mark a player. They have speed and are great athletes.”

Outside of Anchorage, the only other city that has high school flag football is Fairbanks. There won’t be further growth and expansion of the sport until the other districts join in.

“We’re trying to get the Valley and the (Kenai) Peninsula on board to get started,” Navarre said. “In order to have an ASAA sponsored state meet, you have to have four different conferences or 60 percent of the population.”

High school flag football came to Alaska in 2005 because the Anchorage School District was not Title IX compliant.

A survey was conducted to gauge the interest among the students and since traditional football fields were available, adapting to play on a field with larger dimensions than the game is typically played on would make starting it up more financially feasible.

“If you look in the other flag football rules, the field is supposed to be thinner and only 80 yards,” Navarre said. “We figured we’d adapt to the football field we already had because of the cost to get it started.”

The sport took off in Alaska, prompting articles from ESPN and other outlets to examine the growth. Pre-COVID, Navarre said the Dimond program averaged more than 100 girls and the other schools around the city had high participation numbers as well.

“They did flag football, and it really took off,” Navarre said. “The pandemic hurt us a little bit with numbers, but it really took off, and I think it was the second-highest involvement of girls in sports and maybe even the highest for a while.”