The Swans, a fledgling Australian Rules football club, train in the Fielding Public School gym for their upcoming season.
The Swans come out to play in springtime. But their game might seem a little unfamiliar to sports fans and birdwatchers alike, because these Swans play Australian Rules football.
Only two years old, this volunteer-run football club is relatively new – and unknown – in Ottawa. But the game isn’t just for Aussie expats wanting a taste of home. Canadians are singing the Swan song, too.
Centretown resident and Swans assistant coach Chris MacLean grew up on Canadian popular sports such as hockey and basketball. Then MacLean fell in love with footy.
So how would he describe the game to those who know nothing about Aussie Rules?
“I tend to tell them it’s a cross between rugby, soccer and hockey and grid iron,” he says. “I try to relate it back to North American sports because a lot of people are familiar with those.”
MacLean joined the Swans mid-season last year and says the game combines the contact, speed, hand-eye co-ordination, jumping skills and team work of the other sports he has played.
The style of the game traces back to early forms of Gaelic football and rugby.
With an oval ball on an oval field, the aim of the 18 Swans in their red and white jerseys is to specky, handball, mark, and kick the ball through the four white goal posts of the opposing end.
According to vice president of sponsorship Richard Keane, club numbers are growing.
Until the Swans came along some sports enthusiasts found there wasn’t a summer sport they could really get into and Australian Rules offers something new and different.
“Canadians have responded very well,” he says. “Just the sheer numbers that we’ve got this year is scary.”
But while the club tries to build the sport’s popularity on Canadian soil, the ties to footy’s Australian home land are still strong.
They set up the Victoria Wildfire Appeal as part of the Canadian Red Cross, a fund for donations for the victims of the wildfires that engulfed the south of the country earlier this year.
Swans president Ray Kaduck says that it was the obvious thing to do considering the strong affinity Canadians and Australians share.
“It was hard to sit there and watch the television and see the magnitude of the disaster and not do something,” he says. “It’s not a thing that a lot of thought went into, it was a very basic reaction.”
Keane says that to date the club has raised about $2,000 for the appeal. But as a non-profit and volunteer-run club, finding funds to cover the team’s own day-to-day expenses remains an issue, and Kaduck says that there is more that needs to be built up than the fan base and club memberships.
“Anything we want we have to make,” Kaduck says. “If we want goal posts, we have to make them, and we have to make boundary lines for the grounds to play on.”
As the only Ottawa team in the 10-team Ontario Football League, players travel – mostly self-funded – to Hamilton, Guelph and Toronto for their away games. The Swans are also helping to train a team from the Montreal area to add a close competitor in the OFL.
The club may be new and the sport a little different; the ugly duckling of North American sports perhaps.
But the club is sure that with teamwork and commitment, they can grow to be the graceful and dominant Swans in the OFL and raise the profile of Australian Rules Football in Ottawa’s sports scene.
“If you’re a team, you can make up for a lot of stuff,” MacLean says. “If the guys are willing to give their all for the person next to him, then success will come.”