National Sporting Capital

Melbourne is unofficially referred to as the sporting capital of Australia. Many major sporting events are held here including the Australian Open, Melbourne Cup, Australian Formula One Grand Prix, AFL (Footy) Final, and the Olympic Games in 1956 to name a few. There are other events as well, and in the 6 months that we've been here, we've noticed that the Aussies do love their sport. Of course the interesting thing is that there is essentially no sport at the high school and university level -- it's all club based. This is one of the reasons why I believe it has been so challenging for me to find a job.

On Friday, we had plans to meet up with one of my former athletes from UNC, Kendall Fletcher. Kendall plays for the Victory, the women's professional soccer team here in Melbourne. The men's team is called the Victory as well, and due to her connections, Kendall unexpectedly hooked us up with tickets to watch the men's Victory team play the Central Coast Mariners on Friday night. It was a really good game, as the Mariners were in first place in the league and Melbourne had been struggling a bit, tying in their last 3 contests. The team plays at a soccer specific stadium, AAMI Park, with a pretty sweet view of the CBD.

Crazy-looking skies over the Melbourne Victory game!

Scarves with your favorite team's name on them are very popular here.

We had dinner beforehand at Mexicali Rose, and I would rate the food as pretty decent Mexican. More traditional than Mamasita, similar price range, but the margarita wasn't quite as good. :)

Saturday we had plans to take a long drive down to check out the Latrobe Valley Water Ski Club. Erik and I are considering joining the club so that we have a place to water ski over the next few years. They were having a competition and mentioned that it would be a great weekend to come down. The drive took about 2 hours and certainly got us out into the countryside of Victoria. There were kangaroo signs along the side of the road during much of our drive. The lake is a pretty good set up for skiing, and they have a club boat, a slalom course, a jump ramp, and a smaller "back" lake that they plan to put a mini-course on next season. It is VERY expensive to join compared to what we paid to ski on the Severn River back home, which was a mere $25 a season and boat gas. We also had fantastic people to ski with in Maryland (shout out to Tom and Tim if you are reading this!), who provided beautiful boats for us to ski behind (sorry Tim, Tom wins out here...the Malibu is my favorite boat on the Severn!). The people were great and we actually ran into a guy who used to work at Coble Ski School with Erik many years ago...what a small world! We are still contemplating joining due to the costs and also the distance from our house. Unfortunately it's quite far from where we live and we might only get down there to ski once or twice a month. However, we can camp onsite, so if we go down there to ski we can stay for the weekend and get a good number of sets in!

Sunday I had to work. That's right, I said work! Technically I wasn't getting paid though. I am going to be teaching Sports First Aid and Sports Trainer courses for Sports Medicine Australia over the next few weeks, so I went to observe a Sports Trainer course to see how it compared to my Sports Medicine classes back in the States. It was surprisingly similar in many ways, except that they tape (or STRAP!) the ankle a bit differently than I have learned, so teaching that to students will be a small challenge. I start teaching a week from today, and I am excited and a bit nervous to get back into the classroom because it's been about 9 months since I last taught students!