It’s fourth-and-5, with the game on the line for the Pirates, and the blitz is coming.
“They sendin’ the house!” a teammate warns from the sidelines, getting in a little trash talk while he’s at it. “It’s more like an apartment, but …”
The Pirates’ quarterback can run — he’s already scampered for a touchdown in the first quarter — so the defense has to be careful about overpursuing him.
The ball is snapped, the QB steps up in the pocket as a wideout surges off the line and slices through the middle of the field on a slant route, catching a heater in stride for a first down.
It’s a typically physical football play, with some hard blocking on the line of scrimmage and hand-checking between receiver and cornerback.
It doesn’t end typically, though: Instead of being tackled, the pass catcher is stopped by a defender tugging on a strip of fabric worn around his waist.
This is full-contact, eight-man flag football, and it’s having a moment on a recent Sunday at the All American Park, where the second week of Vegas Flag League’s fall season has gotten underway, 40 teams competing for the league title.
“Flag football is just exploding,” says Vegas Flag owner TJ Love, who founded the league two decades ago. “It’s exploding so fast.”
With more than 20 million players globally and more than 4 million youth players in the U.S. — a 50 percent increase since 2020, according to the NFL — flag football is among the world’s fastest-growing sports.
Major colleges such as the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas-Arlington have made it a varsity sport and now offer scholarships.
In July, the NFL Flag Championships youth tournament in Indianapolis drew more than 350 girls and boys teams from across the country — including three from Vegas, all coached by Love — with games televised on ESPN, ABC and Disney.
In December, NFL owners voted to approve the development of a professional flag football league with an initial investment up to $32 million.
All of this is leading up to 2028, when flag football officially becomes an Olympic sport.
Locally, it has become so popular that Love capped the adult league at its current size because with another 100 teams competing in the Vegas NFL Flag youth league, which he also runs, there simply aren’t enough fields to go around at All American Park.
The competition at the west valley athletic complex has grown increasingly fierce. On Sunday, the Pirates battle the Balla Boys, a highly athletic squad with some absolute burners at wideout.
“On that team, there’s guys that have played high-level football, guys that played (Division I) in college, sniffed NFL practice squads,” says Dustin Wilder, a 12-year veteran of the league who plays wide receiver and cornerback for the Pirates.
“It’s very competitive,” he continues. “I mean, there’s three refs for every game. There’s standings and playoffs. Everybody takes it seriously. Everybody’s there to win.”
‘It’s grown drastically’
Love stands on the sideline and watches a quarterback slip out of a defender’s grasp.
“There’s some skill to flag football that is unlike real football,” he observes. “When it looked like he was dead to rights there, he was able to just twist his hips, because when they’re going for that flag and you move your hip a little bit, they can make you miss — and you’re gone.”
Football is in Love’s blood: His father, Jay, founded the city’s first Pop Warner team in the late 1950s.
Love was more interested in golf growing up: He was a state champion at Clark High School, played at UNLV and then golfed professionally from 1993 to 1999. Afterward, he founded Las Vegas Sports Magazine, with the city of Las Vegas among his main advertisers.
In 2007, when the economy was crashing, he was informed over lunch one day that the city couldn’t afford to buy ads anymore.
“They were telling me about all the money that they were losing and that they were shutting all their sports programs down,” Love recalls. “I knew about the flag football league a little bit, had friends that played in it. I thought it was a great sport, knowing there’s growth potential there. I was like, ‘Can I privatize that?’ They said, ‘Sure, pay us for the fields.’ By the end of that lunch, I took over a flag football league.”
Love was right about the sport’s growth potential.
“There were only a few teams when I took over,” he says. “By 2010, I was operating the largest adult flag football league in the country.”
A number of the players were parents who encouraged Love to start a youth league, and a little over a decade ago, he partnered with the NFL to found Vegas NFL Flag, which now fields 130 teams with 1,500 kids in the program.
“It started small,” Love says, “And just became big.”
So has adult flag football.
“It’s grown drastically,” notes Wilder, a former Marine and current vice president of business development at Camden Tradeshow & Event Furnishings. “A lot of people kind of poo-poo flag football. They think it’s two-hand touch, like a vanilla version of football. But how TJ has it set up, it’s the closest thing to playing regulation football that you can get.
“There’s blocking; you’ll see three-man lines — offensive and defensive — and they’re full contact,” he continues. “It’s real football.”
A full-contact release
It’s the third game of the morning, the High Rollers versus Vegas Strong, and the “Lonmower” is getting loose.
The young QB — better known as Lon Halverson off the gridiron — whips a short screen pass to Kyesean Pitts, a shifty wide receiver with liquid hips and blazing speed who manages to get 5 yards before a beefy defender stonewalls him to the turf — hard.
“People hear ‘contact’ and they assume it’s just light blocking,” Halverson says. “No, there’s people that are definitely blocked pretty aggressively.
“I think the majority of us understand that we’re not out here to kill anyone,” he continues. “We’re just trying to have some fun, but also tie in those elements of traditional, 11-man football, because what makes football so great is the physicality.”
A former lacrosse player at UNLV, Halverson joined the league two years ago after playing flag football when he was a boy.
“Most people probably start out playing flag, and then whenever their parents deem that they’re at a safe age to play tackle, they go into tackle,” he says. “But then coaches get involved and the competitive nature kind of gets in the way, sort of deteriorates some of that fun that you may have had when you were a kid. I think this just brings it back, in a way.”
The league is a mix of relative newcomers like Halverson and vets like Wilder, who’s been on the same team since he started over a decade ago.
There’s a wide range of ages and skill levels here, from 18-year-olds just out of high school to one player, affectionately nicknamed “Pops,” who’s pushing 70.
Some teams are based on occupation: The members of Vegas Strong are all police officers; the Pool Party squad comprises dayclub and nightclub staffers.
There are three tiers of competition: entry-level rec teams, intermediate competitive squads and the premier elite division. Everyone plays each other during the regular season, but the playoffs are divided by skill level.
Each Sunday, the elite teams take the field first, followed by the less experienced outfits as the day progresses.
For a seasoned player like Wilder, game day often starts early with the Pirates. Now in his 40s, he still relishes the competition.
“Once you start having kids and life happens, you deal with the weekly grind of your day job, and a lot of people just don’t have that release to let off steam,” he says. “For me and my group of guys — a lot of the teams— the love is there because everyone values that, being able to play and just get that release and camaraderie.
“Everyone works; no one’s going pro,” he continues. “But to be able to get out there and compete, hang with the boys, that’s what it’s all about.”
After their game, Wilder and a number of his teammates stick around and chill, drink beers, listen to music, scout future opponents.
Love bounces around constantly, taking it all in, knowing that his busy days are likely to get even busier before long.
“I’m afraid of what’s going to happen after 2028 — flag football’s just going to explode even more,” he says. “Once everyone sees it on TV in the Olympics, every field will have flag football going. I’m not going to have enough football fields in this town.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.