When you think about what changed from last year’s sports and this year, the main thing would be Pitman’s Girls Flag Football. It’s our newest fall sports and even though this is our first season ever, they’re ranked 9th in the state. Here is an inside look from the team and coaches.
What position are you?
Daniella : I’m third on center
What are your goals?
Daniella : Honestly, my goals for this season is just to have fun, get better at the game and hopefully take some dubs home.
What do you think the season will look like?
Ivy Butler : I think this seasons gonna go well because despite us being a really young team and inexperienced we work well and we work good together and we have a lot of team chemistry and we’ve only been getting better. We’ve already played a few games and I feel like we’re only going to go up from here.
What position are you?
Ivy Butler : I play wide receiver and corner
What are your goals for the season?
Ivy Butler : My goal for this season is to work hard every game, but I really want to beat Turlock High, that’s like my main goal. I wanna beat Turlock really badly, but I would like to beat every team and have a winning record.
What is your biggest fear when playing girls flag football?
Ashli : Probably like making a mistake and the other girl gets the ball or someone picking off the ball.
What’s your pet peeve?
Ashli : Not having good sportsmanship
What is something you enjoy about girls flag football?
Ashli : Just playing with my friends and also the experience because it’s new.
Next, I interviewed all three coaches.
What are some things you’d like to see this year?
Steve : We wanna win. We want to see growth and development from all three levels. W we don’t want to see the same mistakes in week one that we see in week 10. and we want to see growth we want to see development
Matt : The same as Coach Alvaro, I think Flag Football is in the beginning stages of blowing up and being a national worldwide sporting event. Like I mentioned this before, it’s going to be on the Olympic Card in 2028, so I just think it’s going to create more opportunities for female athletes. I think that it’s popularity is gonna keep getting bigger and better.
Adam : I wanna see our team keep getting better. I believe they have the potential to do really well and we still have a lot of room for growth. I think when these things start to count in the post-season we’ll be ready to go.
Why should girls join flag football?
Matt : I think female athletes should join flag football if they like team sports and they like working with others. Flag football is a great game in terms of developing athleticism, it’s very exciting and if you’re someone who wants to join a team sport and work on that short-area quickness and agility and ability to catch and throw, flag football would be good for you. compare and work on that short area equipment
What motivates you to be a better coach?
Adam: I just really like to see the kids grow into good people and I think the better mentorship they have the better people they become, you know. You get attached, build relationships and you know we really care about the girls and it’s important that we do the best we can so they have every opportunity possible.
Matt : I just wanna be better for our kids, we really take pride and feel blessed to have these opportunities to be mentors and coaches, we take pride in that. So mentoring and you know, being a person of value and good character we can give some of that or model it to our students on our sport teams or classes, it motivates me.
Steve : A Lot of the same of what the others said, my biggest fear is to be out-coached by the person on the other side of the field and that’s just me being complacent and not putting in my best effort as a coach for the players or the boys that I’m coaching so just being motivated to make sure that I never put in in partial effort and that I show what full effort looks like on and off the fields.
What is the future for Pitman girls flag football?
Matt : It’s very promising, we have just seven seniors on our team this year who are very young. From a grade level standpoint we’ve got a lot of underclassmen kind of stepping up this year and having large roles. So we’re really built and designed for the future, I think the next couple of seasons will be really exciting for us, especially once we have more experience and games under our belt.
Steve: This is the first year we are ever doing this and for us to always be showing improvement week by week, like we have been already. Like how coach was saying we don’t have a lot of upperclassmen we have a lot of freshmen and sophomores they’re only going to learn the game and get better by week and so yeah Pitman flag football is on the up and up
Adam : Our future is super bright. We have tons of kids who are excited about it and they’re high quality character kids so as we’re getting better at this rate it’s going to be a really special 3 years.
SHOUTOUT!!
Matt : Varsity defense, they have been amazing through the first five games of the Season they’re just doing really really well!
As we can tell from their responses, the future is crazy bright for Pitman Girls Flag football. Even without as much experience as other schools, they are still working just as hard and long. Make sure to come and support their games!