The biggest money issue for us is just the cost of trips to Australia for tournaments, plus any flights to tournaments around North America. I personally fail to see the benefit of regularly playing in Australia, at the cost of ~$100,000 for 10 days per team. Thankfully, the game is growing so well up here that the need to fly to play games is rapidly diminishing, so locals can enjoy a decent standard of footy week-in, week-out without travelling. My league kicked off this time last year with 12 women, and we now have 75 playing every two weeks, which is much more enjoyable for everyone involved as it means more teams and an interesting competition. We’ll top 100 by mid-June, which isn’t a bad rate of increase over 12 months.

Now we just need some Swedish women to start playing, so that we have someone besides the Yanks to beat at footy!

We, who are based here in Sweden, too have similar challenges. The local councils allow us only 4 months of the year to play on the grass fields which we have to work our schedule around the rugby community. It is a long process to get a full sized oval anywhere within the city limits, so we play 9-a-side on the cities rugby fields for the time being. This has allowed us to grow new teams and expand our local competition significantly. But most importantly, it has given us more competative and meaningful games; and that is where the I feel the true source of our limited success (this, driving improvement and growth at all levels).

Despite the initial hurdles, the game is growing (from only 25 in 2002 to over 400 this year) and we are some 70% non-Aussies. We still haven’t gotten any funding from the AFL (though it has been promised for some years) and almost everything is self-financed by the players themselves, thereby leaving us modest in our ambitions.

Probably my point here is that you are not alone (Finland and Norway are in a similar predicament) and this is the right sport (with some of its similarities to ice-hockey, handball etc) to take to the locals wherever we are high up in the world. There is no shortage of big, tough, mobile boys up here that given the right development roadmap from an early enough age, can potentially get picked up as a tall, mobile KPP in the international draft. The problem for us is getting these programs off the ground. We could definitely use a little seed / angel investor money to start the ball rolling and get a dedicated FDO out to the local schools/Sat morning Auskick clinics.

Good to hear the Mike Pyke story is getting some media coverage over there. Now if we could only get a Swede playing in the AFL… ok, we kinda have one in Kris Massie (born in Malmö but lived his entire life in Australia), but it’s not the same.

‘m involved in the running of footy over here in Canada, and the game is starting to get some mainstream, if irregular, attention. Articles on Pyke’s debut were published in most of the broadsheet newspapers nationally, and our local clubs get exposure in local news and on television once or twice each year in the major cities. Not a heap of press, but not much less than other niche sports such as rugby and basketball.

It’s important to keep in mind that Canadian sporting culture is very different from that in Australia. Sport isn’t as culturally important, and receives a lot less coverage than the saturation in Australia. It is also viewed on a professional level mainly as entertainment, whereas when living in Australia attending a sporting match is seen to be somewhat separate than going to the movies. To that end, amateur sports receive very little coverage in major media outlets, and local results are rarely published as they are in Australia (local league results in the sport section of the print or TV news). Instead, professional franchises, both Canadian and American, dominate coverage. Rugby in that regard, receives little coverage as a thriving amateur sport with a narrow professional base, and football (Canadian and American) receives mass-coverage despite having a narrow playing base.

Australian football has done very well to grow as much as it has since 1990, as it has overcome a lot of challenges that Aussies may be unaware of. Firstly, the weather is hostile, with approximately 150 “playing days” per year. That means footy competes against most other sports for participants and fields (all but ice sports, basketball, volleyball & indoor sports). On top of soccer, rugby and Canadian football, add cricket, softball & baseball and unorganized golf, hiking and watersports. And before you think that these sports likely occupy different grounds, keep in mind that Canadian municipalities spend far less on outdoor fields, because they can only be used for 1/3 of the year. A quick look at Google Earth will enlighten you. The result is that we train pre-season in temperatures as low as -20 degrees, and often commence and end our footy seasons in the snow (even playing from May to September – it can snow in every month on the Prairies).

The mildest climates in Canada are in BC and Ontario, and not coincidentally, footy is growing fastest in those regions. Alberta suffers from a shorter summer season and a more-isolated, lower population base, and Quebec has obvious challenges in introducing French-speaking locals to footy (what’s the translation of ‘speccie’?).

For what it’s worth, I reckon Canada’s Australian football scene is growing really well without any great assistance from the AFL (approx. A$10,000 per year). Juniors programs are operating in Vancouver, Calgary and the Greater Toronto Area, and men’s and women’s teams are solid in those cities plus Edmonton, Ottawa and Montreal. Canada is the only country outside of Australia and PNG that can field senior and U18 men’s and women’s national teams, and Canadian clubs won the US National men’s and women’s Championships in 2008. About 70% of the player-base are Canadian citizens too, which is important in driving the growth of Australian football in the future from expat origins to a native sport.

It’s great to see so much interest in our game up here, both from the Aussie on this forum, and from the locals participating in the Great White North.

exactly re Pyke that it illustrates that being able to do one or two things half okay is not so much the issue – it’s the ability to NOT be a liability the rest of the time. And, it’s one thing to gain half an idea to go in VAFA D4 reserves – it’s quite another at the pace AFL is played at.

btw – on Sat night, I watched as Port got the ball on the rebound around the flank, Travis Boak sprints off from around CHB straight up the guts – I watched as his North opponent was struggling to match stride about 5 metres behind him. Boak sprinted without the ball and with no guarrantee of getting NEAR the ball. As it turned out, the play progressed around the flank and he was able to hit the goal square without breaking stride for what looked a simple handball over the top and a tap in goal – - – with his North opponent still 5 metres behind……

Try to portray that on tele, or try to explain to Pyke that it’s quite one thing in RU to run 90m’s with the ball to score a try, but, try running 90 m’s just to get in position to maybe recieve the ball….(or stop your opponent)…and then still have to do something correct with it.

Excellent article on Harry O’Brien – terrible homeland the Congo what a burden on the poor lad. Can’t stand him as a player, firstly he’s Collingwood but secondly he often illegally scrags and holds forwards when on the lead, after that article I’m a fan now

MC,

Watched a bit of Pyke against Geelong. He really looks a bit lost at times, his handball skills are understandably very very soft. He is in the team for rucking but he his needs to hold his own in the body work, got thrown to the ground or put off balance quite a few times against Geelong in rucking contests. No doubt a learning curve ahead he needs another 10-15 games under his belt to be anything other than a part time ruckmen off the interchange.

Redb

you don’t have to read the article.

Thurston -

20 years and 26 clubs – - it ain’t huge and sure as heck ain’t getting mainstream regular coverage……..hmmm……must be a media bias and conspiracy!!!!

No – reality is, that in the last few years, they’ve managed to get more regular organisation and structures in place and are building a base. There IS reason to believe that there’s a place for the game (how big a niche, who knows).

From the perspective of most interested in Aust Footy overseas, the big thing of interest is that clubs that in the past would be purely social, 4 games a year against whomever could be organised as opposition, and end up with a few beers, a BBQ and the 80% expat Aussie crowd would head off until the next time – - well, now there’s pockets of fair dinkum footy leagues and clubs and it’s interesting to track the growth – in different parts of the world.

Thurston – Mike Pyke’s mate said to him after arriving in Australia and sampling footy that this was the game they would have played had it been available to them. Rugby is a proud and relatively global game – I’m sure it can cope, but, from our point of view, we just hope that here and there people can have sufficient access to our game that they could make the call a little earlier than Mike Pyke at age 24. We don’t need many, but, it’d be kinda nice to have a little foreign legion of players in the AFL who make it a little more ‘cosmopolitan’, develop some greater ‘real’ interest overseas and perhaps could form a ‘rest of the world’ team one day to take on either ‘QLD’, or ‘Vic’, or ‘Australia’……who knows.

or, it may just result in fitter Ice Hockey players!!

And see yer AFL man O’Brien has been in the Congo recruiting Football players for the A-League. Nice work Henry! Great story in the SMH..hope you didn’t miss it.

I had the good fortune to live in Vancouver back in 1996. A wonderful place to live and with its “milder” winter climate and a rare opportunity to play outdoor ball sports in Canada in the Australian off-season. Somehow rugby continues to be a winter sport there, though there was an odd game where it did start snowing (poor 3/4 line!). Being a forward, I took solace in the scrum and maul. Thankfully the skill level was such that we welcomed each knock-on and took full advantage to find warmth in the ensuing scrum.

Anyway, I happened to get wind of a pub in Vancouver showing the AFL grand final that year. Since my club wasn’t involved, it became a rare opportunity to actually tongue wag with a number of other Aussie ex-pats who happened to be in town. One beer lead to another, and eventually talk started about having a couple of “scrimmage” / walk-up matches of footy. Why not?

So the next weekend, we naively met at a rugby field near UBC and started to play this bizarre sport called “footy”. We all invited a few of our Canuck friends and they got hooked, hence their coinage of the term “ice-hockey on grass”. Due to unexpected popularity, we met again the next week and lo-and-behold, the locals who turned up now brought a few of their own mates – we had interchanges! Undetered, we flappingly met again the week after and even though the weather was arctic that day, we got a decent enough turn-out.

After that weekend, I got a job to coach a rugby team in Quebec (I taught them Aussie Rules there too but they are a proud mob) and left town.

Bottom line, from personal experience, Aussie Rules has a high retention rate once exposed to playing the sport and the Canadian experience showed me that we have barely hit the second paragraph on page one in the Canadian footy story.

Watch this space, ey?

My recollection is that at the time, the respective Seattle and Vancouver Aussie Rules communities were just beginning to become aware of each other. I would not be surprised if there are now regular matches played between teams in the two regions.