College flag football’s best QB is from, you guessed it, metro Atlanta
Before every Warner University flag football game, Kathryn Hutchinson’s coach pulls her aside as he does with all his offensive core players.
The ritual that Tim Mimbs shares with Hutchinson, a junior from River Ridge High in Cherokee County, is to ask her who the best quarterback is in the country.
At first, Hutchinson needed prodding from Mimbs.
“I’m like, ‘It’s you,’” Mimbs told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “‘It’s you.’ Now she’ll give me this smile and go, ‘It’s me.’”
Hutchinson is no braggart, but she has put together a season that would seem to make her quarterbacking supremacy an inescapable truth. In an absolutely bonkers season, Hutchinson has destroyed the NAIA record books for this nascent sport, led the central Florida school to the precipice of a de facto national championship and has become, by all appearances, the best quarterback in the country.
“It is kind of crazy,” Hutchinson said of her standing in her field. “I stay humble. I don’t act like it, say it. I just kind of keep doing my thing, keep winning games.”
An elite college football player from metro Atlanta?
Who could have guessed?
In her first season fully entrenched as Warner’s quarterback, Hutchinson has smashed NAIA single-season records for touchdown passes, completions and passing yards and is on track to break the marks for passing yards per game and passer efficiency rating.
The most arresting number might be that before this season the NAIA’s single-season record for touchdown passes was 95, a total that required 23 games to amass. Hutchinson surpassed that mark by the Royals’ 12th game.
Going into the inaugural NAIA Women’s Flag Football Invitational that begins Thursday in Bradenton, Florida, she has piled up 152 touchdown passes in 20 games. That is 65 ahead of second place. She has thrown a mere 10 interceptions.
“She’s lighting it up and she’s doing great,” Mimbs said.
Ranked No. 1 with a 20-0 record, Warner leads NAIA in both scoring offense (58.1 points per game) and scoring defense (4.0).
“I’m just very proud of myself and proud of the team and what we’ve been able to do,” Hutchinson said. “We’ve been working so hard the past couple of years, and now we finally have a year where we can really show ourselves and prove ourselves to everybody.”
It starts with Hutchinson, the trigger for a passing scheme that has roots in the Air Raid system of the late Mike Leach, according to Mimbs. She doesn’t have the biggest arm and isn’t the fastest runner, but Hutchinson is accurate and poised and processes quickly.
“She reads defenses and understands what we’re trying to accomplish against defenses better than anybody currently in the country,” Mimbs said. “There’s nobody reading defenses like she is.”
A thrilling new world has opened up to girls and young women like Hutchinson, who grew up playing soccer and basketball but also loved to throw the football with her dad and with the boys at recess.
“I’ve always kind of loved football and I’ve always wanted to play football, but I kind of just never had the opportunity to,” she said. “So, once it became a sport in high school, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. I have to do that.’”
She rides the crest of a sport that seems to grow on a daily basis.
The GHSA sanctioned flag football for girls in 2020 (Hutchinson’s sophomore year) and has grown from fewer than 100 teams that season (COVID depressed participation) to more than 300 this past fall.
The sport is mushrooming at the college level, too. The NAIA designated women’s flag football as an emerging sport in 2021, getting a head start on the NCAA and becoming the game’s most competitive collegiate level. Thirty-five NAIA schools fielded teams this season, up from 14 in 2022.
In January, the NCAA followed the NAIA in designating it as an emerging sport, with Nebraska becoming the first power conference school to officially add it, beginning in 2028. In March, Sports Business Journal reported the Big 12 was taking steps to sponsor the sport with at least six teams in 2028.
Men’s and women’s flag football will debut in the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, playing 5-on-5 as opposed to the 7-on-7 format used in high schools and colleges. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Hutchinson could represent the U.S. there.
While a bias toward his star would be understood, Mimbs said, “I wouldn’t pick any quarterback at any level of any current format in this country over her. And I know ’em all.”
A young woman who as a girl wished for a chance to play organized football is now playing the game on scholarship in college, made the NAIA’s inaugural All-America team (Ottawa University defensive back Jukanie Washington from Decatur High and Milligan University two-way player Parker Bridges from Loganville High were also honored) and aspires to play for the U.S. national team.
A dream that would have seemed to be beyond the stars a decade ago — to be the head flag football coach at Georgia — feels entirely possible.
There are more chapters to come in the career of Kathryn Hutchinson, flag football star quarterback, and that is marvelous.
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About the Author
Ken Sugiura is a sports columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Formerly the Georgia Tech beat reporter, Sugiura started at the AJC in 1998 and has covered a variety of beats, mostly within sports.
