I'm 36 with a partner of 20 years (yes, you read that right) and a 5 year old son, all of whom live in Adelaide, South Australia (which is almost as far away from anything as I reckon you can be - move south and you hit Antarctica, move north and you hit a great big desert, west is the Nullarbor Plain - a vast, flat area of low scrub, and east is, well, we don't talk much about it). Despite the distance from the rest of the world, it is a great place to live, with a vibrant Blood Bowl community (for international reference, we're about 800km from Melbourne).
I have been playing Blood Bowl since Kerrunch, although I remember peering through the glass of a huge hobby store we used to have here called Tactics when I was too young to feel confident about being involved. They played 1st edition and I was fascinated. When Kerrunch came out I ordered a copy via Military Simulations and loved it, forming a small gaming group with friends at school who played for a few years.
In 1995 or 6, Games Workshop came to Adelaide. I was 19 and was not enjoying university, so I dropped out and worked for 4 years in GW. During my time there I had miniatures featured in our WD as painting was probably the strongest part of my repertoire of gaming skills. Obviously GW is an evil organisation, and they were (and probably still are) terrible to their staff. I told them to stuff it in 2000 and managed to score a job in a local Credit Union that ended up stretching to 11 years. During that time I went back to uni and completed a Bachelor of International Studies. I worked at all levels of the organisation.
Also during the early 00s I started a BB league called the Marienburg BB League. We played about five seasons before lapsing and, for probably six years, I didn't game or paint much at all.
In 2008 I stumbled across the growing BB community in Australia and met a guy named Speiroz who was trying to get a local tournament running. I was in and went to the first SSB, renewing my love of the game. I met others who have become core members of the Adelaide scene (Olaf, Vain, etc) and I won the Best Painted award, something I was (and are) incredibly proud of. This stimulated my effort to work on my painting again and basically drove me out of gaming hibernation. Eventually I was involved in the AusBowl State Championship and in the creation of BL!TZ Magazine, which survived for five glorious editions before becoming a side note in BB history. I was incredibly humbled when the Australian community awarded be the Most Valuable Coach for my work on BL!TZ and the State Championships in 2011.
In 2011 I decided that a career in banking and finance was boring and retrained as a teacher (along with my partner, while our son was a toddler - yes, I'm crazy). We moved to the southeast of SA, to a little town called Naracoorte (which is even further from anything related to civilisation), where I had neither a reliable internet connection, nor a gaming community. Luckily this lasted only a year before I returned to Adelaide.
I'm currently a secondary school teacher (English, History, Geography) and an avid BB player. The recent arrival of Meg Maples in Australia has revolutionised my painting and I am currently working on a Nippo Goblin team that is better than anything I have managed before. It should be fun to play at SSB2014. Other than that I'm looking forward to defending titles at the ADBC and in the CCKUP league this year (I need to highlight this as I'm not sure they're not just fluke).
This is me looming over the 24H Ironman Challenge trophy earlier this year.
