PORT ADELAIDE players have been put through a punishing running session on the first day of the club’s pre-season camp on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
Players and staff had an early flight to the sunshine state on Sunday morning, arriving to warm conditions and a conditioning session where players were put through their paces on a field neighbouring its accommodation at the Novotel Sunshine Coast.
Head of High Performance, Stuart Graham said it was all part of a plan to get the players a solid block of conditioning before Christmas.
“All up, the boys did probably an 11kms conditioning session to kick things off,” Graham told portadelaidefc.com.au on Sunday afternoon.
“We want to build a bit of fatigue early in the camp so there’s a resilience aspect to tolerating this camp and fronting up and performing at a high standard throughout the week.”
The camp, centred around Maroochydore, will run across six days where players will endure physically testing training sessions as well as team-building and fun activities.
The last time the club held an interstate pre-season camp was also on the Sunshine Coast back in 2019.
Graham explained the value of bringing the group together on a camp.
“It builds the base pre-Christmas so we can build an endurance base, a foundation, that sets us up from a performance perspective but also from an injury perspective we feel it has a huge part to play in dropping our injury rates if we get the load right,” he said.
“The camp-style also enables the players to be exposed to the coaches so much in terms of embedding the game style, and where we are here there’s opportunity to do a lot of team-building exercises as well.
“On site here at the Novotel on the Sunshine Coast we’ve got some paintball activities and some amazing race challenges that the boys will get involved in for team building and an element of fun amongst all the hard work they’ll do throughout the week.”
Graham said the Sunshine Coast presented the ideal conditions for a high performance and team-building camp.
“We love the heat up here and the accommodation settings allow for everything,” he said.
“You’ve got AFL fields on site, you’ve got the team activity stuff on site and the accommodation is really purpose built for high-performance camps and we love coming here.
“We’ve also got good history here and because of COVID-19 we haven’t been able to get out of the state so to be able to return to the Sunshine Coast is something the group really wanted to do – the coaching group and the high-performance team were all united on this being the spot.”
The players with less than five years’ experience are entering their fourth week of pre-season training while the more experienced group has only been back in training for seven days.
However, the club’s high performance boss was thrilled with how the players have returned.
“They’ve come back in great shape, particularly the 1-4 year players,” Graham elaborated.
“They’ve clearly done the work in the off-season which has meant we can get into footy at a high intensity already.
“And the 5+ year guys, the core group we’ve had for a long time know how to do the off-season, they do it really well so our training standard is high immediately and this camp means we can step it up again and set us up for the January block of pre-season.”
Port Adelaide will conclude its camp on Friday evening.
