1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - Troy Hassebrook & Mandy Brandt, Girls United Flag Football (part 2) : March 6th, 12:25pm

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Troy Hassebrook & Mandy Brandt, Girls United Flag Football (part 2) Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's time to go one-on-one with D.P. Coming at you live from the heart of Lincoln America, a 93-7-the-ticket and the Ticketfm.com. Sponsored by the Downtown Lincoln Foundation. Here is your host, Derek Pearson. Congratulations. You've made it to your weekend. It's Friday. We're right there. If you're knocking on the door at work, don't worry. It won't be too much longer.

And we'll have some entertainment for you here on the ticket as you go along. 1.30. We'll have our next game in the girls state basketball tournament. It will be Lincoln North Star in Millard West and then Carney in Omaha North at 315. Norris and Gretton East at 6th. And then stay tuned for Bennington in Pious this evening at 745. What a time to be alive. What a great day it is for state tournament action as teams are punching their ticket to the championship games this weekend. Once again, any game at Pinnacle Bank will be called here on 93-7 the tickets. So stay tuned this weekend as well. Derek Pearson is out of town for today.

D.P. Travel day for him. And I'm Jake Bockovin in studio for him on today's episode of one-on-one with TP. And with me in studio, Troy Hasbrook and Mandy Brant, both former Huskers themselves. But now with Girls United, we just talked all about how girls flag football is blossoming here in the state of Nebraska. and nationwide, and let's just jump back into that conversation as we get going here. I know a big obstacle for all of this. It's kind of exciting, especially you see the University of Nebraska. We mentioned the first segment hiring Liz and Katie Sowers to come and help coach their new

flag football team that's going to get started here in the next couple of years. But, you know, where do you recruit from? Where does how this come from? And I know that that's a big obstacle still for girls flag football. Troy, you were kind of talking to me during the break, too, about how, you know, if you wait until middle school or high school to propose it to the girls, they're already in, you know, soccer or volleyball or basketball or whatever. So is youth involvement the biggest, the biggest obstacle for girls flag football at this

point? It is. The thing is with that is just letting them know that we have this. I mean, everybody knows that you've got soccer and you've got track and you've got volleyball and softball. Now it's saying girls flag football is in the state of Nebraska. Where can I find it? If you're here in Lincoln, it is Lincoln Youth Football.

You've got numerous resources there. That's June and July. Go to Omaha. You've got the Middard United Sports. Sign up there. Easy one. We already have signups going on right now. And in our program, it's 3rd through 5th, 6 to 8th.

And if we get more and more, we'll break that even more down to smaller groups. If you've got a little younger one, first and second grade, we have co-ed. So they get a chance to dabble in it, have fun. I tell people, if you like the game of tag, you're going to love flag football. It's just a lot more competitive. And then eventually we develop your skills into a well-machine athlete. So, and then you figure you've got the high school program right now. And we play through the Miller United Sports, but we also have the athletes rise with the junior stockman program and Andrew.

That's another venue that we have growing. And that's through the College of St. Mary's and at Ralston football. So, and then you look at just the state of Nebraska, Hastings College has it as a varsity sport. Midlands College in Fremont has it as a college sport. And the College of St. Mary's just picked it up this year. So you've got four state colleges, three currently that have a season, and then the Huskers in 2028. And what's nice about that is in 2020, you're going to see it in the Olympics. So, I mean, it is just outstanding to watch these programs rise and bring notoriety to that.

And now it's just adding it to the Huskers itself brings even more attention. Yeah. And these are scholarships. These are scholarship athletes. Yeah. So, I mean, Nebraska's had it. I mean, since I was in college clearly for intermurals, girls teams, co-ed teams. But these are actually scholarship athletes.

So, and they don't mess around. If you want to see what it looks like, go on a Saturday or a Wednesday evening out to Fremont and watch the Midlands girls because they are, they're amazing to watch. Well, speaking of that, this Saturday. the Midlands College plays Coddy College at one o'clock. We're going to head out about 11 o'clock and start tailgating with our girls United Sports and our bunch of our family members. Come out, support the girls. If you're from Fremont, step in. Come on out, watch these girls play. I'll throw out two names. Two names that I want to just talk about real quick is Olivia and Angel.

Both have helped our immense program coming in doing one-on-one, small group and their entire entourage from parades up in Elkhorn to numerous can. camps that we've went through. So these two have helped us out immensely. I know Angels currently helping out as a coach out there. And then Olivia's playing her final season. So we've got seven seniors out there. And we've got a little surprise for them in the stands. But we're going to show up in numbers. We're going to have over 100 people in our little entourage going out and supporting them. Tailgate, Cornhole, you name it. Pizza, you name it. We've got everything else there. So it's Saturday at 1 o'clock the girls will play Coddy College.

So yeah, that's awesome to look forward to. If you can make it certainly consider that. I did want to ask you, though, too, with, you know, with Midland and I think a lot of people, that was kind of the first look into, okay, you know, this is, this is happening here in Nebraska. Was that the Oscar games last year? Normally knows the spring game. They called it the Oscar games last year. And, I mean, what did you guys think of that kind of coming together?

And then, you know, kind of the light that shown on girls flag football. and basically the biggest slot that you can there for spring and how's your football? I got to say that when I don't think anybody expected what they what they saw. I thought that they probably were like, oh, they're going to come in. They're used to seeing what, you know, intermurals, no, the intermural girls at Nebraska, the fact that they take their time outside of their classes, their job, whatever else they have, and it's an intramural sport, and they are a team that works hard together. all the credit in the world to them.

There's a difference when you're a scholarship athlete and you're getting paid and somebody comes in and puts together your lifting program and your meal program and your practices and your plays. But when they came out and they played last year, I think a lot of people had opened their eyes of what girls flag football or women's flag football in college actually is. Because it was a lot of fun to watch. And as much as I'm a Husker and I really wanted to cheer for those girls like Troy said, the Midlands girls have helped our girls a ton and we were on the sideline with them.

And so it was great to cheer them on and watch them do that. Like I told you earlier during the break, a couple of the guys turned around and we're like, oh my gosh, like, what is going on here? I'm like, yeah, welcome to women's flag football. Well, you get a shout out to Jay Foreman and, again, Matt Ruhl to get our girls sideline passes. So our team was able to get on the sideline and watch what happens on the sideline for these girls.

And then to experience that, the excitement of one, day I want to play this. Yeah. One day I want to go here. You know, it's just one of those things you just, you can't draw back. And I get emotional talking about it. Just knowing that one day, not only did I play at Nebraska, my daughter could play in Nebraska football field and Mandy played a football field.

So, I mean, you've got three family members that could play on the same field during their generation time wise. And that's just exciting. Yeah, yeah, that is incredible. And there's in, you know, that happens in sports. I can't wait for those stories that kind of pop up and, you know, we'll be on the, on the lookout for that. But as we're saying,

I mean, that's why you need to continue the sport to develop and grow because, you know, how are local kids going to get the opportunity, you know, around here to make it to the,

you know, the Husky team. Well, that's what's nice about Matt Ruhl. Matt Ruhl did two years ago, he created a camp called She's Got Game. And two years ago, we had girls from all over the place.

Heck, we had girls that were traveling from, I'm here to see my grandma for the summer and here's Matt Rul's, she's got game camp. And you had a lot of girls down there. It was an exciting time. the girls got to learn little tidbits of football.

But then afterwards, talking with Matt and some of his staff, we kind of changed the direction of what that camp was about. And it was about teaching girls football. And then it went to the following year. So last year, we had it where we tailored it towards flag football. And this year, we don't know where it's going to go, whether it's the new coaches take over or Matt's going to run it one more time. But being able to allow us to come down there and help those guys out,

teaching the game of flag football. And then we did little competitions with five-on-five. Girls ran routes. and just the excitement in the state. And I think bringing attention to that. Now, you'll see it across the board where, you know, when we first announced that Girls Fly Football and Nebraska was going to come out, people were like, what about wrestling?

Wrestling, absolutely. I mean, that's another fastest rising sport for girls athletes. And we could have went different directions, but this is a direction that the Huskers took. And, you know, either way, you couldn't have gone the wrong direction. Supporting girls in the sport of whatever may be is outstanding. And so, you know, I'll let Mandy talk about that. But it's just, it's, it's, it's neat to see every sport taking a stand to let girls be part of.

Absolutely. I mean, we have a girl on our team that also she wrestles. I think this is her fourth year. She's been a state champ twice, a runner up one year. So I'll see how she does this year. And it's a sport. Yeah. She, she, I mean, it's her between football and wrestling.

Those are her passions. She loves it. So when it did, like Troy said when it came out, and I know a lot of people were hoping for wrestling, I mean, we support girls sports across the board. Yes, we're happy that it's flag, but absolutely, hopefully wrestling doesn't follow that far behind because it's just great to see these new opportunities. I mean, having won myself a long time ago,

it's great. It's nice to be a pioneer of it and to go out and learn and succeed and then kind of paved the way for other people. So our girls are doing that. I mean, flag's been around for a while, but more so, like I said, in like California, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, places like that. Here, our girls are doing that.

The girls, the junior stockmen are doing it, the girls down here in Lincoln. But the more that we can get them started at that young youth age, and I would really encourage any parents that have girls that are playing, but maybe playing through some of the other programs and they're playing with boys, and there may be only one or two girls on that team to really seek out Miller United or Lincoln Youth Football to do that because they're going to get a much better experience. and they're going to learn a lot more. Honestly, they'll get more playing time.

They'll see what it's like to play with girls, not saying that girls can't play with guys and boys. They absolutely can and they can be very competitive there. But, you know, go find a girls group and a girls program. And it's just going to help them get to where they want to be if this is the sport that they want to do. And that's the same thing. You've just got these sports here.

You know, I've got somebody that reached out saying, hey, what about in Scott's Bluff? What about in North Plath? What about North Plath? Form your teams. you can easily form a group of girls fly football, reach out to the NFL. That's who we go through. And you have the USA as well.

Get your little notoriety where you can kind of start that going. Get some interest. And truly seven girls per team, you could start four different teams, 28 girls. Yep. And then you could start your own little mini league. And it could range from age groups or high school programs. That's going to be the easy one where finding at least, in this case seven on seven, finding at least 10 to 14 girls that want to come compete outside of this.

and just say, hey, you know what? If up where we're out, if it's Papillion, then Grattan forms one team. And granted, you've got Grattan to East and Grattan a normal. But you've got between the two, you can form one team of 14 girls and go out and compete against Papillion and Elkhorn and Millard and Lincoln and add it on.

I mean, it makes it simple. We're close by. It's easy to get to. And even in the fall, we encourage the girls that get done with Lincoln Youth Football down here to travel up to Miller United Sports. They can form their teams down here, practice here and on Sundays is when our games happen, come up and compete in our league.

How cool. That's the same thing for us. We're looking into playing in the league in June and July down here in Lincoln Youth Football. Yeah. And just supporting each other that way. Now, down here, it's USA football. Up there, it's NFL football. But Elkhorn's got their own little mini league.

So, I mean, it's growing. But Millard United Sports is the foundation of where all girls fly football in this area that I know of had started from. And Troy Street is the ringleader behind that. Yeah. Like Troy said, if you're out, somewhere where you're not Omaha or Lincoln and you want to get something started, reach out to Troy Streeter at Miller United.

He'll direct you in any direction or, you know, to the right people. NFL is there. They have the program, NFL flag, and they will help everybody become an NFL flag-affiliated program. And they set you up with flags and jerseys and everything that you need to get started. Oh, it's nice about that is you get to choose your NFL team. I was going to say you get the NFL jerseys. Oh, man. You get the NFL flags that have your logo on it.

And for us, we chose the Steelers. Not because we're tied to the Steelers, but we now are the Girls of Steel is our nickname. Okay. Yeah. And so we bought them steel water bottles. We come out. And it's just have fun with it. Enjoy it.

And the thing is, so go ahead. We let Lily Pick in third grade. Hey, what team do you want? Which one would you like? And we have two neighbors. One's a Steelers fan and one's a Green Bay Packers. And she went with Steelers. So we have more Steelers paraphernalia, probably more so than Nebraska.

I never owned any NFL affiliate stuff. And now we've got more. Steeler stuff because that's our normal season. Yep. And then during the travel season, we're Girls United. And we just created our first logo as you can kind of see our shirts on. Oh yeah. And then as it just grows, we'll just keep adding. And we'll add stars for every year. And as it keeps growing,

we'll travel. And, you know, right now our first tournaments, March 21st down to Kansas City. And we go up to Minnesota the following weekend. Then we have a week off. And we head down to Kansas City for the Kansas City regionals, April 11th. And then we'll compete down there to try to earn a spot to nationals. And if you qualify down there, then you become the Can City Chiefs, and they'll deck you out in the gear. Okay.

And if some reason something happens there with our 10, 12, and 14 you, we have the second opportunity to travel up to Minnesota and qualify there as well. Now, we have other regionals that we are in the area of that we travel. So it's like Detroit, Wisconsin. Colts. Yeah, the Colts. And so those are our regionals, but we figured we'll do two this year and see where it goes. And we have other little tournaments in between.

And we'd like to host our first tournament for us up here, but that may change into more of an NFL combine. Yeah. So we'll see where that goes. But yeah, otherwise, I mean, one of the things for us is a face behind the name. And I know we had spent some time. We ran into our daughter absolutely loves Emmett Johnson. And so it was one of those days. And I don't if you watch the Husker volleyball game, but the Grinch showed up. That was me. Oh, you were the Grinch. I was the Grinch. And so I used to teach drama here at Irving Middle School. And so went there. We showed up, had a fun time. It ran into Emmett. And of course, I'm in Green. And I'm like, hey, we're doing

girls flag of a ball. How can we help you and build a name? You have a name here. And so Emmett's been working with us and granted, he's taken some time away because of the combine and getting ready for the NFL draft. So, but he's, he's reached out to us. We've reached out to him and his agent to talk about how his face can help push the issue. And we need a female here in the state of Nebraska. I mean, we got volleyball girls or professional volleyball that we can say, hey, come help us push this. Come help us grow this by just your face alone and your name and your image. So. Yeah. I think the new coaches when the Sauer sisters, when they come in, that they'll be able to do a lot of that, which will be great.

Yeah. Yeah, it would be fun to see that. I've got to ask you guys, have you found yourself watching a Steeler game or two then? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Especially we're on about. Typically after our games, we'll go to the sports bar or whatnot and just hang out and have some food-wise after our games.

We're like, oh, there's the Steelers. Oh, here's this. And even a point, for me, it was more of the, I want to do Bengals, former Husker coaching down there. I thought that'd be great, good connection. but just, you know, with now the name, Girls of Steel, we can't get rid of it. Yeah. It just has that catch to it.

We're the Girls of Steel. It is very cool. And, you know, you can obviously feel, too, like, okay, when you get to put that uniform on, then naturally you will be more interested maybe to catch it. Exactly. And learn more when you're watching on Sunday. We have another former Husker's daughter on our Girls of Steel team, too. Laura Buttermore, Laura Pilkowski.

Pilkowski played volleyball at Nebraska. And then her husband, Matt, is the coach at UNO for women's volleyball. volleyball. But Emmy, their daughter has played on our team now for four years. So she's also a girl of seal. Yeah. And this year, we're working to do a second round of back to back to back championships, you know, putting with dedication for those girls. When Lily was in fourth and fifth grade, I took over her program of girls flag with Mandy and thought, let's grow this. We won the championship. Came back, won it again. So we were back to back to any champions at the younger level, moved up an age division. And we did well, but then the eighth graders dominated us.

And that's where it's just, eighth graders versus sixth grade. And this great quarterback. So, and then this last year, we did an outstanding job of our girls dedication. We won and did nine and oh this last year for our girls to steal. Yeah. And so defending our crown one more time.

And there's going to be some good, talented programs out there, including the chiefs and Joe Lee and his, his crew, who's helping out with us. So we've got a lot of volunteers. We're all volunteers when it comes to coaching. And we all have different backgrounds and experiences.

But it's just the time. I spend a lot of time outside of this, along with the rest of them, just figuring out donations, how to get the offset cost for things of traveling. The one that we do want to plug coming up on Sunday, so March 8th that Chris and those guys promoted last night, I do believe Chris Raff is Sunday at heavy brewing.

Check in is at 12 to 1230. And if you can sign up prior to, it is teams of two. It's 50 bucks to buy in. And that money will help out travel with our girls fly football and offset some of the cost. Bags fly at 1 o'clock, but it's heavy brewing in Gretna.

We'll have silent auction. items. We have a mystery cooler that we're going to fill up with gift cards and Fairways done a great job in numerous places like you save have helped out. But we'll fill it up with random things. You're going to bid on that silent auction cooler and see what you win. But it's just coming out, supporting our girls and having some fun, throwing some bags. Kids friendly. Come on out. They've got food there. They've got drinks. We'll have silent auction items, but it could be a seven-year-old once come throw with dad. Come on out. Learn about flag football. Have a little fun. Support our girls. So if you're around the area, it's Sunday, we'd love to see you out there throwing some bags at the heavy brewing company up in Omaha, or in this case, Gretton, Nebraska.

As you can tell, it's a close-knit community, and you guys are doing everything you can to move the sport forward, Troy Hasbrook and Mandy Brandt in here. One final time. We got about a minute before we need to go to break. Just if you can, and it's tough. Condense your final pitch to everybody out there to, you know, kind of what the purpose was today and in the action move. and forward. Well, a couple of things I'm going to say really is what I wanted to get across today. Number one, fastest growing sport in the nation. If you are interested, please, please, please reach out to Millard United. If you're up in the Omaha area, we actually have a couple girls that do travel from Lincoln up to Omaha for our travel team. But if you're interested,

Millard United, if you're interested in Lincoln, Lincoln Youth football, and really reach out. If you want to just have your girls come and participate, learn about it, try. We're always open for somebody to come to one of our practices to see what it's about. And then I would also plug the Midlands girls. Please support them up in Fremont. They are amazing and they play on Saturdays. Correct. And then you look at it,

you can always find us on Facebook. You know, Troy Hassabrook. Everything I post nowadays is all girls fly football. And it's kind of changed from family to girls fly football. And that's what's going on. We have Girls United. On Facebook and on Instagram. So you can kind of see some of the things that we're doing.

So we're trying to grow that as well. But just the name out there. Miller United is where it's at. Troy Streeter, if you have questions for any kind of girls fly football or starting your own program. He's also a white hat, so he's a referee, so he knows the ins and outs of that as well. So outstanding resource to him. And then for us, Nebraska, reach out to DP. That's what you need to do. He knows the ins and outs of the world of flight football across the U.S.

Well, there you have it. Once again, thanks to Troy Hassabrook and Mandy Brant for joining us in studio. You guys did way too good today and you're on way too good of a mission that I assume. I think we'll see you probably back in studio at some point as well. But that'll wrap it up for today's one-on-one. We will go ahead and take a quick break. We'll do your turn. We'll get back to the action from Pinnacle Bank Arena.

Coming up next year, Lincoln North Star in Millard West on 93-7, the ticket.