March may be all about basketball (and brackets) in America, but halfway around the world, Australia is all psyched about the return of footy. The 2008 Australian Football League season kicks off on Thursday night with the traditional Grand Final rematch, which will be Geelong v. Port Adelaide this year. Everyone’s saying the Cats could be even more dominant this year and could win two Grand Finals in a row, but I suspect the Collingwood Magpies, the Hawthorn Hawks and the resurgent Sydney Swans will have something to say about that.
Meanwhile, USFooty is looking for 3 million people who know what the hell I’m talking about.
The 2008 USAFL Board Retreat was held over the weekend of February 8th-10th in Colorado Springs, the site of this year’s National Championships. As the USAFL moves into it’s second decade, this weekend was critical in future planning and continuing to work towards it’s ten year goals:
• To have 10,000 participants in the next 10 years
• To have 1 % of the US population to know what aussie rules is about
• To be the best run amateur Australian football league in the world, including Australia
• To remain community based.
Those may not seem like big goals, but for a football code that only gets a brief mention in the press when an Aussie punter shows up in the NFL (or on American Idol), that’s a tall task. The American sporting population at large is currently obsessed with hoops and brackets and couldn’t care less about the Cats v. Power match on Thursday night, let alone the start of the Atlanta Kookaburras season. Creating an audience of 3 million people who know how Aussie Rules is played — and nobody can say I haven’t tried to do my part here — might be asking a little too much.
You have to applaud USFooty for thinking big, though. They would get a lot more help if a cable TV network like Versus would pick up the AFL. There’s just as much drama — and judging from the likes of Wayne Carey and Brendan Fevola, just as much douchebaggery — in the AFL as there is in the NFL, and with the code celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, now would be a perfect time for the AFL to start thinking globally.
Sadly, I don’t think AFL chief Andrew Demetriou is capable of such forward thinking. Aussie rules needs a champion who can free people’s minds and change their way of thinking about football.
Someone like… Jeff Wortman!
You thought I was going to say Sheedy, didn’t you? Ha ha. 
6 responses so far ↓
1 a different Dave // Mar 19, 2008 at 1:32 am
Only that last goal (remaining community based) is achievable. In fact it’s very easily achievable as long as the other goals remain out of reach.
I like how the code is allegedly “celebrating its 150th anniversary” when it is merely celebrating the birth of its oldest club. Sheffield FC is older. If aussie rules wasn’t born with the VFA, than neither was soccer born with the FA.
2 Sean // Mar 19, 2008 at 8:10 am
Interesting that you should say that Aussie Rules was born with the VFA, when the SANFL was actually formed in Adelaide earlier … the game was well and truly established in Victoria before the formation of the Melbourne Football Club.
Sure 150 years is an arbitrary date, but they have to celebrate something. More and more evidence shows that the games origins are still very vague and can be traced back further than 150 years. The AFL recently commissioned a historical study which found among other things that despite popular belief, the contribution of Tom Wills, thought by many to be the game’s only founder is not as significant as first thought.
See: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sport/afl/story/0,26576,23314627-19742,00.html
The Melbourne Football Club may be the oldest, but many clubs were formed before the MFC. Especially if you count the schools that were playing the game before the formation of the MFC. The same study shows that long before the first official matches had been played, that football was played throughout much of Victoria.
The MFC is significant in that it wrote the rules and, unlike Sheffield, has now played at the elite level for every one of its 150 years.
3 a different Dave // Mar 20, 2008 at 1:52 am
Well if you want to use that line of argument, many soccer clubs were formed long before Sheffield FC. The point is soccer and rugby go back a long time in England, so if you want to drag up the very earliest glimmer of your code in Australia, other codes can do the same, and they can do them earlier, too.
4 a different Dave // Mar 20, 2008 at 2:14 am
Did them earlier in Britain/Ireland, that is.
My point is that the Aussie football code nationalists engage in special pleading. They look for the very earliest glimmerings of their code in Australia, and ignore the precise same things for soccer and rugby which occurred much earlier in Britain/Ireland. You don’t apply the same logic to other codes as you do for your own. That’s called special pleading.
5 Sean // Mar 21, 2008 at 7:19 pm
What is your point ?
If you want to celebrate 1 million years of rugby league – go ahead, I’m not going to stop you. Who cares ??? “special pleading” – what kind of drugs are you on dude ?
Please explain why every time Dave posts something on AFL, you have a bash at the game’s historical roots and claiming that it will never become popular outside of Australia. You are obviously more of a historical expert than the experts themselves ! Whatever the obscure origins of a sports, it is not going to stop it from growing.
Perhaps for once you should stick to commenting on the actual blog, rather than obsessed ranting !!!
6 Kick2Kick // Mar 25, 2008 at 9:51 pm
And that is the whole point of having a website like Kick2Kick.net to help explain the game of AFL as it is definitely lacking in the world of Australian football.