With Mercy seniors Sam Baiden and Christian Aaron Manipis leading the way for the full reboot of the club, there are a few changes to what it used to be in the past. The Flag Football Club is now led by students who played flag football in the past, as the newly formed group had its first meeting on Nov. 20.

Moving forward, games will occur on Sundays weekly (unless said otherwise via email) and in their first meeting, Sam and Christian used that time to form teams and get players their shirts for upcoming games. They also played king of hill flag football style and assigned people to random teams to get to know everyone involved and just to get games going within the club itself.

Despite the delays and a late start to the season, there are still a few weeks left to play in Dobbs Ferry, weather and temperature permitting. While it could be moved to a different field in the near future, as of now, they still have the turf field reserved on Sundays.

Even though they are both seniors and won’t be back to run the club next Fall, Christian is optimistic about the group and said “Hopefully, the next students who take over this club can run it back next year and make it a proper intramural sport again.”

Flag football used to be a booming and competitive intramural league at Mercy when it was part of the Athletics department back before 2020. Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

“The end of my freshman year was the start of the pandemic and everything was shut down,” Christian said. He followed up by saying “My junior year last year, it was still heavily restricted for outdoor public events so we couldn’t make it happen but this year, everything is opening back up slowly so we went ahead and started the flag football club back up.”

When it was a part of Mercy Athletics and organized through MAV Recreation as an intramural sport back in 2018-2019, there were student refs and the club was funded by the college during its second and third seasons, as players were able to get new gear like jerseys, flags, and footballs for the games. Even some coaches help run it and the recreational sport was taken very seriously in Mercy with multiple established teams. However, its first season was founded by former Mercy students Smith Brickner and Derek Napolitano back in 2017. It started with the gear paid for out of pocket and with enough people interested, that got the ball rolling to get it popular enough to get the school to back it up the next two years.

Now Sam and Christian, both amped to get on the field, want to get the flag football started back up again, even if the conditions aren’t the same as before. Nobody had picked the club up during the pandemic, so both Sam and Christian wanted to organize it once most of the restrictions were lifted.

“Things are getting back on track slowly,” Christian said as the first outing for the club was a few days away. “We will see how this goes with games with the players that show up on Sundays and progress from there.”

Now running through Campus Life, it gives the club the flexibility it needs as well as gear funded to keep the intramural sport going for Mercy. Athletics will still determine the availability of the field but games on Sundays will be handled like public events to reserve the field week to week, just so they can make adjustments to the schedule when needed.

Both Christian and Sam have been promoting Mercy flag football on their personal Instagrams but one of the main ways they decided to share it is through a QR code announcement on the Dobbs Ferry campus, specifically on the monitors in the buildings (especially the monitor by the dining hall in the Main Hall). This code would send you to a Google Forms link to sign up for the flag football club by getting emails to then use to contact people who want to join.

When asked about how they came up with this method of promotion, Christian said, “We both have RA experience on campus and have dealt with QR codes, along with Google Forms for other on-campus events and programs so this wasn’t anything new to us.”

This was a cleaner way to market flag football coming back to Mercy as opposed to more conventional methods with flyers, as both Sam and Christian thought this was the quickest and most convenient way to get more people engaged to join and to organize via email if they were interested.

The flag football club is also in need of a photographer, so if anyone has experience in that field and is willing to take photos during the games for social media, contact them through this Google Form linked here: Mercy College Flag Football. Also, you can join to play flag football via this link as well.

Their main statement is that they wanted to “bring back a club, something to bring all of us together as one and also as a community,” and to “give students something to do, whether they are residents or commuters, as this should be a club anyone can join.”