Dallas, TX -- 4on4flagfootball.com is finally on the map. Flag Football players across the Dallas, Fort Worth Metroplex can count on a Saturday league with over 35 teams, a Rockwall league with close to 20, and a Fort Worth league that expects to have nearly the same amount starting again soon. All of these leagues are under one umbrella, 4on4flagfootball.com, the brainchild of builder Dennis Freels. North Texas finally has a 4on4 Flag Football league it can be proud of, but it hasn't exactly been a short time coming.

Patrick Alley, Quarterback of one of the top teams in the nation and big 4on4flagfootball.com supporter has probably waited with more anticipation than most.

"It's nice to know that we don't have to worry about finding good competition anymore. Actually, even though my team mainly plays at the A level, I'm excited to see so many new up and coming teams in the lower divisions. The only way teams get good is if they stick with it and we definitely have a great group of lower division teams doing everything they can to move up the ranks."

Alley has been playing flag football for close to ten years with history dating back to his days at his Alma Matter SMU. He won many intramural titles at the local Dallas University and after graduation was itching to get back into it wherever he could. He was hooked by the NFL experiment back in the early 90's "Air It Out".

"Those were the days," Alley says with a smile. "It was incredible!"

"Air it Out" was known to snag over 1,000 teams two weekends in a row to the Polo grounds in Plano and South Fork Ranch to compete in the huge mega-event sponsored by the likes of Pert Plus, Southwest Airlines, Coca-Cola, the NFL, Nike, and a host of other big corporations trying to expand their prescence.

"The leagues back then were truly something to see", says Mark Moore, a local Mortgage Broker and long time Flag Football player in the Metroplex. "There used to be over 100 teams in the league. There were so many teams in "Air It Out" that is was easy to recruit plenty of people to play in the leagues. We used to play at Brookhaven, It was like an event every Saturday. Food, Music, everybody brought their families and we just played a lot of football. There were close to 20 teams in each division."

Those days began to fade though in the late 90's. With the unfortunate folding of "Air It Out", the sport began to decline into what would eventually be nothing more than a few guys scratching their heads and wondering what happened. Slowly each year the numbers dwindled as different companies attempted to duplicate what "Air It Out" had been able to accomplish.

"It's impossible to do what the NFL was able to do back then" says Jason Biddle, a systems analyst for Club Corp in Dallas. "You can't get on the phone and call Southwest Airlines and get them to drop a bunch of cash on a flag football tour that you "think" is going to bring in a lot of teams. The NFL was able to guarantee a big turn-out because of the high level of exposure and commercial airtime during their games. It's very easy to build something when you're the NFL."

Biddle plays for one of the top local teams in the Dallas area and has had his share of traveling around the nation to play in big tournaments. "Back then teams used to travel to five or six different cities a season because you had to win one of the "Air It Out" cities to qualify for the national championships at Disney World in Orlando."

Although a cash prize wasn't the incentive to spend thousands of dollars on hotels and airline tickets running around the US to qualify, the teams did it without hesitation. "The biggest reason was the way they made you feel," Moore claims thinking back. "They used to shower you with gifts and make you feel famous for a weekend. On top of that if you won the tournament you got to play against the Pro's on CBS right before the Pro-Bowl. That was the kicker, that's what we all had in the back of our minds as we booked our flights for Green Bay, one of the first qualifiers of the year. We wanted to go there and qualify early so we knew we were in. You didn't want your qualification chance to come down to one event in one city, there were two many things that could go wrong."

As the sport began to officially "Go Wrong" in the early 2000's, local organizers failed to adjust marketing plans to reel in new teams. "It just wasn't fun anymore" Alley states as he thinks back to the early days of 2000. "You had to play the same teams week in and week out, it got old."

As the tragic 9/11 scenario unfolded before our eyes on Fox News, the extra money people had in their wallets to play flag football seemed to be the nail in the coffin. "No one could afford to play as much" Moore tells of those money crunching days. "Everyone was trying to figure out more important things like how to pay rent and what kind of new world were we living in."

Local organizers became discouraged with the way things were going and with other things on their minds decided to not put any extra effort into rebuilding.

"It's ironic that right at that moment I became interested in Flag Football as a business", says Dennis Freels, 4on4flagfootball.com builder and owner. Looking back on it now I was both lucky and crazy to make that my starting point. I remember calling around to see what was going on in our area and getting no where. I called the head of what seemed to be the 3 top National Tours at that time to see what kind of plans they had for the next year. One in particular, ZFootball, had big plans of bringing the old "Air it Out" back to life. I went to work with ZFootball in November of 2003 and our first event was considered by all a great success. Although the numbers were low compared to the Tournaments of Old, we were happy with our start."

The sport began to make a comeback in the big North Texas Metroplex, but it wasn't for almost two years after that moment in 2003. "It took forever and I think I quit five or six times in the process," Freels says thinking back. "In the back of my mind I kept hearing the words of one of my business coaches; ["There's nothing wrong with quitting, just make sure you don't do it for more than five minutes"]. I don't think I ever quit for more than a day or two so I guess that's good enough because everything is going great now."

The sport bounced around from city to city and day to day for about two years until March of 2006. "Man, this feels like old times" claims Darrell Neal, a local UPS manager and long time 4 on 4 flag football referee organizer. "This is great, it's about time."

The hard work and long hours seemed to have paid off as over 35 teams lined up to play on that opening day in March. "I remember what I was thinking that day," Freels went on to describe. "Two years ago, this was nothing more than a dream, now we have the ability to step back and look at something that we can really be proud of."