Australian Football Association of North America

The Australian Football Association of North America (AFANA) is a non-profit organization that formed out of the campaign to save television coverage of Australian rules football in the United States and Canada in 1996. AFANA has an emphasis on the fan, and aims to help the game to develop and to improve its exposure in North America, including better TV coverage.

AFANA was co-founded by three members of the 1995-1996 campaign: Richard Lipp of Kansas City, Wade Hinkle of Dallas, and Rob de Santos (then of Vienna, WV) when it was learned that the sport had no TV coverage for the 1996 season. The campaign was ultimately successful and coverage began on the new ESPN2 ("the deuce") network in June. The network declined to cover the Grand Final in 1996. The AFL tried to find another network but in the end turned to AFANA and the Australian American Chamber of Commerce of Southern California. The two organizations successfully put the game on the air on satellite in the USA and Canada in just 8 days. This firmly established AFANA. The following year, coverage continued on ESPN. Again, problems with the Grand Final occurred when ESPN delayed the broadcast 95 minutes (due to live baseball) on just 36 hours notice after repeated assurances that the game would be live. Despite an intense lobbying effort, ESPN did not budge. The relationship between the Australian Football League, AFANA, and ESPN continued to be strained and after the 1997 season, the network again dropped the sport. With AFANA's help, the sport moved to the new Fox Sports World channel the following year.

The organization has played a part in every effort to keep TV coverage since its founding including network changes in 1998, 2007, 2009, and 2012. In 2004, Fox announced the channel was changing names to Fox Soccer Channel and would eventually drop all non-soccer coverage. AFANA successfully lobbied for the coverage to continue into the 2006 season. The following year resulted in a major success of the lobby group with the televising of live AFL matches beginning in 2007 by Setanta Sports (USA). Current TV coverage is again on Fox networks including Fox Sports 2 and Fox Soccer Plus, a premium network.

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