For ‘footy’ fans, Aussie rules
Ottawa women prepare for national championship here, and dream of playing in the International Cup in Melbourne, GORDON HOLDER reports.
Emma Dickinson lived “down under” between 2006 and 2009, so she knew about Australian rules football.
She didn’t play because there was no women’s team where she lived in northern Queensland, a state in the country’s northeast, but she became quite familiar with the Australian Football League and its passionate followers in that country.
Then she returned to Canada, and last year she rediscovered Aussie rules football at home in Ottawa through a connection in recreational dodge ball. Really. A former University of British Columbia varsity rugby player, Dickinson is a bit of a star in Canadian AFL, winning “Best on Ground” honours as player of the match when the Northern Lights national team routed the United States 86-1 in the women’s 49th Parallel Cup match at Edmonton in August. On Thanksgiving weekend, she and the rest of the Ottawa Swans will take aim at a national championship at Rideau Carleton Raceway.
“Having participated in the national team program and knowing a lot of the girls from around the country, knowing how much they love it and how good they are and how great of athletes they are, I’m really just excited to get their names out there and the name of the sport out there and try and get them a little bit more exposure and support,” Dickinson says before practice on Rideau Carleton’s grass infield. “We are coming up to a big international tournament, and this nationals tournament is going to be a historic event. There has been nothing of this level for Canadian female footballers ever.
“And, personally, I would love to be the national champion. I would love it if the Ottawa Swans could be the best club in the country. But, more than that, I just want to have a great weekend of footy with a lot of talented women from around the country.”
“Footy” has pockets of followers from coast to coast, with 21 teams for men and nine for women in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.
All nine women’s teams have been invited to nationals in Ottawa, and a half-dozen are expected to participate. Some may combine forces.
The Swans are one of five women’s teams in AFL Ontario. After going 3-5 during the regular season, they defeated the Etobicoke Kangaroos 32-11, but lost 40-29 to the High Park Demons in a semifinal prior to the Grand Final.
Speaking of Grand Finals, the Swans women’s and men’s teams plan a pub gathering to watch the AFL championship game at famed Melbourne Cricket Grounds. That battle, matching winners of the “preliminary finals” between the Geelong Cats and Hawthorn Hawks and the Sydney Swans and the Freemantle Dockers, will be played in mid-afternoon Sept. 28 local time, but, because of the vast time difference, will be broadcast in Canada starting at 11:30 p.m. ET one night earlier. Got that? For Dickinson and other Canadian team hopefuls, that gathering of converts will be an opportunity to see what playing at MCG in front of 100,000 spectators is like. They dream of being there for the International Cup, which is played there every three years and will next be contested in August 2014.
“Just thinking about it makes me giddy. I would be thrilled, honoured,” says Dickinson, a 26-year-old who works in development and communications for the Green Party of Canada. “I’d love to return to a country that I know and love to play the sport that I’ve magically found in my own country. I feel like I’m lucky in that maybe I’ll actually have some fans over there.”
Like Dickinson, Swans captain Lisa Dalla Rosa has a university varsity sports background, in her case soccer at Ryerson, plus competitive swimming and a family tradition of sports involvement. She was drawn to Aussie rules by an email from Ray Kaduck, original president of the men’s squad, and her team leader on a 2004 Grey Cup volunteer committee.
“I can do this,” she told herself after watching a game.
Dalla Rosa, 32, has worked with the Swans since the beginning in 2006, at first helping set up the field for practices and games in the men’s team in Division 1 of AFL Ontario. For several years, though, there was neither a women’s squad nor even a men’s club in Division 2, where a small number of women competed for other organizations, and Dalla Rosa decided against joining a Toronto-area squad.
It was only last year that the female Swans took flight, the result of word of mouth recruiting, friends of friends and even a 2012 stint organizing one of the stations in City Chase. “Everybody here is connected somehow,” Dalla Rosa says. “We have very few who just stumbled upon us.”
There are only about 15 women on the Swans roster, not quite enough for the fullout 18-player version of Aussie rules. However, modified games can be played with a minimum of 10 (nine on the field and one substitute).
That’s another reason why the 2013 national championship, the first that’s genuinely more than a regional competition with a smaller number of teams, matters to footy faithful.
It’s also about promoting the sport and preparing national team members for the International Cup.
Games at the national championships are scheduled for daytime hours on Oct. 12 and 13.