Aussie Rules season is upon us!

It's rare that I get to enjoy my favorite sport this early in the calendar year. The men haven't even begun their pre-season yet - that's still three weeks away. But this season marks the inaugural campaign of the AFLW, the women's version of the top professional Australian Football League.

And after a first weekend of games between the eight teams involved (eight of the eighteen mens' teams bid and won the right to have synergistic women's clubs alongside), everyone involved should be insanely pleased with the way the product was accepted by the public.

The best example was the first one, the opening game between longtime rivals Carlton and Collingwood on Friday night, AEDT. (They're currently eighteen hours ahead of us, so a 7:45 kickoff there was not only still daylight down under, where it's still summer, but translated to a 1:45 a.m. start time for those of me in the Mountain time zone here in the U.S. And yes, I set my alarm.)

The match was originally scheduled for a small, community venue that seats two thousand people, which gives a sense of what the AFL was expecting for interest in the product. The cost of attendance was free, with a possible small parking fee depending on where the field involved was located. With the build-up to the season approaching, it became evident that they might very well exceed that capacity, so they moved it to Ikon Park, which seats twenty thousand. Surely THAT would cover any eventuality.  

Whoops. Not quite.

It turns out that at eight p.m., the fire marshall demanded that the AFL close the gates, with an overflow attendance of 24,500 patrons inside and another few thousand outside, to whom AFL CEO Gillan McLaughlin had to go apologize for. (Personally, I don't see why - they'd already done everything they thought was necessary to accommodate the crowd!) Entrance to the AFLW games is free, and except for parking at sites where it's scarce, so is the parking.

The other three games this weekend were also sellouts in the six to fifteen thousand range, leaving the AFL with the pleasant problem of trying to move future games on the seven-week fixture to more appropriate sites. The quality of play was at least as good as I expected, and is reminiscent of watching women's college basketball: the intelligence of play was clearly there, the tactics were solid, but the athleticism wasn't as impressive as the men's game. The games are shorter, and the scores are lower, but none of the games were competitive: the scores were 46-11, 48-12, 44-12, and 25-10 (and that was close because of the horrid weather). If that stays the norm, it'll be as hard to stay involved as it is any other time you have a wide range of team quality. U Conn is on the verge of its 100th straight win, which makes for boring games, but the rest of women's teams are much more balanced.

As for the men, they start their preseason in three weeks. The season itself starts on March 23rd, with the finals series beginning in September. I'll post a season preview in mid-March, to try and get y'all intrigued, but most experts are expecting this year's Grand Final to be a rematch of last year's prelim final between the up-and-coming GWS Giants and the now-champion Western Bulldogs, a game that the Doggies won 89-83 in one of the best games of the year in Sydney. Other title contenders include Geelong, Adelaide, West Coast and Sydney,