05/19/2025
Last spring, a trio of flag football players from Staten Island led by Samantha Toscano, then a SUNY Cortland sophomore, created the university’s first-ever women’s flag football club team.
Though growing in popularity in high schools and college intermurals, traveling club teams in the sport are still a relative rarity, so campus recreational sports staff expected organizers would face similar challenges to those of other fledgling clubs during its first year.
They didn’t expect the team to raise $8,000 for uniforms and travel, recruit a more-than-healthy roster of 27 players, and take second place in their league’s championship tournament after beating the top-seeded team.
“They were a lot more ambitious and a lot more active this year than I would have expected a first-year club to be,” said Matthew Nuesell ’01 M.S. ’08, assistant director for intramural sports and sport clubs. “It was clear from the beginning that Sam was motivated. But someone must take control and move the process forward, and that was Sam.”
Toscano, who in high school played for two Staten Island travel leagues, competing in places like Florida and Arizona with the Staten Island Giants and then The Home Team, began her SUNY Cortland career excited that the university offered intramural women’s flag football through Campus Recreation.
Flag football is a no-tackling version of the classic American game that follows NFL rules but substitutes a tugging off strip of material attached to a belt by Velcro for tackling the opponent carrying the ball.
“The only sport I’ve played on a team has been flag football,” said Toscano, now starting her senior year as an inclusive education major. “I tried other sports, but it never really resonated with me like flag football.”
During her first year at Cortland, Toscano played intramural flag football, but was disappointed by the level of play.
“Intramural was basically no practices and just one game a week,” Toscano said. “A lot of times we had to forfeit our games because the other team didn’t have enough players or goaltenders.”
She shared her thoughts classmates Julianna DiMarzio and Vanessa Rizzo, both friends and high school flag football players from Staten Island.
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we just start up a club?’” Toscano said. “It’s something we’d always played, and we wanted something like that at Cortland.”
By April 2024, Toscano had lured away the cream of Cortland’s intramurals program and received 50 replies to her club interest SnapChat ad. Last fall, the inaugural 2024-25 Cortland Women’s Flag Football club launched through Campus Recreation with more than two dozen players.
“I think there’s only eight out of 27 of us on the team who had played flag football before college,” Toscano said.
Toscano, the club’s president, and rising seniors DiMarzio, club vice president and a speech and hearing science major, and Rizzo, club secretary and a business economics major — spent the past year recruiting, organizing and building the team’s foundation. The club took held late-night practices in Lusk Field House and met to discuss game strategy.
They played their first string of games this spring. In April, just one year after the club was founded, Cortland’s team captured second place in the nine-member league championship tourney in Staten Island, having beaten the league’s top seeded varsity team, Villa Maria College in Buffalo, N.Y., in the semifinals. Cortland had been seeded fourth in the Staten Island Shootout Tournament of the new National Collegiate Flag Football League — part of the NIRSA, which stands for the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association — with a 2-4 overall record earned at the mid-March Battle in Buffalo, N.Y.
In the league’s first-ever NCFFL Championships, Cortland ultimately lost to College of Staten Island’s club team. The game is chronicled in a Long Island Advance article.
Despite defeat, the Red Dragons returned home ecstatic.
“I’m proud of our team, because that whole team that we played against, they have all been playing flag football probably since they were eight years old,” Toscano said of the competitors from her hometown, including coaches she had known personally. “They were a team of experienced girls with experienced coaches. We’ve just started.”
This season, Cortland’s scoring standouts were rising junior sport management major “Maddie” Madeline Ryan of Long Island, Cheyenne Chamberland ’25, a childhood/early childhood education major from Buffalo, N.Y., who just graduated, and Toscano. Rising sophomore and graphic design major Emma Romach of Buffalo, N.Y., started as a first-year student, bringing defense savvy to the field and making at least five interceptions in each tournament.
Last fall, fate introduced Toscano to two of the team’s three coaches, Cortland varsity football team’s coaching student interns Brandon Munk, a senior sport management major from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Robert Harberger, a senior sport management major from Rochester, N.Y.
“I met them one day when I was playing flag football in the quad outside of Hayes Hall,” Toscano said. “They’ve all played football growing up.”
This semester, Harrison Sussman, a junior coaching major from Scotch Plains, N.J., another undergraduate coaching intern with varsity men’s football, joined forces. The three men together share expertise in defense, offense, quarterbacks and special teams coaching.
“They do so much for this team, especially this semester,” Toscano said. “They work with me to plan everything out, they help with practice, they help plan games.”
Women’s flag football is all about strategy.
“One big thing that’s different from men’s football is women don’t always have that physical advantage that men do,” Toscano said. “They must have the thinking pattern behind what they need to do.”
The fledgling club quickly raised $8,000 on Snap Raise among friends, family and former high school flag football teammates to buy uniforms and travel to games this spring. Campus Recreation kicked in $1,000 for 2024-25 and the club is now eligible for funding in 2025-26.
The NCAA recommends flag football for its Emerging Sports for Women program and New York state is one of 15 in the nation that have sanctioned flag football as a high school varsity sport.
Next month, the New York State Public High School Athletic Association Championship for Girls Flag Football is being hosted by Cortland and Homer high schools.
“It’s not going to be hard for them to figure out that our college has a flag football team,” Nuesell said.
“As those opportunities are available in more high schools, those students will continue to look for opportunities in flag football. Right now, Cortland is one of the few sport clubs that exist for flag football in New York.”
Cortland’s flag football club shows strong potential for next year, with the key officers in place as seniors and most members able to return as sophomores and juniors.
“I’m hoping we can eventually become a varsity team,” Toscano said. “I think we can.”
Visit Instagram at @cortlandwff to keep up with Cortland women’s flag football.