Special - Anthony Stalcup
Hillgrove’s flag football team, above, advanced to the state championship game in the first year of its program. Below: Lauren Render, Coco Carleton
and the Lady Hawks were featured as part of the Super Bowl pregame show on CBS. Bottom: Jasmine Blackburn scores in the title game.
By Anna Snyder and Gabriel Kahaian
MDJ Sports Writers
In early February, the nation’s largest television audience
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of the year began to settle in to watch Super Bowl
LV between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers.
What 96 million viewers got to see during the preview
show on CBS was a taste of what thousands of girls across
the state of Georgia already knew. Flag football was an exciting
new option as a high school sport, and it was more
popular than most people would have ever expected.
To deliver the message, the network showed highlights of
Hillgrove’s first-year program playing in the state championship
game against West Forsyth at Georgia State’s Center
Parc Stadium.
The 2 1/2 minute feature was used to help convey the message
that young women have a place in the game of football
and highlighted the fact Sarah Thomas was going to be the
first woman to officiate a Super Bowl, and by the end of the
game, the first two female assistant coaches — Tampa Bay’s
assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar
and assistant defensive line coach Lori Locust — would be
the first women in NFL history to earn Super Bowl rings.
What it also showed was the overwhelming success of
the first year of flag football in Georgia as a sanctioned
high school sport and the quieting of skeptics who may
have thought the game would not catch on. It also proved
to inspire girls of all ages to participate.
“I think a lot of female high school athletes always wanted
to play football,” Daniel Pickney, Hillgrove coach, said. “And
usually, traditionally it was always in the form of powder
puff or something like that, but then the opportunity got
See FLAG, Page 134