Girls win Unity Cup
The Aussie Rules Unity Cup 2017 was played out between eight female teams and 12 male teams representing 14 diverse communities from Melbourne and regional Victoria. 
The Jewish teams, both male and female did our community proud with excellent footy skills and great team mateship as is needed for AFL 9’s. At the end of Round 8, both the Jew Crew Male and Female teams were the only undefeated teams in the competition.
The only challenge the girls were presented with was how to display their triple digit scores on the two digit scoreboards! Veteran coach, Joel Kuperholz was very proud of his team, ‘Every girl demonstrated great capability in every position – the difficulty was that the backline got almost as much rest as the bench! But seriously, each girl demonstrated such great ability and attitude, they were all standouts and a pleasure to coach in a game that most of them had only just learned either at training last week or just that morning!’
Unfortunately things didn’t go quite as smoothly for the boys. Despite beating every team convincingly in the 8 rounds, they faced off against Islamic Council of Victoria in the semi final and noticed they were now fielding a team made up from the best players of other teams.
The Jew Crew still managed to beat them. Their concerns were confirmed when they faced off in the Grand Final against many of the same players who were then playing for Newport Islamic Society.
The Jew Crew Coach and Team Manager, Ryan Kuperholz explained, “We weren’t upset at losing, we were upset at losing in those circumstances. It was a disappointing finish to what had otherwise been an awesome event. I appreciated my boys playing well and playing fair right up to the end.”
Sport teaches us about life.