SUMMER’S BLOOD, SWEAT ‘N’ FEARS: MAKING ROUND 1 ALL THAT MATTERS

[Sanctorum]

This article was written by recently retired Eagles player Will Schofield and appeared in last Saturdays Weekend Australian. I'm passing this on because it gives a unique 'insiders' perpective of what goes on at AFL clubs in the pre-season:

"Fights between teammates, mock match committees that serve as mind games, legendary coaching sprays and mistakes that ruin your hopes of round 1 selection.

Oh pre-season, how I don’t miss you.

We are in the middle of AFL silly season, where every player is in career-best shape and each team is training the house down. Externally, fans and observers hang on every training update. Any scrap of news, injury updates, fights at training, positional changes – something, anything, just to give us hope for
the upcoming season.

But what’s it like this time of year inside an AFL club?

Internally, the start of February is when the whips start to crack. Things start to matter, coaches form strong selection opinions. No matter how you’ve handled yourself in January and pre-Christmas – what you do over the next four weeks will decide your fate for round 1. Of course it’s also important to have a solid block of training in the off-season and festive break. You need to present yourself well after being away from the club.

But in all honesty, it’s more important that you don’t make mistakes. Tick all the boxes, listen and learn. You don’t have to be a standout in December.

You just can’t afford to be that player, the one who didn’t do what he was supposed to. The one who fails to hit his 2km time trial time, doesn’t meet skinfold requirements, stuffs up off the field, talks back to coaches, or doesn’t listen in meetings.

Don’t be that guy.

As you clear January, training intensity starts to lift. Skill sessions become match simulation drills, running sessions become intra-club games. If you’ve been going through the motions to this point, that’s OK. In fact, as you get older that’s what tends to happen – work wiser, not harder. Yet at a certain point, generally around five to six weeks from the start of the season, everything starts to matter. And I mean everything.

Coaches watch every move you make, trying to find a point of difference to settle selection debates. Everyone is fit, everyone wants a game, but 45 doesn’t go into 25 (players picked for pre-season games). And it certainly won’t go into the 22 playing round 1.

West Coast used to run a session around this time of year where the players would run mock match committees. The squad would split off into groups, a head coach would be assigned and they would pick their starting line-ups for round 1. The exercise was veiled as a leadership and coaching activity, but in reality it was a wake-up call for fringe players as to just how hard it would be to get selected.

I wasn’t picked a lot in these sessions, someone was always training better than I was or had more potential upside than I did. Given these teams were selected by your peers, your teammates, it was always difficult to be left out. I knew training mattered from day dot, every player does. But I learned that a lot of it is more about perception than anything else. If coaches and players perceive you to be doing all the right things and giving maximum effort, results
on the training track don’t matter too much.

Pre-season sessions can be absolutely brutal. I’ve seen injuries. I’ve seen fights between teammates – Shannon Hurn versus Mark Nicoski would be the pick of the bunch. And yes, sometimes a player might struggle to get out of first gear at training. Drills can start to feel mundane, relative to the middle of the
year. Sometimes there needs to be a spark.

There’s a video clip of Josh Kennedy and I going head-to-head in one of my last pre-seasons. If you watch the clip with no context, you might think the intensity is incredible. Which it was. But that particular clip was premeditated by us both, to an extent. Training had been poor to that point, Josh and I
knew it. As senior players, leading by example is often the best way to get a message across. So we walked to the front of the group and both knew we were about to give effort well above match intensity. We needed to go above and beyond. Players don’t go that hard at each other throughout games. It’s unrealistic, you just couldn’t sustain it. But we were making a point and it worked.

Younger players watched us and wanted to match our intensity, training standards lifted for the rest of the session. And for the record (people tell me I gave away multiple free kicks in this drill), there was an umpire present and I didn’t hear a whistle. Play on.

Coaches are in their element in February. There are proper sprays that never see the light of day. I remember when Dom Sheed pulled a right-foot kick through the middle of the ground, resulting in a turnover goal for the opposition.

“That’s not you Dom!” Adam Simpson bellowed across the track as silence gripped the ground. Simpson then directed Sheed to sit on the sideline and watch training for a little while, as he considered what standards were required at the level.

Simpson was right, it wasn’t Dom. The rest of us couldn’t help but chuckle as he sat on the side of the oval, watching on like a scorned child for the rest of the drill.

Moments like these are important, but what really matters is what you do on game day. You can be as fit or fast as you like – if you can’t execute come game day, there isn’t much point.

How do you react under pressure? Can you win a contest one-on-one when it matters? Can you keep running when your mind tells you to stop? Can you use your voice in front of 60,000 people? Do you know your role and can you play it? Are you a good teammate, can you sacrifice for others? Can you be relied upon when it counts?

These are the things that matter. You can’t really replicate those scenarios in February, try as you might.

A big deal is made of pre-season both inside and outside the four walls of a footy club. The reality is the hard work is really a means to an end in order to get your name read out by the coach before round 1."