Arrivals
Onfield: Rohan Bail (Mt Gravatt), Jamie Bennell (Swan Districts), Sam Blease (Eastern Ranges), Neville Jetta (Swan Districts), James Strauss (Oakleigh Chargers), Jack Watts (Sandringham Dragons), Liam Jurrah (Yuendumu Magpies), Jordie McKenzie (rookie - Geelong Falcons), Rhys Healey (rookie - Bendigo Pioneers), Daniel Hughes (rookie - Melbourne)
Off-field: Scott West (assistant coach), Joel Hocking (fitness manager)
Departures
Onfield: Ben Holland (retired), David Neitz (retired), Jace Bode, Nathan Carroll, Chris Johnson, Isaac Weetra, Jeff White, Adem Yze
Off-field: Paul Williams (assistant coach - Western Bulldogs), Ross Monaghan (football operations manager – Richmond), Leigh Newton (ruck coach – Hawthorn).
Pre-season training started: Monday, October 13
Post-Christmas break: The Demons will restart their pre-season campaign on Monday, January 5, with the bulk of the program to be held at Casey Fields.
We spoke to fitness manager Joel Hocking to get an insight into how the Demons' pre-season program is progressing…
Medical room
Brock McLean (ankle): Brock is due to start back after Christmas with his skills, but he's progressed really well from what was a serious ankle issue that required surgery and involved both his tibula and fibula bones as well as the ankle joint itself. He hasn't really missed a beat in coming back and we'd expect him to back into skills in the new year.
Jared Rivers (groin): Jared is tracking really well and is pretty much on the same time line as Brock. The injury that he had was not really a normal type of injury for a footballer to suffer. He tore the groin off the bone and that's something you generally associate with hamstrings. We've taken it a bit slower because it is a bit of an unknown, but he's another guy who hasn't missed a beat.
Russell Robertson (achilles): An achilles rupture is almost as serious as it gets – you'd put it alongside a knee reconstruction – but he's back jogging and we're not really in any rush with him. We've got three or four months to get him up and we'll just steadily build him up and make sure that he doesn't take too many backward steps on the way there.
Paul Johnson (calf): Paul's doing bits and pieces of skills, but isn’t far off joining the main group.
John Meesen (ankle): John is in the same boat as Paul.
Who's burning?
I think Aaron Davey has been a standout. For a guy to come out of the rehab group and be in the shape that he's in is very, very good.
Kyle Cheney is in really good nick. James Frawley is another one who also stood out; he's going really well in the gym and he's tolerating the loads that are being dished out in training as well. It's a positive step for a young kid like him to be making those sorts of leaps and bounds in pre-season.
Pre-season training camps
We're holding a three-day camp in Mansfield starting on Wednesday the 17th, which will be more about getting the kids involved than flogging them.
We've done a lot of really good stuff in the gym so far and you don't want to put them at risk of taking a backward step over the course of a three-day camp when we've still got a lot of work to do before our first game.
Pre-season training overview
The situation at the end of last season, which I think is a credit to the development of the younger kids during the year, is a lot different to the previous year. The season before I think they had a hell of a lot of surgeries – I think they had about 16 or 17 – but at the start of this pre-season I think there were only about seven. There's your head start right there; there are a lot less guys who have needed to be modified.
At the same time we've still got to take care of them as best we can and make sure that the work that is going into them is quality and that we're not just running around in circles waiting for something to happen.
I like to take an optimal approach. I like to keep the guys in their optimal training load, so we modify their programs based on a lot of different things that we measure with regard to their physical performance. We try and keep them at their optimal level. We try and keep them on the edge without tipping them over.
There's overload involved in every program obviously because that's how you improve, but our program is based around giving them increments that they can handle. So they're still performing really well, but they're able to back up from day to day and maintain the quality.
What coach Dean Bailey says
"We're going to give ourselves the best chance to get fit. We were uncompetitive and not fit enough last year and we have a chance to rectify those two things.
"[We] looked at the program and we asked for [the players'] feedback on the problems with pre-season and the things they found difficult. We listened to the players and we said, 'This is a program we think will help you and helps us and it's also a better way to do a pre-season'."
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the club.
