The Brunmeier's diary continues

West Perth Pre-season Training Phase One for Jared and James:  COMPLETE

It was a cool Monday night on December 18th, the second lot of fitness testing had begun as we were heading into Christmas break and some needed recovery time.  Having finished our 3km time trial, West Perth Coach Toddy Curley brought us in to a tight huddle to say a few words before we dispersed for the night.  He had positive comments to say about the team and how we’ve improved since the start of pre-seasoning training five and a half weeks ago.

That tripped my mind over, five and a half weeks?!  Has it been that long already?  If I didn’t stop to think about it I would have sworn only 3 weeks or so had gone by, but as the old saying goes, “Time flies when you’re having fun”. 

And fun we had.  Trainings had slowing been ramping up in intensity and expectations.  We kept the same format though the last couple weeks of one session all skills, one session all running, and one session half skills, half running.  The coaching staff mixed these days around Monday, Wednesday or Friday to keep us on our toes.  Tuesday/Thursday we were expected to lift weights at the club. 

The training sessions that were all skills were the most fun.  The players would split up into six equal teams.  There would be three fields set up of varying size, each of which would have a different hand ball game to simulate game situations.  The six teams would rotate through the different games playing different teams in a round robin. 

The idea behind the hand ball games was to start bringing players back up to match awareness; there wasn’t any tackling in the games with the concept of reward without risk.  Players could now concentrate on moving the ball effectively towards a goal to score points without having to worry about being tackled.  This made the games very fast and flowing with turnovers happening when the defensive team swatted the ball out of a players hand; the offensive gave a poor handball that resulted in the ball touching the ground, or the defensive knocking a handball away or intercepting it.

Each field was officiated by a coach or senior player.  Todd had one field, Clayton Lasscock (nicknamed Junior) had another and Jason Salecic had the final one.  Along with officiating the games Todd, Junior and Jason would coach teams on the field as well, pointing out what improvements needed to happen or what this particular game was trying to accomplish whether that be tight man defense or working the ball forward using two on one situations.

The games were a lot of fun but very challenging at the same time.  Fitness takes on a new meaning when you start running full out but then incorporate trying to move a ball up the field using hand passes and then trying to defend against a team doing the same.  These types of practices were good eye openers for us showing that we could get the ball but really needed to work on our skills to make clean hand passes to our teammates especially when we are under pressure. 

Beach running made an appearance as one of our all running sessions.  At first we were pretty excited to be running on the beach during a gorgeous evening; however our strength and conditioning coach Chris Dorman soon made it clear that we weren’t here for the views.  After doing a couple sets of 40 meter sprints through the sand everyone was pretty much over beach running, which if you’ve never ran on loose sand is quite hard.  Our session didn’t stop there; we had to do a couple sets of continuous running with pace changes up and down the beach and ended the night with more sprints.  A couple guys were dry heaving by the time we finished.  The highlight of the session was a recovery

- Jared Brunmeier
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