CONNOR Rozee got to Allan Scott Power Headquarters early on the Monday morning and stood outside the double glass doors like a kid on his first day at school.

A new place to come to every day, a new locker to find, faces to learn, names to remember and a new uniform to wear.

With his footy boots in a backpack over one shoulder, Rozee walked through the front door off Brougham Place for the first time knowing his life was about to change forever, and in that instant he would go from carefree 18-year-old to full-time professional footballer.

“It didn’t sink in for a bit that I was supposed to be here,” he tells SAWeekend, which was granted exclusive access to his first AFL pre-season.

“Walking around seeing the big names like Travis Boak and Ollie Wines, it’s kind of weird to think they’re my teammates now.

“But knowing I’m going to be here hopefully for a long time, it’s pretty exciting.”

Rozee, mind you, was pretty well prepared for this moment.

A product of the game’s elite junior pathway programs, he’d just played in North Adelaide’s SANFL premiership and four months earlier was in South Australia’s under-18 national championship team.

That had all led him to Alberton Oval at 8am on Monday, November 26, four days after his future was set when Port Adelaide drafted him with Pick No.5, allowing him to live his AFL dream without even leaving home.

That’s half the battle for AFL draftees in their first year, particularly those who move interstate.

They’re getting their driver’s licence and car registration changed over, are suddenly managing their money, paying bills and doing their own shopping.

At least Rozee had been spared some of this for now and could get straight into footy training.

He brought his own boots through his personal sponsorship with Nike, but everything else was waiting for him in his locker.

The club gives its draftees two of everything – two training shirts, singlets, pairs of shorts, polo shirts and jumpers.

The game day guernsey would have to wait but Rozee will almost certainly get his hands on that in the rooms at the MCG this weekend.

“Everyone was there together by the Monday and the first morning there was a fair bit of media stuff, we got given all our gear and met the players and coaching staff,” Rozee says.

“We had training straightaway, it started at 8.30am, and it was a little bit modified but still pretty solid.”

Rozee was born in Port Augusta where he lived until he was 13 when the family moved to Adelaide.

His junior footy was at South Augusta where his dad Robert won a best-and-fairest but Rozee was more interested in cricket as a kid.

That changed when he got to North Adelaide which identified his talent and five years later he would help the Roosters break a 27-year premiership drought on Adelaide Oval.

“It had been a pretty long year so I gave myself a couple of weeks afterwards just to chill out,” he says.

“Then three or four weeks leading up to the draft I started ramping up the running, I didn’t want to come in (to an AFL club) under-done.

“One of the things I’ve been trying to work on the last couple of years has been my running so I guess I was a bit nervous coming in to the whole thing.

“I had a week at the Crows last year and that gave me a little bit of insight into what an AFL environment and a normal week is like, so I didn’t come in completely blindsided, but it was still tough.”

“Initially we did about 75 per cent of the full training, they took us (draftees) out of a couple of drills but we were pretty much with the main group other than a full match-play drill when we’d do some running on the side.”

“The first week all of the draftees got put into some apartments together in Glenelg, even the SA boys, so we were car pooling to training and pretty much when we got back to the apartments everyone was sleeping we were so tired.

“Luckily we didn’t have to cook that week, the club organised for us to go out for dinner to Chad’s (Cornes) a couple of nights, Hamish Hartlett’s place one night, so that was good.”

Eat, sleep, train, repeat – that’s basically it for an AFL draftee coming into the system and for 72kg Rozee, that included a lot of food and a lot of weights.

“I’m one of the skinnier guys at the club so I saw Emily our dietitian about trying to put on some muscle and for me that involves eating a lot of protein during the day,” Rozee said.

THE DIET

ON A TYPICAL DAY DURING PRE-SEASON ROZEE WOULD EAT:

Breakfast: Two eggs on toast with a coffee.

Lunch: A full bowl of cold meat with salad.

Afternoon snack: Muesli bars, biscuits, fruit, and a protein shake particularly if he’s been in the gym.

Dinner: More meat with salad and/or vegetables.

Evening snack: Protein shake before bed.

“I was 72kg coming in and I put on 2kg in the first few weeks, and by the end of pre-season I’d put on 4kg,” he says.

“It makes it a bit hard to put on weight when we’re burning all the carbs with the running but things are going in the right direction. We do three gym sessions a week and they go for an hour to an hour-and-a-half so it’s pretty solid.”

Port Adelaide’s draftees had done three weeks of training when they flew to Noosa for the club’s pre-season camp on December 12, designed to boost their fitness on the field and their connection off it.

Rozee says day two of the camp would prove to be the hardest of the entire summer.

It was 28C and 80 per cent humidity when players were challenged with a series of running drills around the oval in the morning, then match-simulation after lunch and their GPS tracking devices showed they’d covered anywhere from 10km to 15km and at high intensity.

“It was a very solid session – like what we’d do back at the club but then a bit extra on top in the morning, then we came back in the afternoon and did a full running set and ended up going to the gym as well,” Rozee said.

“I’m not great in the running, bottom third maybe, and Ken (Hinkley) told me coming in that was one of the things I had to work on. My strength is my speed and agility but I need to build up my motor.

“It’s hard though running with boys who have been here for five or six pre-seasons so I just try to stay positive, I know I’m only first year so I’ve got to be patient.”

That theory however doesn’t apply to fellow draftee Kai Pudney who the Power took as a Category B rookie from the SANFL and is now arguably the best runner at the club.

“He’s ridiculous, I think he’s done a fair bit of athletics along the way, he’s one of the best runners at the club already,” Rozee said.

“I NEED TO BUILD UP MY MOTOR”

Rozee and his teammates were given three weeks off over Christmas and reported for duty again on January 10.

It was time off from the club but not from running and they were all given individual programs to follow.

“I got a fair bit out of the Noosa camp in terms of my fitness and I don’t think I lost anything over the break which was good,” Rozee says.

“Most of the younger boys got pretty similar programs for the break, we were training every second day which was mainly just running and a little bit of kicking as well.

“I have a soccer pitch at Adelaide City just around the corner from my house so I did most of my running there.”

“A typical session is probably a couple of two minute runs leaving everything out there, then some high speed bit in the middle with 50 or 60m sprints and end on a couple of three minute runs to gas yourself out.

“It’s all over in half-an-hour or 40 minutes. Overall we do a fair bit of running but the most we do is two or three minutes at a time, and for me the shorter stuff is a lot easier.

“With the kicking I got one of my best mates who lives around the corner to come out and have a kick, otherwise I’d find a footy oval and have some set shots.”

By February Rozee had noticed significant improvements in his running.

“The weather has been hot as well, our sessions have been 13 or 14km and sometimes three times a week, so I think I’ve got a fair bit fitter.

“I’ve taken about 25 seconds off my 3km time trial time so I’m pretty happy with that. After the draft my running was the main thing to work on so to improve that shows positive signs.”

The gym at Alberton brings welcome relief from the heat and the monotony of running. A typical session involves 10-20 players moving through at a time – usually in their lines (forwards, backs, midfielders) or by age – and each session lasts about an hour.

In the corner of the gym is a whiteboard and in front are four iPads mounted to a desk that record everything the players do – every weight they lift and kilometre they run – and when they’re not at the club they log all that data on their phones which are synced to the iPads.

On this day, hip-hop music is playing and watching it all unfold through the glass windows of their offices are Port Adelaide’s fitness staff.

“We have accountability and total buy-in from all our players and coaches to make it work,” says Port Adelaide’s head of high performance Ian McKeown.

“Essentially a pre-season program could look the same across every club in the competition but it’s whether the work is put in behind the scenes to make it happen. We are blessed with the Brad Eberts, Justin Westhoffs, Travis Boaks, Jack Trengoves of the world who are overseeing things – the program really drives itself.”

The gym is a social setting as well as a training environment.

“Between that and the physio room, there’s a lot of shit being talked,” McKeown says.

“But it’s important because it’s part of a young player’s education. They get to know each other and by watching how our leaders go about it they are learning about the expectations and standards that are set.”

McKeown has been in the job for 18 months after replacing Darren Burgess who brought him to the club in 2013. This is his second pre-season in charge but he sees it as a never-ending project.

“You probably don’t ever stop, as things unfold during the season the messaging you get either in coaches’ reviews or the frustrations they might have, you start to pre-empt what they’re going to want (in pre-season),” he says.

“So you need to have things in place way before September or October. I like to think we use all the experts that are here rather than it just being my program that I’m driving.

“The most important thing is to make sure the football coaches get what they need and asking the right questions so you can write the programs.

“Between Stu Graham and Tim O’Leary from a medical point of view there are plenty of layers of different injuries and histories which you have to deal with.

“So Stu and I sit in on a lot of the coaches’ end of season interviews because our job is to prepare the players to train the way they want to play.

“Ken (Hinkley) empowers us because it’s our time when it comes to planning the program. The overarching stuff he is driving to a certain extent but it’s a very collaborative thing.”

McKeown says the players are naturally inquisitive about what’s involved but some would rather not know what they’re about to do.

“We’re as transparent as we can be but we are also trying to educate them so they understand increases in load and what that feels like,” he explains.

“They need to know what sessions are faster, or more combative, and they’re told that. In the mornings you’ll see a lot of me buzzing around making sure everyone is OK, but the guys who want to know what training is and what the week looks like – we will tell them.

“We have formal team meetings where we will present the information but typically we tend to stay away from that because they have a lot on their minds and to be honest, a lot of them don’t want to know.

“They want to know what the week looks like – they’ll definitely want to know when they’re doing 1km time trials or 200m sprints – but beyond that they just want to know ‘either this is a big week or not’.”

McKeown says Rozee could not have been more impressive in his first AFL pre-season.

“You don’t quite know what their limits are or what they’re training background is so you tend to be a little bit conservative,” he says.

“And one of the challenges we have is for the player, it’s not fair on them to be conservative because they’re here to showcase themselves and they’re excited.

“They want to do more and the biggest thing is educating them about reporting so we know how sore they are, where they’re sore, that they’re getting the treatment, that their nutrition is right, so they’re doing all the things to help them train as well as they can.

“A lot of the guys haven’t seen a gym properly before so you add that on top of an AFL training load and it’s a lot.

“Connor has been fantastic. He hasn’t missed a session and we are very rarely pulling him out of anything but we are smart about managing him through drills.

“All the young guys who came in this season have done fantastically well and that’s a credit to what they’ve done before this to be comfortable here.”

While from the outside it may appear that setting PB times on the track and having minimal players in the medical room would constitute a successful pre-season, McKeown says the program won’t be judged until the end of the year.

“It’s interesting because you do tend to get caught in a trap - where does a pre-season end?” he says.

“How do you review that and mark that?

“One of the things I feel I’ve brought to the table here is it’s a never ending push and never ending review cycle, because there is always something that’s coming around the corner. So to look into the future and make sure we’re ready for the questions. But the true mark of any fitness staff is if we win.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re running fast if we’re not playing well. Or if we’ve rehabbed someone well that’s fantastic and we value that and put a lot of time into that, but I’d much rather they were healthy in the first place and they’re out there helping us to win.

“Not that we can necessarily affect the W or the L, but we can help create a healthy list which trains the way the coaches want them to train and embeds the system they’re trying to run.”

GAME DAY

The light at the end of the tunnel that had been driving Rozee all summer finally arrives by March when he plays in both of Port Adelaide’s JLT Series games to stake his claim for a Round 1 debut.

“It’s been a long time coming, when we started pre-season it seemed like it was so far away and even after Christmas still felt like it would be ages away,” he says.

“Now we’re finally playing games, it feels real, the reality of playing AFL football is kicking in.

“I’ve changed a fair bit since I got here. Physically I’ve improved my fitness – my first time trial compared to after Christmas I took 25 seconds off and I would have improved again by now, and I’ve put on about 4kg as well.

“Mentally with the training we’ve done I’m in a good spot, we’ve been working pretty closely with Nathan Bassett and all the forwards, it’s been good to learn the structures and get our head around what we have to focus on during games.”

Hinkley has made no secret that he plans to play all three of Port’s top draft picks in Round 1 - Rozee, Zak Butters and Xavier Duursma.

Rozee has allowed himself to think about what that will be like, running onto the MCG to play Melbourne in front of 50,000 plus.

“Most of my family would come over from Adelaide, I have a few in Melbourne already so they would come and watch and a few friends,” he says.

“I do think about it. There’s been a fair bit of talk about our young players and three first-year guys playing in the JLT so it’s hard not to get excited, but until I get picked I’ll just keep focusing on training.”