Oxford athletics had been planning to welcome Girls Flag Football this year, but the district decided to cancel the sport at Oxford for this fall season. The previous school year, the CIF Southern Section had finalized plans to add flag football as a sanctioned sport to high schools sectionwide. Along with the rest of the AUHSD school district, Oxford had been expecting to create a team as well.
However, the district isn’t able to provide all the facilities and programs for every school within AUHSD. When a sport requires sizable funding, it takes much interest at a school site for the district to decide on supporting that expense. AUHSD Athletic Director Jeffery Russel estimated the approximate price for starting one team to be $3087.50. Besides spending constraints, the district’s vision prioritizes supporting all schools fairly. With Oxford supporting existing sports and programs, there is an indirect impact on funding flag football.
“Every campus can’t have every single program. That’s how we market ourselves at different schools within the district. Magnolia has Cyberpatriot. Kennedy has AI, but we don’t,” Principal Amber Houston said. “We try to spread it [funding] out throughout the district, so kids are able to choose and enrollment is spread out.”
Oxford also doesn’t have a regular football team, unlike most other schools in the district. As part of the district’s decision, they wanted to keep it equitable as opposed to having a girls flag football team while missing a boys football team.
In addition to spending and small interest, Oxford already has limited room for athletics, having a small campus and a small field. With existing high school sports plus junior high intramurals, accommodating an additional sport is stretching space thin for Oxford athletics.
Although it didn’t make the cutting block, flag football had generated enough interest for the district to make it a possibility. Oxford athletics director Mr. Clifton had sent a form to 8th-11th grade girls surveying interest for girls flag football last school year.
Twenty-four marked they’d be interested in participating, which was enough to consider fielding a team for the coming fall season then. Mr. Clifton listed he’d be content with fifteen committed athletes. They are among those disappointed in the sport’s cancellation.
“We were crying. We had a girls flag football group chat and we were all so disappointed,” senior Megan Tran said. “We were all so excited, getting our physicals done. We really thought it was going to happen.”
Next year, the district will revisit and reevaluate school programs as it always does. With CIF having just recently introduced flag football, the costs of supporting flag football for the first time, along with student-athletes’ interest, will be new things to review. Like any other missing sport, there is a small chance the district will introduce it, but as of now, there are no official plans to bring flag football to Oxford.
