International expertise to drive Port Adelaide’s premiership push through new fitness team
PORT Adelaide’s new fitness coach and medical chief have gathered expertise from around the world — and the Power hopes they can be a key piece of the premiership puzzle in 2018.
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THEY are part of an elite international group that travel the world to exact high performance — and now they are settled in at Alberton.
New fitness coach Ian McKeown — who takes over from the well-known Darren Burgess — and new head of medical services Tim O’Leary arrive at Port Adelaide with credentials from around the world.
McKeown was promoted from within the club after Burgess took up an offer to join Arsenal in the English Premier League but his background means he will draw from a range of streams as he drills the Power’s players on the track and in the gym.
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He started his career in high performance in his native Northern Ireland and it has since taken him around the world.
McKeown with the Northern Island institute of sport, the rugby side, Gaelic football, the national hockey teams before heading to the AIS, where he completed his PhD and worked with The Matildas, basketball, volleyball and hockey again.
It’s also where he met Burgess, who first offered him a job at Alberton.
“It is a very small field, the high performance part of sport,” McKeown said. “There’s not that many people that are doing it around the world.
“It’s not like being a top accountant; every city has 500 accountants that are really good.
“Every city has two to three (high performance experts) and not that many in each country.
“We get together a lot and network pretty hard.
“I consider a lot of the guys who work in the NFL, NBA, EPL friends and we call on those people quite often at the drop of a hat because we have those personal relationships.
“But to get a peer you can’t find one in the same street or the same city; you have to work hard at that — staying up late or getting up early to speak to somebody on Skype or make a phone call.”
O’Leary’s journey is different because he is South Australian, having played basketball for Norwood and football with Rostrevor’s Old Collegians before moving to London and then joining the Power before heading to the US.
He returns to Port Adelaide armed with knowledge gathered as the rehabilitation manager with the NBA franchise Milwaukee Bucks, where he worked with multi million dollar basketball stars.
“They called it senior physical therapist and I left here (Port Adelaide) as head physiotherapist,” O’Leary said. “The department was smaller — there were only 15 players — and we were sent out there to set up the department with a bit of a blank canvas.
“Interestingly enough the NBA is a little bit behind in those things, which seems odd to people because there’s so much money involved in it.
“But younger owners are starting to look around the world at what goes into looking after players in reducing injuries and managing players.
“But at the same time I learnt a lot because these players basically don’t stop.”
McKeown and O’Leary will work closely together — they have to.
One is about extracting the most from each athletes body without breaking it, the other about making sure it is put back together and ready to endure another session.
But the key these days is no longer to be fitter than the opposition — those days are gone.
Run a beep test or bench press and squat test across all AFL players in all 18 clubs and there will not be much difference in the results.
The McKeown-O’Leary partnership is about efficiency, and it comes just as much from keeping players balanced and happy.
Yes, they want them to be as strong as possible, but it has to be balanced against putting on too much muscle that can slow them down when it comes to running out games.
And yes, they want them to eat and live healthily, but not to the expense of not enjoying life.
One example is this: after each match, every nutrional guide is chucked out of the window. The players are allowed to gorge on pizza, soft drinks, lollies — anything they feel like to get fuel back in their systems.
There are also rigorous screens: players are tested medically and through questionnaires twice a week to monitor their wellbeing.
“What works for Trav (captain Travis Boak) might not work for Robbie Gray — you have to manage that load and the training.
“It might look like their training at the same time but they might be doing quite different things.
“If you’re playing well and are injury free, nothing changes. But if there are changes needed it’s a decision I’m accountable for and we have to work out as a team, whether it’s physio-related, injury-related, strength-related or fitness-related.”
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