Park Hill junior Anna Anderson was one of the 17 girls across the country selected to be on the Team USA U17 Flag Football Team.
KANSAS CITY – Making a name for herself last fall with a successful onside kick in the Class 6 District 8 Football Championship, Park Hill junior Anna Anderson is one of 17 girls selected to the USA U17 National Women’s Flag Football team.
For the last seven years, Anderson has played some sort of football and is now going to play on a much larger stage. She started playing flag football in the fourth grade and transitioned to 11-man football in middle school.
“I only played flag football for awhile, then in seventh grade I started playing tackle (football) with the middle school team,” Anderson said on Sports Radio 810 WHB. “I kept playing tackle and just got back into flag (recently).”
Park Hill junior Anna Anderson runs onto the field ahead of a Trojan football game last fall.
In middle school, Anderson started out playing wide receiver and eventually made the position change to kicker in the eighth grade. That same season, she decided that she would continue playing in high school.
“When I started playing tackle (football), I had to teach myself how to kick because I was small, and all the other guys were so big. Once I started kicking, I was like, I’ve got to keep doing this, it’s really fun,” Anderson said.
Flag football isn’t a nationwide high school sanctioned sport as Colorado became only the 11th state to make that change on April 23. The Park Hill junior went to social media to get back into flag football.
“Flag football is pretty developed in Florida and Texas and places like that, but it’s not as common here. I looked on Instagram and found USA Football and there was this link for a combine, so I submitted that and I met some college coaches for flag football,” Anderson said.
The NAIA coaches had connections to USA Football, helping Anderson start the process of making the team. She was selected to the national team’s trials – which is essentially a tryout – where they cut 36 girls down to 18.
“I went out to North Carolina, which is where they had it, and tried out for about three or four days. I felt like I did pretty good so after I got home, they gave me a call that I made it,” Anderson said.
Flag football is different than tackle football, being right over 53 yards long and 30 yards wide and only five players on each team are on the field at once. There are also different rules, in addition to the defense grabbing the flags around the players’ wastes in lieu of tackling them.
“There’s usually a quarterback, two wide receivers, a running back and a center on offense and there’s usually two corners, a safety, a linebacker and a (pass) rusher on defense. If the (pass) rusher rushes the quarterback, they can’t run so they have to find a way to find someone open and the center can go out and run a route too,” Anderson said.
The 16-year-old is the only player on the U17 USA Team who is from the Midwest and was selected as a wide receiver and linebacker. She has training camp in late May in North Carolina, followed by Junior Internationals in July, located in Los Angeles.