GRASSROOTS
The British American Football Association is set to use its new strategy to embrace the sport’s recent rise in popularity
GRASSROOTS TOUCHDOWN FOOTBALL
the sport of American football has been indelibly imprinted in the consciousness of the British sporting public. The game aired on a then fledgling
E
Channel 4 in the days before multi- channels offering extensive live sports coverage and 24 hour rolling sports news. As a result of this and allied to a culture that was increasingly exposed to and devouring, various forms of
Below: The 2011-2012 University National Champions – the Portsmouth Destroyers – charge onto the pitch
ver since the National Foot- ball League’s (NFL) Washington Redskins took on the Miami Dol- phins in Super Bowl XVII in 1983,
Americana, from television programmes to fast food and soft drinks – American football struck a chord. The sport quickly took hold across the
UK. Teams were set up and many were soon playing in front of crowds whose numbers were in the thousands. A col- legiate league started across British universities and the stellar cast of the NFL – Dan Marino, ‘The Refrigerator’ and Jerry Rice – became household names. However, the sport soon started to
dip from its participatory highs and wide audience. Cultural changes, in particular relating to the re-emergence of domestic sports on television, and increased fo- cus and investment from other national governing bodies, meant that American football was getting squeezed and the
structure underpinning the domestic game was not sufficiently robust to sus- tain the sport during this period. At a national level the sport was run
by leagues with little in the way of a de- velopment agenda and at grassroots level most teams existed without a support- ing club infrastructure where the next generation of players would be groomed. As teams fell by the wayside there were knock on effects for leagues and the overall management of the game. Into this vacuum the British American
Football Association (BAFA) arrived. Rec- ognised as the national governing body for the sport, the association existed as an umbrella organisation to bring together the different elements of the sport, which existed as separate entities.
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Issue 3 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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