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For much of her young life, Urbana High senior Keira Speikes has been at the forefront of the area’s burgeoning girls flag football scene.
She was, for a time, the only girl participating in Frederick County’s youth recreational flag football league, even before now-Hawks coach Nick Damoulakis gathered an all-girls squad in 2020. Speikes helped push the Urbana administration to lobby for starting a varsity girls flag football squad at the high school and has been a member of the Hawks’ inaugural two teams.
Now, Speikes is the area’s first Division I flag football recruit — and she’s staying local.
Speikes is the first commitment to Mount St. Mary’s new flag football team, which is slated to start play in spring 2026.
“I was very conflicted about if I wanted to play in college and having to give up going to another college that’s bigger or going to college with my friends,” Speikes said. “But once I talked to the Mount coach, and I talked to my family and friends about it, the more I wanted to play flag.”
It’s been her primary sport for the past nine years, so it would have been difficult for Speikes to completely abandon it.
She had considered playing flag as a club sport and was even recruited by NCAA Division III Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, but Speikes left her options open. She applied to Mount St. Mary’s in late October solely for academic reasons.
But a week later, the university announced it would become just the second NCAA Division I school to offer women’s flag football at the varsity level, following Alabama State. That completely changed her calculus.
“When they announced, that second, she wanted to make it a possibility,” said Corey Speikes, Keira’s father and Urbana flag football’s defensive coordinator.
So, Keira Speikes made it happen.
She expressed her…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/perfect-candidate-urbanas-speikes-heads-045900702.html
Author : The Frederick News-Post, Md.
Publish date : 2025-01-25 04:59:00
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