For the second straight year, Tualatin is fielding a girls flag football team, and for the second straight year, the girls have taken to the sport and are putting together a dominant regular season.
As of our press deadline, the Timberwolves are 7-2, and six of those wins were shutouts, including a 39-0, 60-0, and 41-0 victory.
“Our team chemistry is really good because it is our second year and we returned mostly everybody,” said Ries Miadich, the team’s senior quarterback. “Being such a new sport, all the girls coming back really helps because we just know our stuff. We’re progressing very well as a team.”
Coach Bubba Lemon agreed. He said last year he had to start with a kind of baseline for the sport to help the girls build up knowledge of the game. Even though they had experience watching football, he said he wanted to treat it like any other football team, which meant building up the language of the game and the strategy.
“It’s been a little bit easier because we can pick up where we left off,” Lemon said. “We did change a lot of stuff. There’s some new onboarding with some new kids, but it’s going well. The hard part is we have a bunch of girls from the basketball team, and they had a deep playoff run. As the season goes on, we can finally start dialing in a bit more.”
Lemon himself has been able to throw himself into the season more as it has gone on. He’s also the head coach for the boys basketball team at Tualatin, leading the Timberwolves to the state title this year.
He also said he’s excited to see how the sport continues to evolve in the state. Girls flag football was first listed as an emerging activity in Oregon in 2024, with 32 teams, according to the Oregon Sports Activities Association. That number has grown to 47 schools in 2025, and is up to 58 this year, well beyond the 50-school threshold needed to sanction a vote on making it an official sport.
Sophomore Sydney Murdick is in her second year on the team, and said it was fun to see how her younger sisters reacted to her playing last year.
“One of my sisters played flag football last year after I did, which was really cool,” Murdick said. “She saw me on the field and wanted to do the same thing, and that just inspired me to keep playing.”
Hannah Wachter is a sophomore and also in her second year on the team. She said she originally tried out for the team because she watched football with her dad growing up, and had some friends also interested, so they thought it would be fun to try together.
“I just really enjoyed the game, and I had a lot of fun with this team,” she said. “We were all coming back, so I was really excited to come back and play again.”
