AD Scott Wetherbee dishes on impetus behind EMU adding women’s flag football
The Eagles will begin playing women's flag football in spring 2027, the first school in Michigan to sponsor the sport at the varsity level.
Ypsilanti — From Scott Wetherbee’s vantage, adding women’s flag football as a new spring sport for Eastern Michigan was close to a no brainer.
And amidst the who, what, where, when and why of it all, Wetherbee is clear-eyed about the final point: Why the Eagles are adopting this sport, with the inaugural season set for spring of 2027.
“All of all of the conversations have been about growth initiatives with campus, right?” Wetherbee said. “And trying to help enrollment. And help with just this overall student experience.”
Eastern Michigan announced last week that the athletic program will add women’s flag football, which the NCAA doesn’t currently hold championships for, but recently tabbed as part of the Emerging Sports for Women program. Women’s flag football comes with a low cost and material threshold to get off the ground, and it’s something that Wetherbee wants to use as a platform to try and grow the university via athletics. Eastern Michigan is the first program in the state of Michigan to sponsor women’s flag football on the varsity level.
Speaking about the program with Mitten Football at Eastern Michigan’s spring game, Wetherbee offered a hopeful vision for what the women’s flag football program, which will begin games next spring, could look like. Even at Rynearson Stadium.
“And it would be kind of neat to have all the teams here watching our spring football game, and then maybe, at the end, when they're all done, the team can do autographs while our women's team plays a team, and we actually have a game right here,” Wetherbee said. “Because I would anticipate, we'd probably play on our soccer field, just from an intimacy and crowd. But we could always draw up a field here and play, and I think our fans would really enjoy it.”
By filling the flag football rosters with athletes who are getting scholarships in the form of academic aid they’d otherwise get, something Wetherbee said is the plan, they can keep costs down for flag football by not delving into athletic scholarships.
The annual budget for the women’s flag football program would be somewhere around what EMU spends on its tennis or golf programs, Wetherbee said. Eastern Michigan spent 595,058 on women’s tennis during Fiscal Year 2025. The Eagles spent $876,046 on women’s golf that same fiscal year, and $1,032,975 on men’s golf.
“There may be some opportunities if you live on campus to get some other aid, again, to try to drive having a good student experience on campus as well,” Wetherbee said. “And then from a budget standpoint, obviously you need a head coach. We're gonna try to manage where we don't add another staff member for strength and conditioning, a trainer. So that is spreading us out a little bit. I think if we ever decided to add another sport, in the same realm, then we probably would have to add each one of those. Just because of safety reasons and everything else.”
At Eastern Michigan, Wetherbee views women's flag football as a distinct opportunity to help grow the university through athletics.
Over the last decade, Eastern Michigan has seen a steep drop in its general enrollment, dropping below 20,000 and now sitting around 12,000 for the current academic year.
There is also a belief that being an early adopter of women’s flag football at the NCAA level can give Eastern Michigan a competitive edge.
“To kind of be out in front, so then now we can get some of the better student athletes and people excited about it before other schools adopt it, and you can kind of plant the flag early,” Wetherbee said. “And I've also learned through this process that last year, there were 41 high schools in the state of Michigan that had flag football, and this year there's 82. And next year, they're projecting 130 plus. All as a partnership with the Detroit Lions, is the initiative with Michigan High School Athletic Association. So I've learned those stats from the Lions and talking to them. And that just kind of showed me how much growth is going on. And it's continuing.”
Andrew Graham
Women's sports in general have been major growth areas across the NCAA, with softball, volleyball and women's basketball all growing in popularity rapidly in recent years.
The pressing task for Wetherbee and the EMU brass is hiring a head coach. In the first 24 hours after announcing the new team, Wetherbee had multiple people reaching out with interest in being the head coach.
The Eagles were probably ready to announce this program earlier, but Wetherbee held off with the presidential transition at EMU.
“I think we actually were probably ready to pull the trigger in the fall and then knowing that we were going to announce a president in December, it felt like we should wait,” Wetherbee said.
Wetherbee isn’t dead set on hiring a coach who comes from a specific background, and could imagine someone coming in with the vision to have a club and varsity team. The club level is where most college flag football is played, and EMU will play against club teams to start, Wetherbee said.
Having two teams would mean EMU could have a total of around 40 athletes competing in flag football at some level, with the club potentially serving as a pipeline to varsity.
Collegiate flag football is currently 7-on-7, with games played on an 80-by-40 yard field, about the equivalent of playing from inside the painted numbers and to the 10s on a standard football field. Games are broken up into four, 12-minute quarters.
And because flag football doesn’t have the physical toll of tackle, they play weekend jamborees, with several teams gathering in one location.
“You do a jamboree and you bring a bunch of teams to one place and you're together and then you find another central location and you do that again,” Wetherbee said. “And so there's travel, you lower the travel cost and recruiting is a little bit easier.”
There has been interest from other MAC athletic programs in flag football as Eastern Michigan has explored it, Wetherbee said, but nothing more than preliminary interest in exploring the sport.
He is hopeful, though, that more MAC schools follow suit, and eventually get a championship sponsored at the league level. There are already enough teams sponsored at the NCAA level to get championship status, but women’s flag football has not garnered that yet.
