The Utah Girls Tackle Football League (GFL) is the first all-girls youth American football league in the world, founded as a nonprofit in March 2015. The league is currently in its season. The GFL consists of three age divisions: elementary (grades three–six), junior high (grades seven–nine), and a high school division (grades ten–twelve). There are over 600 players spread across 32 teams; 35% of them are minorities. Everyone in the league apart from the match officials is a volunteer.
History
Creation as a nonprofit
In 2014, two years after Sam Gordon's football highlight video went viral, she posed a question at a school assembly she attended, asking which girls would be interested in playing tackle football and reportedly "dozens of hands went up." This interest caused Gordon and her father, an attorney, to look into starting a league of their own. They contacted a former offensive lineman for the Utah Jynx Women's Football team, Crystal Sacco, who was already making steps to start an all-girls youth league in the area. They also called USA Football Director of Football Development Samantha Rapoport for help. Sacco would go on to become the commissioner of the league and Rapoport would become a member of the board of directors.
In early 2015, with the assistance of a few local professional women's football players, Gordon and her father founded the GFL as a non-profit. It is the first known full-contact all-girls youth tackle football league ever. According to the organizers, the league filled up completely just three days after sign-ups began. Around 50 fifth and sixth-graders took part in the inaugural season, which was just four-weeks, compared to the current nine-week season.
Media coverage
The GFL gained national acclaim when it started in 2015, and has seen nationwide news coverage. The league has received both praise and criticism. While most news organizations initially simply reported on it being the first of its kind, some media companies have taken a specific stance on the league. ESPN, for example, aired a segment in which the safety of the league was called into question. In the segment, they brought on a medical doctor who said that there is heightened risk of concussions for children and perhaps even further risk for girls. Others, however, have pushed praise onto the league, encouraging their audience to sign up.
In 2020, two teams from the GFL played an exhibition match as the NFL Pro Bowl half time show. The teams had players representing seventeen different Utah high schools.
A documentary short about the league titled First Down was released in 2022 at multiple film festivals across the U.S and received a favorable review in the Washington Post.
Lawsuit to create public school-affiliated all-girls tackle football teams
In June 2017 Sam Gordon and her father, alongside five other GFL players (and their parents), filed a class action lawsuit against three local school districts to force public high schools to offer girls’ football in the Salt Lake Valley. Gordon spoke about the difficulties that girls who want to play tackle football face, saying that when she played with boys "I had a target on my back, and it was in the shape of a ponytail." As the only girl in the Ute conference youth tackle football league, she heard parents from opposing teams urge their kids to “beat the girl.”
The lawsuit used Title IX as justification and received national coverage. The two-week trial featured testimony from girls who played and suffered a range of experiences, including assault and exclusion. Gordon and the plaintiffs claimed girls were not offered equal opportunities in the districts’ football teams, and should be offered separate football teams. As the girls were from the Granite, Jordan and Canyons school district, those were the districts that were named as the defendants (in addition to the Utah Attorney General's Office).
In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Howard Nielson ruled in favor of the defendants. The judge stated that Utah school districts are not required to create a separate sport for girls interested in playing football, as girls who want to play can play on the existing boys teams. Nielson went on to say that “The mere fact that Defendants do not provide separate football teams for boys and girls is not discrimination on the basis of sex. To the contrary, it is undisputed that girls are permitted to play football and do in fact play, albeit in extremely limited numbers." The Federal ruling judged that constitutional and Title IX rights were not violated by the defendants.