The Collie Eagles Football Club coaches are striving to push their teams harder than ever before ahead of their first 2017 South West Football League matches this weekend.
On Wednesday, April 5, the Mail caught up with the league, reserves and colts players and coaches during one of their pre-season training sessions.
The players went through hard-paced exercises designed to build up their momentum and skill levels before the season’s opening bounce down.
Reserves coach Paul Moyses said the teams, between the Eagles’ first training session on Wednesday, February 1 and now, have delivered solid pre-season results.
“I’ve been pretty impressed with the effort they have put in and the skills, just looking forward to it coming into practice in a game situation,” he said.
“They have been doing a heavy workload of endurance work and running, recovery and running and recovery, we’ve integrated that with a few ball drills to keep their skills up and to actually start working with the ball when they are a bit tired.”
The teams have been working on sprinting, stretches, and short and long ball drills to simulate game-style ball drills and scenarios.
“Footy requires you to be reasonably fit and, during the ball drills, we’re always encouraging and trying to improve them – their ball skills, both sides of their bodies, their marking out in front, kicking drills," he said.
“[It’s] just encouragement and basically to try and improve them, the more time they work with the balls the better their skills will become.
“There is a balance there – there is no use being fantastic with the ball and then you can’t run to the next contest, you’ve got to be physically fit as well as having good skills.
“Deep into the season, all the running drills we are doing it’s going to be good for four quarter efforts – you see some teams drop off in the fourth quarter halfway through the season basically because they haven’t done the work we’ve done so we’re hoping that allows us to play four good, solid quarters and still be running at the end of the game.”
During pre-season, the teams commenced training sessions, played scratch matches and scored one win and one loss in the pre-season carnival earlier this month.
The reserves coach said they will take the season one game at a time and work to bring everyone in the playing group closer together.
