Around midnight in the parking lot of a Denver bar a quarter century ago, the Colorado version of a classic Australian sport was born.

Paul Renouf and his buddies were watching the Australian Football League’s Grand Final that night and decided to have a kick under the light poles at halftime of footy’s Super Bowl.

And thus the seeds of the Denver Bulldogs were planted.

“We didn’t ever plan to start a team,” Renouf said. “… From that, here 25 years later, we have a women’s team, two or three men’s teams, teams we take to nationals, and over 100 players traveling to tournaments.

“It steamrolled. People love it. And a lot of people who came out to play at the beginning stayed. Now this thing we started that was just to go play a game of footy has turned into a club, a culture and a community.”

The Bulldogs’ first official game was at a tournament in California in 1999.

In the time since, they’ve become the most successful club in the United States Australian Football League, winning eight Division I national titles on the men’s side and six more for the women, whose team was founded in 2008.

The club’s namesake is the Western Bulldogs, an Australian Football League professional club. It was there that Melbourne native Renouf secured Denver’s original jerseys, giving the Bulldogs a tangible brand to compete in the physical, fast-paced game that’s immensely popular Down Under.

“I happened to stop by the club one weekend when I was down there on a business trip in Melbourne,” Renouf recalled. “I popped over to the Western Bulldogs headquarters, told them we started up a team in Denver, showed them a picture of us. They said, ‘Ah, great!’ And they sent me down to the equipment guy and said, ‘See what you can give this fella.’

“I took two big nylon sacks of probably about 30 used jerseys back home on my flight. The rest is history.”

Emergence of local footy

The Bulldogs formed a few years after the genesis of the USAFL in 1996, with the league’s first game featuring clubs from Cincinnati and Louisville. The first USAFL national tournament was held the following year and soon transformed into a critical driver of the league’s explosive development.

“(Nationals) was really the magnet for the growth of the league because teams were formed during the year, would play some pickup games, ad hoc tournaments and things like that, but the goal for all the clubs was to get a big enough team to go to nationals,” said Rich Mann, one of the league’s founders and a former Bulldogs player.

“The league does regional qualifiers throughout the year, it has some traditional tournaments and invitationals that teams will go to, but ultimately every team is gearing themselves up to try to win nationals. At our first nationals in Cincinnati, we had five teams. By 2000, only our fourth nationals, we had 16 clubs.”

The Bulldogs won their first men’s Division I national title in 2000, four-peated from 2002-05, and added crowns in ’07, ’09 and ’11. The Bulldogs Women ripped off six straight Division I titles from 2010-15. That 15-year run of unprecedented success swelled the club’s numbers. A handful of premier USAFL players, such as Mann, even moved to Denver to join.

That expansion came despite the Bulldogs’ challenges with scheduling regular games against other USAFL opponents. To make up for that, the club started the Colorado League in 2017. The local circuit consists of teams filled with Bulldogs that compete to claim the Colorado Cup. In recent years, games against the Denver Gaels, a Gaelic football club, also filled in the scheduling gaps.

The Bulldogs currently have annual home-and-away, round-robin series scheduled with clubs in San Francisco and Austin (those two teams visited Denver on Sept. 21) as well as rotating trips with clubs from Oklahoma and Dallas. Besides that, they must do what they can to prepare themselves for nationals via training and intrasquad games.

“There’s been years we’ve had five games (in Denver), there’s been years where we’ve had one game. For the most part, we’re traveling to other cities,” Bulldogs president Dylan Braun said. “For me, the main goal outside of playing is growing the sport. When you ask anyone in the U.S. about Aussie rules football, they’ll usually go, ‘You mean like rugby?’ So it’s about more awareness of the sport and recruiting more top-tier athletes to the club.”

The Bulldogs currently have about 120 members. The men’s teams have a large Australian representation, although USAFL rules limit each roster to a maximum of 50% non-Americans. The Bulldogs Women are mostly Americans, however.

No matter what an individual’s background or experience, Shay Sulisz — a former professional soccer player and the lone Aussie on the women’s team — emphasizes “no one’s too serious about themselves, and everyone is supportive of people from all walks of life when they join the Bulldogs community.”

“No matter where they come from, or how old they are, or what their goals in the sport are, there’s a lot of support and camaraderie there,” Sulisz said. “Because this isn’t just sport — it’s an important social network, too.”

That kinship comes with a price tag that amounts to around a couple thousand dollars annually for each player when totaling club dues ($260 for returners), league/tournament registration fees and travel costs.

“It’s a pretty expensive little hobby to go get bruised up and injured out there,” Braun laughed, “but for us who are passionate about the sport, it’s totally worth it.”

Future of the Bulldogs

The Bulldogs’ big payoff comes next weekend in Austin, where two men’s teams (Division I and Division IV) plus the women are competing at the 2024 USAFL Nationals at Onion Creek Sports Park.

The women — who beat a fellow powerhouse in Golden Gate during the Iron Maidens’ trip to Colorado in September — will be one of the favorites in Division I. And the men’s Division I team also has a chance to make a deep run, though they’ll likely have to topple the three-time defending champion Austin Crows in order to lift the trophy for the first time since 2011. Austin dominated Denver in September.

Beyond the Bulldogs’ championship chances this fall, there are improvements to the club that are top-of-mind for its leadership.

They want stable, full-time coaches instead of the player-coaches they’ve had to rely on for much of the club’s history.

“Right now, we just really struggle to find people who know the game and who don’t play anymore to volunteer so much of their time to coach,” said Hallie Kastanek, who has played for the Bulldogs Women since 2009. “It’s hard to juggle coaching while also being fully focused on training and playing in the games.”

Kastanek is one of the women’s player-coaches this year along with Alison Leonard. They are two of the six national team players on the roster. Without a large contingent of Australians, they place a heavy emphasis on recruiting in order to be able to field a reserves team.

“We have to continue to find the woman who just graduated from a local college who played soccer and is looking for that next thing, or someone like me who played college basketball and fouled out a lot, and was like, ‘There’s got to be something else,’” Kastanek said.

“This sport is perfect for anyone who grew up playing a bunch of sports. Maybe they played two or three sports in high school, really enjoyed playing at the college level in something, or really excelled at the club or intramural level in college, and they’re looking for an athletic community they can be a part of for 15 to 20 years after that. We have to find those athletes.”

Outside of coaching and roster sizes, field availability remains the Bulldogs’ biggest challenge.

The club trains at Washington Heights Park and Ray Ross Park. Because of the enormous size of a footy oval — it doesn’t have fixed dimensions, but it’s typically around 160 yards long and about 120 yards wide — the Bulldogs usually play across multiple soccer fields. A true home venue remains one of Braun’s long-term goals, but that’s a tall financial task.

“We’d love to have lights on our fields, because we train in the evening, after (youth teams) practice,” said Steve Noble, a former club president and player. “We are short on sunlight early in the season, and late in it. In the fall when we’re prepping for our national tournament, we have to train on baseball fields. That’s the best option we have available.”

That obstacle is why Mann says the sport’s metro model has come into fashion.

While traditional footy is played on a huge oval with 18 players on each team, metro footy is a condensed version with nine-a-side on a smaller, soccer-sized field. That version, which is what the Bulldogs play in the Colorado League, is even more fast-paced and higher scoring.

“If we go nine-a-side, we can play on soccer fields, rugby fields, we can go onto college campuses, we’ve got so many more lights and stadiums available to us,” Mann said. “It’s becoming a bit of a side-focus for the USAFL, and there’s the potential for a nine-a-side national tournament.”

Metro footy, Mann says, could be the model for the sport to take its American profile to the next level via a semi-professional barnstorming tour similar to what the Premier Lacrosse League has done.

“You could do a condensed tour around America with like four teams made of recently retired players from Australia as well as your best American players, and we’d find a window in the summer and market it to ESPN or whatever (sports network),” Mann said. “The teams would go into a city, play a doubleheader, and the next week they’d move on to another city in a condensed nine-, 10-week season.

“If cornhole can get on ESPN, I don’t see why we can’t.”

Whatever the future holds for footy in America, the Bulldogs believe they’ll be a central part of it.

“All of our future growth is rooted in our foundation, and the founders of the club like (Renouf) who are still involved,” Alison Leonard said. “Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we’re going to still be here playing. And along our ongoing evolution, we want to continue to be a place where everyone feels welcome and can find an amazing community through sport.”

Originally Published: October 5, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.