Pro women’s flag football league is brainchild of Newport Beach entrepreneur
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Flag football is a blossoming sport for young women in Southern California, and numbers speak for themselves.
Participation from high schools in the CIF Southern Section more than doubled from 120 teams in 2023 to 270 in 2024. In the latter year, the section held its first postseason, with Orange Lutheran edging Newport Harbor for the inaugural Division 1 title.
Newport Beach promoter Roy Englebrecht saw an opportunity there and announced this week the creation of the SoCal Women’s Pro Flag Football League, which will launch with games this summer.
“I’ve always been a firm believer in this, in the other businesses that we’ve done,” he said. “If you’re first, and you do it right, you can succeed.”
Each of the eight counties in Southern California will have a team in the league, which will run from June through August. Players are expected to be high school graduates.
“These great high school athletes, if they don’t get recruited but they still want to play, they’ll have a place to play,” Englebrecht said. “We solved that by having a league for these girls to continue their sport that they love. Plus, it’s an opportunity for eight individuals to own a professional sports franchise, to be a Jeanie Buss or a Steve Ballmer or a Stan Kroenke or a Jerry Jones. That’s kind of a fun thing.”
Overhead costs will be relatively low, as teams will likely play games at local high schools or junior colleges. Seven home games and seven road games are on the schedule, with players being paid $200 per game, plus a team bonus of $1,200 per victory.
There will also be playoff bonuses, and the players with the most total touchdowns, rushing yards and touchdown passes will earn an additional $500 each.
Englebrecht said he consulted with several Orange County high school girls’ flag football coaches, including Theo Rokos, of Corona del Mar, before creating the SoCal Women’s Pro Flag Football League.
Rokos guided the Sea Kings girls to the Division 2 title last fall. His daughter, Alexa, graduated from CdM in 2025 and launched a flag football program at Santa Barbara Community College.
“In my opinion, it’s smart,” Theo Rokos said of the new enterprise. “It’s a bus-only league, so you don’t have to really travel, and I think there’s enough interest. I certainly would take my group of girls from CdM to go see a game. The time of year is good. I think they can pull it off.”
Englebrecht plans to hire a commissioner for the league in short order. Additional announcements — including team names, venues, league draft details, player tryouts, ownership groups and corporate partnerships — will be released in early February, according to a news release.
Englebrecht’s league is one of a few new opportunities for flag football-playing teenagers. Flag football will be a sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
This week, the NCAA added flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women Program for all three divisions at the NCAA Convention in the Washington, D.C., area. That’s the first step toward creating a national collegiate championship in women’s flag football and would likely lead to Division I scholarship opportunities down the road.
Meanwhile, in December, the NFL announced it planned to financially support the development and launch of a professional flag football league, investing up to $32 million.
CdM sophomore AnnaSofia Dickens, a team captain on the flag football team who published a book about the sport last fall, just turned 16 but said she would love to play in a professional league in the not-too-distant future.
“The competition’s only going to get better, especially since there’s girls coming from all of the other sports,” Dickens said.
“To know that this isn’t just a hobby, that there’s also a future in the sport for girls like me, I think that’s really motivating to girls everywhere. Up until now, flag football has almost had a ceiling … but now that it’s a pro sport, the NFL kind of removed that ceiling for girls who want to grow up and play flag football as an actual professional sport.”
Dickens added that she thinks the SoCal professional league absolutely can succeed.
“This league would really give girls an identity, kind of a pathway to growing up in a sport that they know they can play for the rest of their lives,” she said.
Englebrecht saw a siimilar dynamic with his daughter, Allison, who played volleyball at CdM in the early 1990s, leading the Sea Kings to a perfect 36-0 record and a national championship as a senior in 1992. After she graduated, she played the sport in college before being recruited to play overseas in Europe.
“Allison loved volleyball,” Roy Englebrecht said. “She didn’t want to quit at 18. She didn’t want to quit at 22, and there were options for her to continue.
“Flag football didn’t have that. Now, it will have that.”
For updates on the new SoCal professional league, follow it on social media or visit socalwomensproflagfootballleague.com.
