Inside Lane Tech’s quest for 1st IHSA girls flag football title
Pregame warmups were about halfway through when Lane Tech High School girls flag football coaches Caroline Schwartz and Shawn Cirton called an impromptu team meeting on the field.
They were minutes away from the first game in the sport’s inaugural Illinois High School Association state playoffs, and the coaches had a warning for the 24 girls huddled around them: Lane’s past successes — the team’s 19-4 record this season and No. 1 ranking in the sectional bracket — all meant nothing to their opponent that Tuesday in early October, Chicago’s Lincoln Park High School.
“This is it,” Schwartz, the head coach, said to her team. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us. This is where we start.”
With the National Football League averaging close to 20 million viewers a week, it’s clear that football has surpassed baseball as the national pastime. All the while, women and girls had been largely excluded from participating, relegated to the sidelines and so-called “powder-puff” games.
In Illinois, that started to change three years ago, when the Chicago Public League partnered with the Chicago Bears and others to launch a girls high school flag football league. Twenty-two teams participated that first season in 2021. Last year, it expanded to include more than 100 schools across the state.
The Lane Tech squad, in its second year of existence, won a nine-team tournament in October 2023 hosted by the Bears, beating Bronzeville’s Wendell Phillips Academy High School in the championship game held in the Walter Payton Center at Halas Hall.
But for some, that victory came with an asterisk, said senior quarterback Alaina Valmassei, because it wasn’t an official Illinois High School Association sport.
“We still don’t get the respect we all deserve,” Valmassei, 17, said on the sideline before the Lincoln Park game.
This February, the IHSA board of directors added flag football to its roster of sanctioned sports. Six months later, Chicago Tribune photojournalist Eileen T. Meslar and I began shadowing the Lane Tech team to document its triumphs and setbacks as it tried to remove that asterisk and claim the state’s first girls flag football championship title.
Along the way, we met a group of girls who call the team a second family, and the coach at the center who nurtures that culture while striving to elevate the nascent sport.
As senior pass rusher Grier Burke, 17, said after one game: “We deserve to be seen. It’s a lot more than pulling flags.”
This is the second in a two-part series examining the path of flag football for females.
‘I wake up for football’
It’s 6 a.m. and I’m at Lane Stadium where the team is about to start its second practice of the season.
The stadium lights give the rising sun an extra boost on this Tuesday morning in August. The first day of school is still a week away and the sprawling campus at Western Avenue and Addison Street is virtually empty minus a boys soccer team practicing on an adjacent field.
I can’t stop yawning (did I mention it’s 6 a.m.?) but the 27 girls on the field appear unfazed by the early hour as they run a lap and then form a circle for stretches, lunges, leg lifts and the like.
“I wake up for football,” senior Jocelyn Hale, 17, said. In this case, that meant setting her alarm for 4:30 a.m.
This is Hale’s second year with the team. The Logan Square resident is the starting running back and one of four team captains. She said she was always interested in playing football but never had the opportunity, “until now.”
Others share stories of being the only girl playing touch football with the boys at recess, or throwing the football with their dads and brothers in the backyard. Several play other sports. But flag football feels different. It’s more of a community, they say. It’s supportive. Inclusive.
“It’s competitive,” says junior linebacker Ije Agbakwu, 16, “in the best possible way.”
‘It makes me want to do better, to push the sport’
There are moments, of course, when they’ve overheard dismissive comments about flag football not being a “real sport” or not being “physical.” After watching 12 games this season, we can attest it’s absolutely both.
“They don’t seem to take it seriously,” said senior linebacker Florencia Fabian, 17, after describing a male security guard’s snarky remark last season. It made her angry, “but it makes me want to do better, to push the sport.”
That’s exactly how Schwartz wants her team to respond. The 36-year-old computer science teacher played co-ed flag football as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and quickly established Lane’s program when she joined the school in 2022.
She demands equity for her girls and the sport. Her team is organized. It’s disciplined. That comes through in all sorts of ways, like their strict adherence to a flag-pulling etiquette.
Players on some teams will yank a flag (the equivalent of a tackle) hanging from the belt around an opponent’s waist and either drop it or emphatically throw it to the turf. Not Lane Tech. Its defenders will, without fail, raise an arm to show the referee that the flag has been pulled and then hand it back to the other team.
We watched Schwartz be silly when the mood feels too heavy and serious when it’s too light. She leads the team in breathing exercises when they seem stressed and urges them to be like goldfish, with short memories, when they make mistakes.
She wants to insulate them from the inherent struggle that comes with being pioneering athletes in a male-dominated sport — but only to an extent.
“They need to know what they’re facing,” she said as that early-morning practice winded down.
A week later, we watched that principle in action. The team had a double header to open the season. They routed the night’s first opponent, Rich Township High School District 227, 34-0.
Lane looked less dominant in the second game against Round Lake High School but still cruised to a 20-0 victory. Shortly before the first half, one of the girls told Schwartz that a member of the all-male officiating crew said she should smile.
“You do not have to smile,” Schwartz assured her.
At the half, an official ran to Lane’s sideline and told Schwartz that the team would incur a 15-yard penalty for an under-inflated ball. It’s a joke, he said. “I got you … to smile.”
She replied: “Dude, don’t tell women to smile.”
Immediately after the exchange, a few players turned to me. “Did you get that?” they ask.
‘I plan on starting something’
Lane began the state playoffs with a commanding 30-0 victory over Lincoln Park. After the game, they sang “Happy Birthday” to senior receiver Gianna Phillips, who turned 18 that day.
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Valmassei, the senior quarterback, was given a homemade get-well-soon card for her mom, signed by the team. Mia Valmassei has been a fixture in the stands throughout the season. We met her at the first game setting up a tent on the sideline to shield the girls from the August sun. She’d often bring a wagon full of snacks for the team — “She’s a big fan of Costco,” Alaina said — or, on cold nights late in the season, hand warmers.
She missed two games due to health issues. The team’s card left the normally steady Alaina in tears, her head buried in her dad’s chest.
“We care about your family,” one teammate told her.
Two days later, Lane returned to Oak Park and River Forest High School to take on the host school in the regional final. With Mia Valmassei in the stands, Lane overcame a 6-0 deficit in the first half to win 12-6.
While the team celebrated, passing around the regional championship plaque like the Stanley Cup, pass rusher Burke grabbed her bag and ran to the parking lot. The senior class president and track team co-captain had to study for two tests the next day.
Lane won its next two games of the tournament, besting Chicago’s Jones College Prep in a dramatic overtime victory to secure the sectional title and a second plaque.
But its run ended Oct. 18 with a quarterfinals loss to Rockford’s Guilford High School. Guilford would go on to finish second, losing to Palatine’s Fremd High School in the title game.
After the quarterfinal loss, several girls broke down in tears, consoled by their teammates and coaches. Schwartz wiped her eyes as she tried to comfort senior wide receiver Makayla Brown, who sat sobbing on the sideline bench.
Walking back to the locker room, Schwartz told me she didn’t know what she’d say to the team “because I didn’t think I would have to.” I asked what she wanted them to know.
“How amazing they are,” she replied. “How hard they worked. All the adversity they got through to get here is amazing. They should be proud of that.”
And what should readers of this piece know?
“How much we care. How much of everything we put in — time, effort, heart, literal tears — to play football.”
Some of the girls said they want to play flag football in college. Twenty-two colleges offered the sport in the 2023-24 season, according to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. In Illinois, Rockford University and Benedictine University plan to join that number this spring.
Earlier this year, Schwartz was named Benedictine’s head coach. She’s not leaving Lane or its team, though, and will juggle high school duties with collegiate coaching.
Before Lane’s Sept. 20 senior night game at home, Fabian, the linebacker and co-captain, told me she wants to study veterinary sciences next year, either at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign or at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Neither school currently has a flag football program, she said, “but I plan on starting something.”
