Orange County Bombers - Australian Football Team

New to Australian Football?
Australian Rules Football (also "Aussie Rules" or "footy") is an exciting, fast paced sport that resembles a mixture of soccer and rugby. Americans new to the sport are quick to find similarities between Aussie Rules and the sports they've grown up playing here in the States. The constant, free flowing style of play resembles that of Soccer and Ice Hockey, the tackling and blocking skills necessary are similar to those used in American football and the ball control skills required in Aussie Rules resemble the same skills needed in volleyball and basketball. At first glance, Aussie Rules is nothing more than controlled chaos, but after closer examination I'm sure you'll agree that Australian Rules Football is the greatest game on Earth.

Where is this game played?
Aussie Rules originated in Australia, but has since spread to many countries across the globe. Today you can find Australian Football Leagues throughout the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark. Aussie Rules in the United States officially started back in 1996 with two teams from the Midwest. Over the past four years the USAFL, or United States Australian Football League, has grown by leaps and bounds, and now boasts over 40 clubs spread throughout several States. For a club near you check out USAFL TEAM LISTS

The Teams
Australian Rules Football is definitely a team sport. Professional games in Australia require teams to field 18 players each.....for a total of 36 players on the ground at once! Positions on the field resemble soccer, with on-ballers, defenders, and forwards. What Americans might find most appealing is that Aussie Rules lends itself to players of all sizes. In Australia's professional league, players range in height from 5'4 all the way up to 6'10.

The Field
Aussie Rules is played on cricket ovals; thus, there are no standard dimensions for a football field (usually called "ground" or "paddock"). The field should be an oval between 135 and 185 meters in length and 110 and 155 meters in width. (The Melbourne Cricket Ground is considered an ideal surface; its dimensions are 165m length by 135m width.) The boundary is marked with a white line drawn a few meters from the stands.

The History of Our Game
The history of Australian Rules Football is quite interesting. It is one of the many existing forms of football, with roots traceable from early forms of Rugby and Gaelic football, but it is uniquely Australian. Its rules were first codified in 1858, and probably predate all other modern forms of football, such as American, Canadian, Rugby Union and League, Association (Soccer) and Gaelic football. Today it is a multi-million dollar business, with a National Competition and numerous smaller leagues. Interest in the game is generally at an all time high within and outside Australia, yet despite this, some parts of Australia are still lukewarm in support of their team in the AFL, and the game has yet to take a firm hold overseas.

How did it all start?
Englishmen were first settled in Australia by force in 1788, when the First Fleet of "transported" English convicts arrived at what is now known as Sydney Harbour, sentenced to be exiled to the far end of the earth for life. They and those who followed, forced or not, doubtless brought their own hometown versions of football with them.

Since Roman times, games involving kicking around small objects, usually leftover livestock bladders, had been played all over Europe, probably spread by the Romans themselves. In the British Isles, these evolved into the village mellays of the Middle Ages (any resemblance to the French and English word melee is totally intentional), annual brutal contests at something that usually vaguely resembled modern soccer, but with entire towns as opposing sides and the field sometimes occupying the miles between their town greens. First goal usually won, and the injuries themselves would probably have limited them to an annual event.

... a Frenchman watching a game at Derby exclaimed that if Englishmen called this playing it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting.
--- Laurence Montague, late of the Guardian of Manchester, in Encyclopedia Britannica.

By the early 19th century, increased leisure time due to the Industrial Revolution led to more regular and less violent sport, and thus began demand for standard rules for football. However, these rules took most of the century to work out, especially since students at various "public" schools (private boarding schools for gentry-in-training) such as Rugby and Eton developed games of their own to play on campus. No one seems to have thought of picking up the football until William Webb Ellis ignored the rules at Rugby in 1823, but it caught on fairly quickly.

The discoveries of gold in California in 1849 were followed by strikes in central Victoria in 1851. British and Irish prospectors rushed in to join the locals, all the "diggers" bringing their own variations on the theme of football into the gold fields. Australian football probably began as the compromise pickup games played by the diggers, incorporating features of Rugby, soccer and Irish games. But it took the likes of Thomas Wentworth Wills to say finally, "We shall have a game of our own."

Wills' father Horatio was the first European to settle in Ararat western Victoria, where the hills reminded him of the story of Noah landing the Ark as the Deluge receded. He was also the only settler who refused to evict the local Djabwurrung people from his land, and young Tom absorbed their culture alongside that of his fellow immigrants. One of the things they taught him was a game they called marn grook, a sort of keep-away game played with a stuffed or inflated opossum skin which featured the leaping overhead catch used today in taking high marks.

Horatio wanted his son to have the best education available, so he sent Tom away to boarding schools when the time came, first in Melbourne, then to Rugby School in England, where he proved himself as a scholar and athlete, captaining the cricket and football teams. He returned in 1856 with an outstanding sporting background on two continents, taught his state cricket side everything he learned in England, and the next summer led them to their first ever win over New South Wales.

Wills was convinced that the cricketers would improve further if they had something to do during the winter months, and he eventually convinced the cricketers that "a game of our own" was just the thing to maintain their fitness. The Melbourne Football Club was founded August 7, 1858, as an adjunct of the Melbourne Cricket Club; it was the first football club in Australia, and one of the first anywhere. The first game was played that very day, as two private schools, Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College, spent the day on the Richmond Paddock (just outside the present Melbourne Cricket Ground). Each team scored a goal that first day; the game was resumed every other Saturday for the next four weekends until it was called a draw on September 4th, after no further goals were scored. (The State Library of Victoria has compiled some interesting research on the origins of "Victorian Rules Football.")

The new game spread fairly quickly, with help from the founders. Wills wrote a new set of rules for football the next year, along with associates H. C. A. "Coldy" Harrison, W. J. Hammersley and J. B. Thompson. Harrison founded the club in his hometown of Geelong that same year, and others throughout Victoria (including Carlton) were well established by the time the American Civil War was over. Each had its own book of laws, similar only in generalities: irregular paddocks incorporating trees and other obstacles, and spectators, no behind posts, no running with the ball, no handpass, no high marks (blokes could get hurt landing on surfaces like this), and more than a vague resemblance to the ancient mellays. To facilitate competition between clubs, the fathers of the game and the clubs wrote a common set of rules in 1866, incorporating most of the features of the game we know today. Many of these, like the high mark, just happened to suit Harrison's athletic talents, which would have been well suited to basketball.

Several of the more successful clubs banded together into the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in 1877. Through the rest of the century, the game spread along the southern coasts of Australia, spawning state leagues in what are now South and Western Australia and began attracting unprecedented crowds in the tens of thousands. (No one thought of asking these people for money until Carlton began charging admission at the turn of the century.) In any event, the issue of professional players drove the next major development. On October 2, 1896, eight leading Melbourne-area clubs (Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne, St. Kilda, South Melbourne) broke away to found the Victorian Football League (VFL), the predecessor of the current national league. (In 1997, the VFA assumed the VFL's identity.)