Submitted photo – The Arcata Eagles celebrate their championship at Hiller Park over the weekend.

By Ray Hamill — The Humboldt Flag Football League concluded its debut season over the weekend with three teams crowned champions at Hiller Park in McKinleyville.

The 2024 season, which began in June, featured three different age groups for players in Kindergarten through eighth grade.

And it should only continue to grow in popularity, as league founder Matt Smith-Caggiano looks to expand next summer.

“As word gets out, I anticipate the league at least doubling next year,” he said.

All three of Saturday’s championship games were close showdowns with no more than a few points separating the teams in each.

The youngest age group featured players from kindergarten to first grade and the Eureka Raiders took home the championship after defeating the Fortuna 49ers 35-33 in the first of the three deciders on Saturday.

The winning roster included Nolan Shealor, Michael Wilcox, Uriah Davis, Jalen Espinoza , Braden Pearlstein, Calvin Yang and Dillon Yang and was coached by JC Espinoza.

In the Division-2 championship game, which featured players in second through fourth grade, it was the Eureka Vikings who earned bragging rights with a 39-34 win over the Macktown Panthers.

The winning roster included Kingsley Darlington, Kinley Hill, Joshua Bradshaw, Jackson Christensen, Kobe Karges, Jarett Kindley and Dean Rasmussen and the team, was coached by Ryan Hill.

In the Division-3 final, which featured players in fifth through eighth grade, the Arcata Eagles prevailed with a 52-40 win over the Eureka Raiders.

The winning team included Zyan Hoffman (WR), Jonah Veerkamp (WR), Arlo Sanger (C/WR), Dominic Smith-Caggiano (QB), Corabella Pagliuco (RB/WR) and Teo Bucheister(RB/WR/Rusher), with Smith-Caggiano as coach.

Overall, it was an exciting and well-received debut season for the NFL-backed league, with well over a hundred young players signing up and competing at four different locations around the county each weekend.

Submitted photo – The Eureka Raiders celebrate their Division-2 championship.

“I am really grateful how everything went,” Smith-Caggiano said. “For the first year we had almost 120 players registered. We had sone challenges and we had to adjust a little bit, but overall everything went really good and I was very happy with it all.”

Smith-Caggiano had hoped to have some high school players and adults for the debut season but was a little short of numbers to do so,

However, he is hoping to add that for next summer if the interest is there.

“We keep striving to do better and fine tune it,”m he said. “And we’re listening to what people are requesting.

“We kind of threw it out there to have it go all the way up to adults. We had people request that, we just didn’t have enough.”

For more in formation on the Humboldt Flag Football League, you can visit the league website.

The Eureka Vikings won the Division-1 championship.

Photos by Ray Hamill/HumboldtSports.com – Action from Saturday’s Division-3 championship game.