AILSA CHANG, HOST:
OK, while most sports fans are watching Major League Baseball playoffs this weekend, there is another championship happening - the U.S. Australian Football League national title in Tucson, Arizona. Teams from all across the country will try to get the ball through the big sticks and take home the trophy. This is the sport of Australian rules football, or footy. And reporter Buffy Gorrilla explains the basics.
BUFFY GORRILLA: You can smell fall in the air. Little kids scramble after soccer balls, but on a corner field in a Philadelphia city park, the Philly Hawks arrive for their regular night of footy training.
JON LORING: All right, gang, let's just bring it in. We're going to do our warmups here.
GORRILLA: Standing in front of a small group of men and women, head coach Jon Loring has a message for his Australian rules football squad.
LORING: We have a really good team going into nationals, so we just got to finish it off and just get as many kicks in as possible. So we'll have two lines here, one group there, just one group there - just work on this lane.
GORRILLA: Loring began playing Aussie rules football in 1999, when a coach started a club in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Since then, he's been devoted to this sport that seems impossible to describe.
UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER #1: There's, like, no comparison. It's not like rugby or American football where it's, like, in lines.
UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER #2: It's like a mashup of rugby, basketball, soccer and just pure chaos. But it's a massive field.
UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER #3: I usually describe it as kind of a lot of sports just came together to create the best sport ever.
LORING: Yeah, good hands. Yeah, juice inside. Yeah. You have Deej (ph). You have Deej.
GORRILLA: DJ Wirth is the captain and midfielder for the Hawks. He grew up playing football and soccer. But during the pandemic, he discovered something new.
DJ WIRTH: AFL was one of the only sports that was still going full time because of the - you know, how Australia was dealing with the pandemic. So there was a lot on TV and kind of got really into it, found out there was a team, came out and really enjoyed it.
GORRILLA: The story of how the best sport ever, aka Aussie rules football, arrived in the U.S. kicks off in the late '90s. These days, 50 clubs, both men's and women's, are sprinkled from coast to coast. So there's some serious competition for nationals.
When you tell people that you play this sport, what is their reaction?
WIRTH: Usually some blank stares.
GORRILLA: Here are some of the AFL basics. There are 18 players on each side. You need to learn terms like mark, bump, speccy, handball, run and bounce. Wirth says the sport can take some getting used to, especially if you grew up playing traditional American sports.
WIRTH: It's a little weird at first, learning to kick the ball.
GORRILLA: Footy uses more of a drop kick, and the ball is like an American football with rounded ends and fewer laces. There's no throwing or passing.
WIRTH: You have to handball it. So it takes a little time. It's definitely the hardest part coming to the game is kind of learning those rules that are, you know, quite literally foreign.
GORRILLA: Athletes have to be fit. The oval-shaped pitch is longer and wider than a football field. There's tackling without pads. The shorts are short, and the tops are usually sleeveless. The Hawks have a small but mighty women's side, captained by a real Australian, Caitlin Tilsed.
CAITLIN TILSED: I really love, like, helping people out, and I feel like one of my strengths is my, like, footy IQ. So if I can share that to other people so, No. 1, they, like, understand the game more, No. 2, it means we play better as a team.
GORRILLA: And it must be working. After a successful season, the Hawks are one of the teams heading to nationals. But nationals aside, for Wirth, it's what happens off the field.
WIRTH: It's a great time. Obviously, we want to win, but we always have a blast.
GORRILLA: All these teams are welcoming new players. The season starts in April. For NPR News, I'm Buffy Gorrilla.
WIRTH: All right, Hawks on three - one, two, three.
UNIDENTIFIED PLAYERS: Hawks.
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