Aussie Rules Football

Yesterday we had the exciting opportunity to learn how to play the game Australian Rules Football, or Footy for short. Apparently new this year, the university has organized a program in cooperation with another nearby university, Notre Dame in Fremantle (no affiliation with our Notre Dame although we do send our business students there for a semester). The program will allow international students to learn the rules and strategies of Footy from experienced Australians, many of whom play for the university's club team. At the end of the program, our team here at UWA will play a match against the Americans at ND Fremantle. I assume these Americans that we will be playing against have already been here for a semester as they already have their own uniforms and a really stupid and uninventive team name, the Yankeroos. The team name is actually awesome, and I am incredibly jealous that I did not think of it first. No word yet on whether our team will get uni's or even a name, though I will push heavily for the Leprecrocs - half leprechaun, half crocodile, and a whole lotta attitude!

Wow so moving on, I'll try to explain the rules here briefly, but I recommend looking up some you tube videos of the sport if you really want to get the whole picture. I would post one on here, but the internet connection in my room runs at snail speed and it would take me an hour just to preview a 30 second clip before posting. So the idea is there are two sets of goalposts on each end, one wide and one narrow ( like this | | | | ). It's six points for kicking the ball between the inner posts and one point if it goes between the outer posts. There are three ways to advance the ball down field. You can run with it. You can only run for 15 steps (or meters) though, at which point you must bounce the ball to start another 15 steps. By running you also risk being tackled which would result in the other team taking possession of the ball. You can also hand pass the ball to teammates. A hand pass consists of holding the ball in one hand and punching it with your other hand. You cannot throw the ball in any way. I should also point out that the ball is much like an American football but a little more rounded on the ends. The third means of advancing the ball is the kick. The strategy is to kick the ball a long distance down the field to teammates. If they successfully catch the ball, then it is called a mark. No one can touch them and they are free to kick it to another teammate or try to kick it through the goalposts. I believe if they begin to run instead then they are fair game for tackling. I asked and they can't stand there forever either, only 30 seconds. Looks like the coveted Schluter Stall won't work in this sport (high school basketball coach reference for the non-Novi readers). Also there isn't any pass interference, so it gets pretty rough when players jump up to try to catch a kicked ball. Well those are the rules as far as I know them. The game is played in an oval, and there is out-of-bounds but I don't know quite how that works yet. I noticed flying in on the plane that the landscape was scattered with little green ovals instead of the little green rectangles you see in America. Between all the cricket and footy played here it makes sense.

For our first practice, they taught us the basic form of the hand pass and the kick, and we did drills. We practiced on the James Oval, which is the big field in the center of campus. We must have looked pretty inept to the many Australians passing by. At the end we played an elementary version of the game with just hand passing and tagging instead of tackling. Thank goodness for just using hand passing because some of our warm-up kicks were hitting buildings outside of the oval. Overall it was a pretty fun time, though I often found myself, when the instructors weren't looking, pulling the football back behind my head and heaving it down field to my warm-up partner as if to score a game winning touchdown.