Girls flag football supremacy will be on the line when the Northeast Ohio Flag Football League holds its annual playoff tournament May 6 at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Twenty-six varsity teams will take the field in search of flag football glory, with games beginning at 4:30 p.m. Semifinal games will be played at 8 p.m., with the championship game scheduled for an 8:30 p.m. start. “It’s going to be exciting,” said Bob Berwald, NEO Flag vice president and co-founder. “To see where we started and where it’s going, it’s exciting to see. To see how it has grown and to see us playing on this stage, you can’t help but to be a little emotional about it.” First-round matchups are: • Madison vs. Magnificat, with the winner moving on to play Mentor. • Berkshire vs. Cleveland Central Catholic, with the winner facing the winner of Perry and Akron Early Learning. • Lake Catholic vs. Warrensville Heights, with the winner to play South. • Berea-Midpark vs. Cleveland Heights, with the winner facing VASJ. • Maple Heights vs. Bedford, with the winner moving on to play Brush. • Mayfield vs. Riverside, with the winner facing the winner of Lorain and Elyria Catholic. • NDCL vs. Hawken, with the winner squaring off against Euclid. • Shaker Heights vs. Lutheran East, with the winner playing Kirtland. The 26-team field was seeded from top to bottom based on the entire regular season, with the exception of last week, Berwald said, so as to give teams the earliest notice for bussing concerns to Cleveland Browns Stadium. Mentor is the top seed, while Brush is the second seed. The games will be played with 12-minute halves, as opposed to the 20-minute halves in which they played in the regular season. The shortened games are necessitated so as to get the entire tournament played in one day. This is the second year the tournament has been hosted by the Browns, along with the 2022 season. The field was not available last season. “I still remember that first time,” Berwald said. “To see the girls run out on the field from the tunnel, there was so much excitement. My daughters still talk about it. There will be 300 girls out there Monday night and for them to all have that memory is pretty cool.” Berwald harkened back to the rapid growth of the NEO Flag girls league, which started with five teams the first year and nine in the second year, which was the first year Cleveland Browns Stadium was used. The league blossomed to 22 teams last year, then ballooned to 51 this year — with 28 varsity teams and 23 junior varsity squads. “The first year we weren’t quite at 60 girls,” he said. “Now we’ve got 300 playing in the Stadium on Monday. With 51 total teams, and there are at least 10 girls on each team, that means there are over 500 girls playing high school flag football in this area. It’s amazing.”