West Falcons Pre-Season Camp

I look up from watching my sweat drop like rain to the pavement as my calf muscles start to cramp to the back of the yute I'm helpling push up a hill that seems to never end. My dirt stained finger smears stare back at me from the tailgate as Callium Chambers shouts out a cadence encouraging the rest of us on the Green Mango team to keep fighting over this last hill.  It is approaching 7pm and my mind, like my legs is a bit numb.  In between leg spasms I try and recreate the events that brought myself and the rest of the teams that make up the West Perth Falcons to our point of current exhaustion.

It started that morning on the 10th of February with the alarm buzzing at 5am in my darkened room.  Our coach Todd Curley's warning still ringing in my head from Wednesday training session; "Be at Sorrento Beach this Saturday for the start of camp at 6am sharp.  DO NOT BE LATE!!!" I quickly dressed, finished packing my bag for the weekend and ate a light breakfast.  James and I were on the road by 5:30am, predictably we were the only car on the road as we made our way to the appointed beach. It was a chilly morning as we all huddled together listening to Todd give us the course layout for our first activity of Falcon camp 2007.  It was a run-swim-run with the first leg being a little over 5km run.  Secondly the swim which involved swimming around the far side of one groin (a large out cropping of rocks that juts into the ocean...don't ask why they are called groins...I don't have clue) to the far side of another, a distance of a couple hundred meters.  The final run was along the soft sand of the beach back to the starting point.

With a shout we were off and the day began.  The pace out of the blocks was pretty quick.  There were 52 participants and you could score points for your team based on where you finished.  For example whoever won would get 52 points for their team, 2nd would get 51 points for their team and so on down to the last person.  Heading into the ocean from the 5km run I was around the top 10.  Any lead I had was promptly lost on entering the water as I soon found I didn't have any fish attributes and watched people I had passed in the run skim by me in the water as if I was standing still.  I dragged myself out of the water breathing a sigh of relief that the swim was over and I was only partially water logged. I managed to make up a little ground on the final run but finished around the 20 mark.

Phil Smith won the event with apparent ease, unfortunately for him and his team, the Knights, his points were nullified because someone from their team forgot their team colors on the beach after we left.  The final piece of drama in the morning involved someone being late.  As a punishment we had to do 200 pushups on the beach with the gentleman who was late doing the counting, not a lot of fun after what we just went through!

From the beach we headed up the coast about a kilometer to the Ern Halliday camp where we would be staying at for the duration of camp.  After a breakie of cold cereal and toast we were piling back into cars and headed to a local oval for a training session.  Everyone was pretty jacked up since the first scratch match is only a week away.  We had probably one of the best training sessions all year with intensity and skills looking very sharp.  An impressive feat considering what we had already done in the morning.

After training the morning and early afternoon was taken up by various "classroom" activities.  A WAFL umpire came to the camp and went over some new rules and interpretations. We had cold sandwiches for lunch, then sat down and ran through some game scenarios with a large rope representing the boundaries, Coke cans representing Falcon players and Lemonade cans representing the opposition.  After receiving a bad tip from Dan Hunt saying "don't make eye contact with Todd or he'll call on you", Anthony Tsalikis (or Slick) had to be the first to demonstrate what he would do in a certain game situation by moving the cans around.  Dan Hunt (or Mado) didn't escape Todd either and was called on to explain another game situation right after Slick.

After the sodas and rope were put away West Perth's CEO, Ken Torrance, gave a bit of a talk on the club.  He covered a wide range of topics from the club's financial goals to different events and opportunities coming up throughout the year.  After his talk we had a break.

The first session of team building was put on by camp staff and consisted of various games that required a bit of thought and teamwork to beat the other teams.  One of the games had everyone in your team tied together in what amounted to a big knot and the first team to untangle themselves received the points.  At the end of the session the Mangos and Bad News Bears tied for first place and settled the tie breaker the old fashioned way...Tug of War.  The Mangos were a bit cocky going into the tug of war because the Joes appeared to be a bit confused on strategy, however when the whistle sounded and the pulling started they pretty well pulled us off our feet to take the win...I'll blame the loss on their weight advantage.

Following the camps activities we proceeded to do team building activities designed by our fitness coach, Chris Dorman.  These had us pushing a small car around a course to see which team could do it the fastest, to carrying logs up hills.  The Mangos, who had been fielding one of the smallest teams number wise on the day had to finish with pushing a yute up a hill, down the other side and then back up the hill.  Exhausted and undermanned we somehow managed the feat, finally able to stagger to the showers to get cleaned up for dinner.  Well after 7pm all the teams shuffled into the dining hall and discussed "Falcons Behavior" as Sass cooked our dinner of steak, sausages and burgers.

Major points were awarded after dinner for a list of items the coaching  staff had put together in a scavenger hunt scheme.  The Mangos ALMOST cleaned house in the points total, coming in a close second to the Knights.  Our high ticket item of the night was an autographed picture specifically to the Mangos from Australian Cricketer Mike Hussey (Hussey is doing extremely well at the moment for Australia and was only trumped by an autographed picture from the now retired Shane Warne).

The night kept getting later as the "Scavenger Hunt" finished up.  One final activity remained, group presentations on a topic given to each team by Todd a couple weeks ago. There were two standout presentations of the night.  One good, one not so good.  We'll start with the not so good one.  The Knights happen to take this honor as well as the privilege of going first.  Presentations were supposed to be 6-8 minutes in length...theirs was cut off by Todd after about 20 minutes with 3 or 4 people left to speak. I don't think anyone was snoring but I my attention could have wandered.  The good presentation happened to be the last one of the night by the Bad News Bears.   They brought some humor and excitement into the mix by doing a skit to emphasize their point.  It was a good way to end the night.

And end the night it did.  By this time it was after 11pm and we were falling asleep on our feet.  Todd gave us an hour reprieve the next morning pushing our beach session back from 6am to 7am.  None the less it felt like my eyes had just closed when Team Manager Ryan Lasscock's woke us up with his baritone voice.  It was a bit chilly as we stumbled to the cars and hit the beach for a recovery session which involved some wading through the water and a brief swim.  After that it was breakfast and then the last activity of the camp, orienteering, put on by our friends at Ern Halladay Camp.

The concept of orienteering is you are given a map of the surrounding area with different check points.  When you get to a check point there will be a little hole punch that you mark your map in the appropriate spot and move to the next point until complete.  The team to find and punch all the check points first wins.  Of course it couldn't be that simple for us after everything we had been through.  A wrinkle was thrown into the rules where each team would have to do the course as a relya, one team member would have to go off and find one marker, punch the map, come back to the start, hand the map off to the next team member and away they went.

To say there wasn't any cheating would be a statement of naivety.  Everyone was pretty well exhausted and rumors swirled of team members punching multiple check points at a time, a blatant rule breach but one that was never proved or argued very hard...since it seemed the only consistent tactic.  All in all the points gained by the winning team in this event didn't do anything to change the overall winner, but it did do enough to switch the last and second last team standings!

With all the points now in, the weekend camp was coming to a close.  Todd gave us 15 minutes to pack our bags and load our things into our cars and then meet in the cafeteria for the points announcement.  The Bad News Bears came in last place due to orienteering. The Knights, who had lead the competition through most of the weeks leading up to camp, came in first place and with their win came a $500 cash prize given to Knight Captain Jason Salesic to divide how he saw fit.

Camp ended with each team singing a song they created specifically for camp.   The Bloods stole the show with a contemporary remake of Vanilla Ice's; "Ice Ice Baby" and fittingly the Bad News Bears sang the worst song thats ending was met with silence and a few chuckles.

Reflecting back on the camp and its physical difficulties it was a worth while accomplishment.  One more step in gelling West Perth players together as a team by giving them a common experience that can be used as a fall back when times are tough.  The best news about finishing the camp would probably be it's the last weekend we spend not playing a game with our first scratch match happening on the 18th...about time!!!

- Jared Brunmeier
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