The Baltic League: A Growing Hub for American Football

We know the sport of football is growing here in America as more and more people are starting to enjoy it, but it's growing around the world as well, and even in some spots you might not know of.

We have a guest today that's calling from the Baltic region to tell us all about football in their area, and he's up in just a moment to tell us all about it.

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And today I.

Our episode is coming from around the world in the Baltic Sea region, I believe in Estonia.

And our guest is James Baxenfield.

James, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Thank you very much for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, this is a pretty cool thing.

I saw you had some correspondence with Arnie Chapman of the Sports History Network, and you're going to be thinking about starting a podcast for football in the Baltic, you know, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about that project and, you know, where your plans are going with that?

Oh, absolutely.

Well, yes, the.

The podcast is starting.

It'll be go.

It'll be launching on the 1st of December, and the first episodes are already recorded.

It'll be a monthly podcast looking into different aspects of the history of American football in the Baltic region and among the Baltic nations, including the diasporas.

Wow.

Okay.

That.

That is really cool.

Now, you have to excuse me, and I'm probably speaking for.

For everybody that's listening here in the States, you know, American football played in the Baltic region, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, Estonia, where you're at, that is a former USSR province or republic, you know, part of the USSR at one time.

We don't really think of American football being played, you know, in that part of the world.

So why don't you tell us a little about, you know, how people feel about American football there.

So, yes, football came here in the.

And since then it's been a small sport.

It's still very much a niche sport in many respects, but growing constantly.

Oh, okay, so.

So the late 80s, you know, it's under Soviet control now.

How.

How did things like players get equipment?

Were they fully equipped, like.

Like, we know a modern football player now, or were they playing more of like a tag or flag football?

Yeah, most of it began with various forms of tag football.

And you see a familiar pattern these in.

So.

And there's a pattern that you see in other parts of Europe or other places around the world where the game starts to develop, where quite often you have players using hockey gear or adapted helmets from different sports, this sort of thing.

It took a while for the teams to become fully equipped, but there's quite a few of them in the region now.

Well, that, I mean, that's really quite interesting because if you, you know, people that listen to this show, we know we.

We have experts coming on talking about American football history, you know, here in the States, and how guys just grabbed whatever they could.

You know, they'd grabbed, you know, baseball equipment, they'd play, you know, grab their old sweaters, anything they could, you know, farm equipment, their farm garments that they would wear just to protect them as they're doing some.

Some heavy labors.

Things work, you know, that's what they're wearing on the football field.

It sounds much the same here in, you know, the 20th century and 21st century happened in your part of the world where people are grabbing their hockey gear and.

And, you know, shoulder pads and stuff from.

From other sports.

That's pretty cool.

That's very interesting.

It is, yes.

It seems to be a familiar pattern in pretty much everywhere the game takes hold.

Yeah, and it's also, you know, very likened to where, because I know myself, you know, being exposed to the sport from birth, basically living in Western Pennsylvania, you know, I can remember on the playgrounds, even in first grade and, you know, early elementary school, we would be on the playgrounds playing tag football and flag football and sometimes tackle football and having our.

Our teachers yell at us for taking each other ground and getting the bruised elbows and skin, knees and everything.

But, you know, sounds very much like the development of folks there in your part of the world.

That are getting accustomed to the game of American football?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay, so is there like some, some organized leagues playing in local teams or how is this set up the most popular level of football in Estonia?

Okay, absolutely.

Yes, there are certainly teams.

They're mostly located in the largest cities.

And actually currently, at the moment, the largest competition involves all three of the Baltic states.

The Baltic League is currently coming to the end of its regular season going into the.

The final quite soon, actually.

Oh, okay.

So it's right on parallel season with almost like the Canadian football as they're getting ready for their.

Their grade cup.

You folks are getting ready for your.

For your championship series.

So what do they call the.

The championship game or the championship series over there?

So it's the Baltic League.

The.

And they're competing for the Baltic League Cup.

Okay, all right, well, that's very appropriate name.

You have to reach too far for that to recognize what's going on.

That's.

That's really cool.

So who.

So who are the big favorite teams this year?

Who's.

Who's in competition this year?

Well, I'll give you a quick rundown of the teams that we have in there currently.

Yeah, certainly.

So from Estonia we have the Tartu Titans, From Latvia, the Rig Burrs.

And Lithuania has the most teams currently represented.

We have the Vilnius Iron Wolves, the Cornus Jukes and the Klaipeda Coronians.

Karonians is the name of a tribe that lived in the region during the medieval period, associated with piracy and various other things in the coastal area.

So sort of like our Buccaneers here in the NFL.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good comparison.

Yeah, yeah.

I like the name Iron Wolves to the one you mentioned.

That sounds kind of a fearsome name.

I don't know if I'd want to mess with the Iron Wolf.

It is a good name.

It comes from a legend about the.

The founding of the Vilnius, the ancient capital and the current capital of Lithuania.

Actually, the.

The way the teams are named is the way that the teams are named.

Particularly in Lithuania.

They very much draw from local history.

So the founding of the city of Vilnius, the Dukes is the name of the.

The title of the rulers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Curonians, as I mentioned a moment ago.

But then at the other end of the scale in Estonia, you actually have teams that appear from time to time where they have Estonian language names, which kind of books the trend that we normally see of American football teams adopting English language names.

Yeah, you got to have some local flavor in it.

Too, you know, it's.

It's not just our game here in America.

If you're playing it there, that's your game too.

And, you know, bring your own local culture names to it.

That's.

That's kind of interesting.

So, so how so, you know, do they, the teams have like team logos and everything too, to go with the names?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Everything that you would associate with an American football team.

It's all there.

There's sometimes cheerleaders, sometimes bands get involved.

They have live coverage, which is increasing quite a lot now you can watch the games on YouTube.

Okay, so yeah, there's really two aspects to the podcast.

One is a personal aspect that I want to improve.

Communicating research outside of academia.

And this felt like a really good topic to approach, something that I'm very passionate about.

Okay.

And the second aim of the podcast is to try to help gain a little bit of visibility for the sport in this part of the world.

And I say help specifically because the teams themselves and other people involved with the game are really doing a fantastic job in that area themselves.

Particularly over the last 12 months.

Their social media presence is increasing constantly.

There's coverage of the games.

You can watch them live on YouTube and then later on afterwards.

Yeah, very cool.

So, you know, with the games being on YouTube and are people attending games, are you having like some, some local crowds that are coming in and watching the games and starting to support and understand the game?

Yes, absolutely.

There are, of course people are attending the games live.

It's not.

Sometimes the crowds can be quite large, sometimes smaller.

But as I say, it's still very much a developing sport.

Approximately 7,300 people attended that game.

It's still the record for the region.

And shortly afterwards, a group of Americans from Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Stampede, came over to the Soviet Union to play three exhibition games.

One in Moscow, one in Tallinn, and one in Leningrad, present there, St. Petersburg.

And I believe it was around 3,000 or just a little bit over 3,000 people who attended that game.

Those are still the records by far.

I don't have the specific numbers for how many people attend the games.

Hey, that's all right.

Those are, you know, some.

We have college games that don't get that many people in it sometimes.

So, you know, don't feel bad about that.

You know, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

We have 150 year head start on, on the Game here to people understanding now, you know, you really, you think about it, you know, I, I officiated football for 27 years at the high school level here and football is by far the most complicated sport.

The rules are the most complicated probably of any sport around that I'm aware of.

The strategies involved are, you know, from a, a man on man strategy all the way up to team strategy or just, you know, it's just mind blowing how different, many different directions that coaches and players can take.

The strategies, you know, win your personal one on one assignments to your overall team assignments to, to get victory and you know, it's where the game of, you know, what we call here in the States, you know, soccer and rugby are complicated games themselves.

They're much simpler in rules and objective than the game of football.

So it's, it's hard to educate a culture to the complications of football, but it's amazing how, how it's growing around the world, you know, and in your area to do that.

We, we see the National Football League is starting to play games.

You know, we just had one recently in Germany.

They've been in Ireland.

You know, my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers played in Ireland about a month ago.

They're in, you know, all over Europe.

There's NFL Europe for a while.

Do you ever foresee possibly a National Football League game being played in your area?

That would be, that would be fantastic and I would love to see that.

I think it will be some way down the road before anything like that could happen.

And in terms of the, the rules, like what, in terms of the rules that you just mentioned, it's really not unusual for the, as a setting up for the game in the broadcast for the commentators to be explaining the rules still at this point to help people understand some aspects of what's going on.

Well, you, you, I'm sure you probably watch some American football there when National Football League or sometimes the commentators have to explain to the American audience the rules because rules are changing, you know, like, such as the dynamic kickoff is the last couple years in the National Football League is really kind of foreign to us and it's really, you know, catching on.

I kind of enjoy it.

But yeah, sometimes you have to have the rules explained to you here too.

So it's good.

This is true.

Coaches and commentators or experts.

Absolutely.

I should really explain that sometimes the rules that are being explained are adaptions to the game because quite often the games take place on local fields or local pitches.

And for example, particularly the rules for kicking are quite often adapted Just simply if it's in a residential area, it's not exactly safe to be kicking them off into traffic.

So with the Baltic League that's happening at the moment, for example, there's agreed upon starts at the 20 yard line and theoretical punts starting from the 30.

Yeah, that, that we do that quite a bit.

And as people are trying to learn the game here, you know, younger children are learning, you know, maybe elementary school level.

They're often doing that because, you know, a lot of the craziest things that can happen and the weirdest rules are during the kicking game.

So if you can control those kicking games to say, okay, we're, we're starting a new series for the offense here without having the kicking game or the punting game, that's probably a smart thing to just learn the fundamentals of scrimmage play.

And the kicking stuff will come later because that's, that's the most complicated part and area, quite frankly, a lot of people get hurt because there's a lot of activity going on and it's sometimes kind of nefarious the way, the way things go on.

A kicking game.

This is true.

There is a kicking game here.

It's just not currently being played in the Baltic League.

It really depends on who's playing, where they're playing and they have, on the time.

It's still quite, it's still not uncommon to see players playing from, from one team playing for a different team to help make up the numbers from time to time.

All right, all right.

So, you know, with, with the sport growing there now, do you often.

I know sometimes one of the signs that the culture starting to accept it is maybe you're, you're driving, you know, down the street and you, you see some, some kids playing ball in a local open area, you know, sandlots, we call them here.

And are.

Have you ever like starting to witness that of, of younger crowds, you know, playing American football, or is it not.

Not to that point yet.

That you've noticed?

I've certainly seen people, sorry.

I've certainly seen people playing recreational games here and there, mostly throwing the ball.

But flag football, aside from the tackle game, is starting to develop quite quickly here as well.

There's, I believe, two teams within the last year or so have been established here in Tallinn.

The Tallinn Bay Bowlers and the Hapsalu Hyenas.

And additionally we also have the first women's flag football team here in Tallinn, the Tallinn Diamonds.

All right, well, that's, that's definitely a great way to start it out here.

I know the National Football League is starting to promote that for, for young ladies to, to play flag football at the high school level and below here as well.

Just trying to encompass everybody.

You know, the, they're quite a powerful machine, you know, billions of dollars going into there.

So they're trying to develop their game, you know, not only across the world, but also, you know, here at home to some, some folks.

You know, the, the female gender has not always been exposed to football the way that the.

It has been to the male population, but it's really growing and there's more and more ladies starting to enjoy the game.

Matter of fact, my, my wife and my 21 year old daughter, my youngest, we bought season tickets to go see the Pittsburgh Panthers, the college team and actually, you know, we're going to see the.

Them play Notre Dame this weekend, which is my favorite team.

So be kind of, kind of enjoyable to go to a sold out crowd.

We'll probably have 65,000 people in Pittsburgh to watch that game, so that'll be a lot of fun.

But women are starting to love football.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think flag football in general for everybody across the board is a great way into the sport.

It removes a lot of barriers that can exist to playing tackle football, whether it's to do with the equipment or the availability of pitches.

And you don't get smashed to the ground as much either.

It's still contact sport, but not as painful.

This is true.

This is true.

I never played football.

Yeah, I never played for.

I never played football myself, but I used to play rugby.

Oh yeah.

I'm probably a little bit too, I'm probably a little bit too old now to play tackle.

But I haven't completely ruled out trying to form a small flag team, even if just to give a few of the teams because I'm often moving around the Baltic States quite a lot for my research just to give them somebody to play against.

Just to.

I don't practice.

Right.

Yeah.

Hey, you got to start somewhere, right?

Very cool.

Okay, so I guess, you know, do the, the super bowl here is probably the biggest television show.

Has the highest ratings every single year in American culture.

I know people around the world are watching it.

They'll often, you know, flash to, you know, military bases or people are watching it.

But is a Super bowl something that's watched live in your neck of the woods?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I watched every year myself and there are watch parties springing up all the time in different places.

Quite often the bar will have a watch Party.

So, so what's the time difference here?

So if the super bowl roughly starts here about 6:30pm on Super Bowl Sunday, you know, on Eastern time zone, what time is it there in Estonia when the super bowl is kicking off?

Well, it depends on the location, of course, but roughly a six to eight hour time difference or so depending on the time of the year.

So.

So like almost 2am in the morning, your local time.

You're, you're getting up, people are getting up to, or staying up to watch the biggest game in America, American football.

So.

Wow, that's, that's amazing.

That's some dedication.

And you know, folks, just to be totally honest with you, you know, we started this interview here with James at 7:30pm Eastern time.

So he, he's, you know, being a real trooper here, being up like 3:30 in the morning over there.

So we really appreciate you being able to take, you know, take one for the team here and help us out in educating us here on Baltic football.

Oh, thank you.

It's really a pleasure.

And yeah.

So James, why don't you give us one more time before you go what, what the title of your podcast is and when, when and where people can find you.

Okay, certainly.

So the podcast is called Gridiron Baltic.

It looks at the history of American football in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Also among the diasporas, there's quite a large history that stretches back to the beginning of American football because, because of immigration to the United States for various regions, particularly amongst Lithuanians, you find them quite often in college rosters from the late 19th century onwards.

And also a lot of local players emerged shortly after the First World War.

Actually, I believe you'll be joining me on Gridiron Baltic before too long to talk about one of those specific players that you've written about in the book of yours recently.

Looking forward to that.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Very much so.

Yeah.

And it's, it's affiliated with the Sports History Network and the episodes will be going out on the first of each month beginning in December.

It's when two Finnish teams came over to Tallinn and played the first game in not only in Estonia, but also in the Soviet Union.

Wow, that is still amazing.

That blows me away.

And I can't wait to hear that episode.

You know, it's going to be, you know, here actually the first of December is my birthday.

So I'll be, listen, I'll get to listen to it on my birthday be part of my birthday gift here to listen to that.

I can't wait to hear that.

And welcome to you Know the History of Football in Podcasting and welcome to Sports History Network.

We can't wait to see you folks.

If you're driving or don't have a pen or jot it down, we'll put it in the show notes of both the YouTube channel and the podcast show Notes.

Also, we'll have a post on pigskindispatch.com where you'll be able to find James and his great Gridiron Baltic podcast that's going to be coming up here in just a few weeks.

So James, really appreciate you coming on and staying up and helping us out to learn a little bit about football in your region and supporting your football history.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

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