Bills Mafia recruiting in Niagara

The Buffalo Bills were back invading Canada this weekend.

One day before their team’s tough, last-second loss to the Houston Texans, the Bills entourage was at Kiwanis Field in St. Catharines staging a free flag football clinic hosted by the Niagara Regional Minor Football Association.

“It’s our fourth year having the Bills come up and we are hosting their skills and drills camp,” NRMFA board member Jim Storin said.

More than 150 kids, ages 8 to 13, took part in the clinic that included eight skills stations that focused on every element of playing flag football, including flag pulling, quarterback, running back, wide receiver, defensive back, defensive line and kicking drills.

Participants included players from the Niagara Regional Flag Football and other organizations.

“Flag football is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world, especially because it is going to be in the next Olympics, and it is important to us to do this clinic because we want to give back to our community,” Storin said. “As a not-for-profit, we started with a tackle league in 1999, then COVID hit and we really had to change how we think and how we got about things. We’ve got into flag football and we have seen it continuously grow. Doing this partnership with the Bills where we can bring kids in for free and learn a non-contact sport, it helps them, it helps us and more importantly it helps the kids.”

This year, the NRMFA ran a spring flag football program in Grimsby, St. Catharines and Niagara Falls and a fall league in St. Catharines.

“We try to do two leagues every year and we are going try and start looking at growing into the winter, possibly doing something at Sinnicks this winter for older kids and maybe even adults,” he said. “We don’t want to look too far ahead but it something our board is looking at. We are trying to grow it a little bit more and see if we can make it work.”

The association had more than 600 kids playing in the spring league and just under 300 kids taking part in the fall league. The NRMFA started flag football programming in the fall of 2021 and there were 104 kids registered.

It has been a great year for both flag and tackle football for the NRMFA. It reintroduced its spring varsity tackle league and had more than 250 players.

“We had a couple of board members who took charge of that, worked with high school coaches and made it very successful,” Storin said.

He is a fan of tackle but believes flag is the future of football.

Saturday’s clinic by the Bills was their first cross-border visit in 2024.

“We are hoping to make trips quarterly because this is a big part of our market for the Buffalo Bills,” said Preston Teague, the Buffalo Bills’ senior director of youth football and programs. “The more we can do up here to grow the game the better and we are excited every time we come up here. The kids are great, the coaches are amazing and we had a beautiful day here. It was a great day for football.”

Participants in the clinic learned a bunch of skills and took home some Bills’ swag which included T-shirts, gift bags, rally towels, yearbooks and wristbands.

“This is a big part of our market and we have a lot of fans in Southern Ontario and the Niagara region,” Teague said, “We are excited to come up here, give back, help grow the game and hopefully encourage some kids and families to join the Bills Mafia.”