A 16-year-old from Lindisfarne has been selected for Australia’s under 18s gridiron team.
Jed Burgess will travel to Sydney on July 4 for a five-day training camp at a sports academy before flying to Auckland on July 9.
He will take the field on July 11 when Australia faces New Zealand in an international showdown.
Burgess said he couldn’t narrow down just one thing which drew him to American football over other more popular sports in Tasmania.
“It’s just my favourite sport in the world, it’s just everything to me really,” he told Pulse.
His long-term dream is to one day play in the NFL, and he’d be the first Tasmanian to do so.
Burgess plays for the Hobart Knights in a senior men’s league and has only been playing organised gridiron for around two years.
He first got into the sport through a school mate at Mackillop Catholic College and has been following the NFL since 2022.
Most of his school mates are also hooked on the game, running a fantasy football league together and setting alarms to watch NFL games at around 3am on Monday mornings during the season.
Burgess said he spotted an expression of interest form on the national team’s Facebook page and decided to put himself forward.
“I filled that all out and then submitted some films, so some highlights of me playing from my past season down here in Hobart and sent that off to them,” he said.
“They actually contacted some of my teammates who’ve been in the Australia team in previous years, they put in a good word and then yeah, they took me into the team.”
Off the field, Burgess and the Knights are working to grow the game locally.
The club is looking to launch its own league in Hobart this year, removing the need to travel to Launceston for matches.
The Knights train and play home games at Calvin Christian School in Kingston and encouraged anyone interested in trying gridiron to visit the club’s website at www.knights-football.com.
