It pains me to say but I've trained for footy for a span of 5 decades - holy jesus what am I doing?
I started way back in the late 1988 as a young tacker and all through the 90's to a senior player.
I had 4 years off in the mid 2000's before making a comeback and here we are in 2019.
33rd year of football next year and how footy has changed.
The days of long kicks playing a strictly territory game are long gone.
Zone defences were years ahead from being used.
Clearance work was nothing more than having you're best players in there and hopefully they can get the job done.
No quarterbacks.
No clusters.
With all these changes withing the game it's remarkable how similar training still is to the early days.
I mean we all still do lanework and 5 point handball!
Things have got to start to change to move with the times and here's the start of it.
The New Rules of Footy Training.
Change means more work sure, but change, specifically strategic change with for a specific reason also means progress.
Local/amateur footy is has even changed as recently as the last 2 years with the implementation of the player points system and harder salary caps.
Eastern Football League powerhouse Balwyn here in Melbourne would yearly bring in 3 - 5 de-listed AFL talent and win premiership after premiership but last year the new rules caught up with them.
Realising that buying top-end talent was not going to work with the player point system, they have now gone the route of developing local talent for long term sustainability which I think will work for them down the track as they'll still have cash to bring in ex-AFL players but far more player depth below them.
If Balwyn have to roll with the changes, then we all do meaning we have to do more with what we have.
My own team had an absolute shocker last year.
Some of the highlights were:
- Losing each spine position player for at least 4 weeks at some point during the year, often overlapping
- One particular weekend we had 35 players unavailable
- We play division 3 and with a grand finalist from the year before still in the league and pushing again, there was also 2 teams relegated from div 2 with one of the teams only having lost 1 game by more then 20pts so could have easily been playing finals in d2 with some luck)
- We didn't really recruit from season 2017 for a variety of reasons
- The league graded our ground unfit to play on in the 2nd last round of the season (work that one out)
- On top of that our league allowed a new team into our league and division with extra player point allowances (again work that one out)
Yes an absolute shocker and we were only the 2nd worst team!
Talking to a lot of my teammates, last season has left a pretty crappy taste in our mouths and with some changes to our off-field structure, I'm sensing that the playing group wants to to do something about it which wasn't always the case last year being up against it like we were.
Along with our new senior coach, who is a current player at the club, we are making changes to how we prepare and train our players this year.
We have to.
We can't do the same stuff and exact a different result.
If we fail then fine, we fail trying new things that we could tinker with and make work.
If we roll with what we've done, we'll fail for sure so let's go down trying.
We are a big club in terms of players (6 x football and 5 x netball teams) but small as far as committee and expenditure is concerned.
We need to develop our players.
We need to get the most out of them.
And that's what I aim to do.
I've read close to 1500 pages of training stuff since last season ended in August and will be bringing a lot of that to training this year.
I'm eager to see how this all plays out and how the players respond to the new methods and drills that we implement.
Here are our 4 points of focus that I'll touch on throughout this week:
* Player Individualisation
* Club Culture
* Coaching/Teaching
* Training/Preparation
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