Junior Flag Football teams take home the Title

By: Albert Dadson

Winning the Flag Football competition at Rowan is a tough task. Teams were able to pull it together for a tough playoff stretch and were able to bask in the glory of bringing home the championship.

In the Co-Rec league it was Back that Pass Up that brought home the championship, in the Fraternity league it was FIJI that won, the Men’s Competitive League saw Lit Squad bring it home while in the Men’s Rec League it was Mean Machine that did it. Finally in the Sorority League it was Running through the 6 that took the crown.

Girls that play with boys are said to be to macho. They also say that they should go home and do their nails and wear makeup. The girls on Back That Pass Up did not get that message.

Nicole Bashford, a junior, is the captain of the team and she did not get caught up in the hype about playing with the boys.

“I wouldn’t really say playing with the boys was challenging because most of the girls on our team are athletes so they are just used to it. They want to play and have fun so the boys are more of a challenge and it made us get into it,” said Bashford.

Bashford and her team were very competitive. They would look forward to their games and try and put the best display on the field that they could every night they went out there. They beat teams with good sportsmanship and played with honor.

“Our team is very competitive. When games would get cancelled we would get disappointed. If we were losing or not doing well we would get mad at ourselves for it. We competed to win but at the same time we had fun with it,” she said.

The team did an amazing job all-around because they would mercy rule teams in the first half so they swept the competition but she can recall a time in the final game where things got tough for them.

“We would always mercy the teams in the first half but in the final game the first half was scoreless and we were so angry because we couldn’t put a play together, we couldn’t pass the ball, we couldn’t do anything but in the second half we ended up winning by way of the mercy rule so we really bounced back,” she said.

The Men’s Competitive league is where the best football players play. Usually they have the best football experience and they probably played high school football and college football.

Justin Glover, a junior, was the captain for Lit Squad, the team that won the competition, and he tells about rough battles in the games that they played.

“There were a lot of really good teams especially coming down the stretch. The first three games were decided by a total of three points combined. In the championship game we took care of business though,” said Glover.

Glover thought the team came out “weak” the first game that resulted in a loss but he thinks they really pulled it together during the season.

“We weren’t really intense at first which resulted in us losing our first game but pretty much after that we were intense. Every other game was an intense game and very competitive. We had very good players it’s just that we weren’t accustomed to the rules of flag football that well so we were playing as if it was real football and it wasn’t. We got over like 10-15 penalties but after that we never lost again.

In the Men’s Rec League it was Mean Machine that brought home the crown and Raymond DePiano, a junior, was the Co-Captain. DePiano had a team that he lost to last year and it was the driving force to get him to sign up this year. The team was called Los Papis and the taste of defeat was so much for him to bear that they had to sign up again and they beat them and won the championship.

“We played last year and we got to the playoffs and we got knocked out in the second round to a team called Los Papis. We knew that we were definitely going to see them again next year,” said DePiano. We were having fun with everything at the same time. So this year we made it to the playoffs and beat the first team and we knew it was Los Papis in the next game so we definitely had that circled up and we knew that this was our revenge game. We ended up beating them 38-12 so that was pretty exciting. The competition was pretty even. There was no team that was insanely good or pretty bad,”

The team had a championship mentality. They picked each other up instead of putting each other down. Nobody was above the team and while they did what they had to do they had fun with it.

“We always mess with each other,” said DePiano. “There was not one point in time where somebody made a dropped pass or if somebody made a penalty we would get on them and be like come on you can’t do that. I personally dropped passes before and I laughed at myself and everyone will laugh at me too. We always had fun. There was not a point where we got mad at each other or we took it too seriously.”

Finally for the Rowan University Sorority Flag Football league it was Running Through the 6 that took home the championship.  Amanda Brown, a junior, was the captain of the team.

When you’re a track team and you’re playing in the sorority league you can get a lot of people giving you flack about why you signed up but the team stuck to their guns and came out on top of everybody.

“Everybody was pretty nice. They probably talked about it but not in front of us but we got a lot flack because people were like “oh well your athletes you shouldn’t be able to do football or intramurals.” But we don’t play football and all we do is run so that’s pretty much it. It felt really good to win and have a pretty high sportsmanship rating. We never got really down on ourselves and were nice to everybody even with the stuff we were faced with,” said Brown.