There’s plenty of football here in North Carolina. If you want traditional American football, you’ve got the Carolina Panthers in Charlotte and plenty of college teams that fill Triangle-area stadiums on autumn Saturdays. If you prefer Association football, you can check out the Carolina Railhawks, a USL Division One team in Cary. If rugby’s your thing, the North Carolina Rugby Union can hook you up. (There’s a Rugby Sevens event in Greensboro next month, actually.)
But what if you’re preferred code of football is of the Australian variety? Then you might want to check out the North Carolina Tigers, an Aussie Rules team based here in the Triangle that competes in the USAFL. They’re playing a USAFL match tomorrow afternoon, actually, squaring off against the Baltimore/Washington Eagles at Thompson Road Park in Garner (just south of Raleigh) at 2:00 PM.
For the most part, USAFL teams and the local leagues they support play an Aussie Rules variation metro footy. From what I can tell, metro footy is 9-on-9 Aussie Rules that can be played on a soccer pitch. This allows American footy clubs to organize matches and citywide rec leagues without having to hunt down a cricket ground, which is kind of hard to do in America. The Triangle area has a local metro footy league as well, though it looks like I missed all their games for this season.
Of course, the next evolution of metro footy is obvious — beach footy! Then again, maybe they don’t want to deal with waves sweeping in and knocking the goal posts down every 10 minutes…
