On Friday night, with M&T Bank Stadium’s lights shining, Nick Damoulakis got to play catch with his daughter in the Ravens’ end zone.

It was a moment he never could have dreamed of, he said with wet eyes. When he and his daughter and the Urbana club flag team, along with the Oakdale club team, started to push for an official girls flag football program, he couldn’t have imagined that, in the second year of its existence, there would be 53 teams competing to participate in a playoff tournament held on the Ravens’ own turf.

“How many dads get to do that with their daughters?” Damoulakis said of getting to play with his daughter on an NFL field. “All these girls are [making history]. Those original 10 girls that played rec football during COVID when they were like, hey, there are no sports, so girls, eight of those 10 girls are out here playing. To go from my backyard playing rec to this? You can imagine what I’m feeling.”

After Frederick County, with help from the Ravens, became the first school system to recognize it as a varsity sport, other counties around the state took interest. In 2023, there were 10 teams, all from Frederick, competing for the first Maryland high school girls flag football title. In 2024, there were eight teams participating in the playoffs, but they came from a pool of over 50 schools. Four school systems were represented: Frederick County, Baltimore, Montgomery County and Washington County.

After the inaugural championship took place at Under Armour Stadium, this year’s playoff teams had the privilege of playing on the Ravens’ field. With fans in the stands and high school and NFL cheerleaders looking on, seven games, from quarterfinals to the championship, were played.

Urbana, the runner-up from last year, lost in the semifinals. Clarksburg High School took home the title.

But Damoulakis and his team have a title no one can take away. His players will always be able to say they started girls flag football in Maryland. And, in a nation without a popular professional women’s flag football league, that team, and all its competition throughout Frederick County, will be the role models for young girls who love football.

“They are the ones that people look up to,” Damoulakis said. “They are the trailblazers.”

But there’s still more work to be done. On a larger scale, last year’s athletes said they’d like for the sport to become popular enough that girls could pursue college careers in it. At home, Damoulakis and the others are working to get the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to sanction the sport — “as it should be,” Damoulakis said.