Opinion Vent & Offtopic

[Big Red Machine]

You think it's a long wait between AFL games?

College Football 25 (Formally NCAA Football) is out on early access from Tuesday morning, I've been waiting nearly 11 goddamn years for it to come back.

The series went away due to some lawsuits around paying 'amateur' university students for their name and likeness.

What's relevant to Gold Coast is that it'll have a create a team function and i've already got plans in place for a GC Suns branded school, I'll share screenshots as soon as I get it up and running.

 

[TheGoldPersons]

Righto not sure where to post my experience for the Perth trip so might as well do it here, going off memory so will probably forgotten several things.

You get access to Virgin lounge at both Coolangatta and Perth
Players and staff sit in front, fans at back - There were supposedly 50 tickets available and most were sold but some people pulled out so there were spare seats, Evans was helpful and got some people to move around to create more space. Some players meet up with the fans just before takeoff, from memory there was Jeffrey, Powell, Long and Flanders

We then take a shuttle from the airport directly to Optus for the captain's run session. We get to walk through the away rooms, we then get an quick Q&A with one of the stats guys, can't remember his name but he was from Richmond with Damien. Talked about a few stats for the season, the obvious being our stats being way down in away games and us being 2nd in league for i50s but 2nd worst for efficiency.

Then shuttle to hotel, players stay at different hotel. Apparently the cost for everyone to be at the 1 place would've been too much. Given a merch pack with a shirt, the hospitality scarf, Sixt book and pen. Free time for the rest of the day.

Friday morning there is a Q&A with Mark Evans and Wayne Campbell. Evans talked about how we had to fight hard to get a charted flight from Coolangatta instead of flying from Brisbane, AFL eventually relented and allowed but it's up to the Suns to make it financially viable. Talked about fairness and competitive compared to Victorian clubs. An idea from Fremantle was to force a Victorian club to host a host game in Perth due to the difference in travel. There is interest on both sides for Dusty to come here.

Free time for a few hours.

Shuttle to Optus and have a prematch function at the Camfield, Evans and Bob East were there. We then go into the guard of honour on the field, I got to hold the banner. We've missed the first 5 or so minutes of the game but we didn't know how to get to the corporate boxes. If the team won, we got to go into the rooms but everyone stayed due to how close the game was.

We lost the game then shuttled straight to the airport, at first they wouldn't let us into the lounge due to the flight technically being tomorrow at 12:05 but East and Evans pushed hard to let us in. Arrive at Coolangatta at 6 or so.

Apart from us losing the game, I'm very happy with the experience.