Bryce Gibbs reveals Adelaide camp ‘disaster’ broke players’ trust in the club
Bryce Gibbs has provided new details about Adelaide’s disastrous camp and how the playing group was put in a vulnerable situation.
AFL
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Recently retired Adelaide midfielder Bryce Gibbs says the Crows playing group “lost a bit of trust with the footy department” after the club’s infamous 2018 pre-season camp, which he says was a “disaster”.
The camp with Collective Mind has lingered around the Crows ever since the 2018 season, with some blaming it for the decline of the club from grand finalists in 2017 to wooden spooners in 2020.
Rumours of what took place on the Gold Coast camp led to the Crows asking the AFL’s Integrity Unit to investigate the camp, and while the club was found to not have done enough due diligence in identifying what was going to take place on the camp Adelaide was not sanctioned for it.
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Speaking on the Greats with Garby podcast Gibbs said it was a “disaster” for the club.
“It was an interesting one and the club said to me: ‘Look, we are putting this camp together are you keen to get involved?’” he said.
“There will be different levels, the leadership group will go through a more intensive time on this camp and then the next group of guys and then the younger guys.
“(They said) we want to put you in the leadership one and obviously rocking up to a new club I wanted to build good relationships straight way and I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to get to know the players quicker so I saw it as an opportunity to do that.
“We weren’t told what was going to be on this camp, we didn’t have the details to be honest so we went in blind and not knowing to expect.
“I think their intentions were good and genuine that it was going to help us but it was obviously a disaster.
“It affected players in different ways for different reasons.”
The Crows leadership group, including Gibbs, then senior coach Don Pyke and then senior assistant coach Scott Camporeale, were involved in a program called “Mark of the Warrior”.
Woule and Leddie said they co-ordinated the camp with tertiary-educated counsellors and psychotherapists and refuted claims that the club had provided sensitive personal information to them to be used as “forms of abuse” on the camp or that players broke down or openly wept as they waited for the bus to go home.
They also said those in the Crows leadership group were led through a “rite of passage” style program where they confronted and overcame “immature masculine” behaviours such as selfishness, entitlement, laziness, privilege, disconnection, lack of integrity, lack of respect and lack of discipline that had been holding back their performance on the field or around the club.
But Gibbs said what happened on the camp hurt the playing group’s trust with the footy department.
“I’d been on that many SA camps and I thought I’d seen it all, so I could filter what I thought I could get out of what we were doing and I could ignore the rubbish that was going on,” he said.
“I was OK with it, I knew some guys were struggling from time to time with it. All you can do is put your arm around them and make sure they are okay and check in with them.
“It wasn’t until they debrief it later down the track, they probably should’ve debriefed it earlier than they did to squash it on the head.
“The club have put their hand up and said it was a complete miss and if we could do things differently we would of.
“We hopped on a bus on the Gold Coast and ended up in NSW. I couldn’t tell you where we were to be honest. We can look back on it and laugh about it but it certainly hurt the group probably more so than I thought it did at the time looking back.
“I think the playing group lost a bit of trust with the footy department. Obviously a lot of details we weren’t allowed to know going into the camp, we all had to sign waivers just to say we can’t speak about it after.
“It was just strange the way it played out and I think the playing group certainly lost a bit of trust with the decisions the club was making and some of the decisions the club made going forward.”
The Crows made significant changes to its footy department after the 2019 season.
That was a season in which Gibbs only played 12 times, and then just the three games in 2020.
He said this fear of getting dropped, which he never had to worry about while at Carlton or in his first year at Adelaide, took away his focus from doing a job for the team.
“I think that took away my strengths,” he said.
“At stages I got too encapsulated about what I wasn’t doing right and worried if I wasn’t doing that I would get dragged or dropped next week.”
Gibbs recently signed with SANFL side South Adelaide for 2021, and said he believed he still should be playing AFL football.
The Crows were approached for comment.
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