Australian Football Association of North America
sports governing body
The Australian Football Association of North America (AFANA) is a non-profit organization that formed out of a 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.
Early history
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.
“Australian Football Association of North America” enters the record as sports governing body. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Australian, Football and Association can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4824178. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1995 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Australian Football Association of North America” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.