How Port Adelaide used its pre-season training camp in Noosa to build a bond it hopes will stand up in good times and bad next year
The Advertiser’s Chief Sports Writer Reece Homfray followed Port Adelaide on its pre-season training camp in Noosa. This is his exclusive, behind-the-scenes report on what he saw and heard from a group hungry to learn and move on from a painful 2018.
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Ollie Wines was leaving the training track in Noosa just before 5pm on Sunday when he stopped to talk with Tobin Cox in the rain.
Wines, 24, and potentially the next captain of the football club, and Cox, 19, the last player Port Adelaide took in this year’s rookie draft stood on a concrete step and chatted.
The Power had just done 40-minutes of full-ground match practice which was the most competitive hit-out of their week-long training camp and Cox was picking his vice captain’s brain.
“I’ve talked to Vossy about this a lot,” Wines explained to the teenager from Naracoorte.
“We go back to things I can control — tackling and pressure.
“If you’re not getting the ball it doesn’t always work but it’s worth a try.”
Behind them sat 36 other players covered in sweat, sunscreen and grass clippings who were undoing the laces on their footy boots to signal the end of another day.
But eight players were still on the oval about to do a running set that everyone else had done that morning.
As the rain continued to fall and the lights came on, Wines, Cox and the rest of the group ignored the food and the cricket on TV inside the clubrooms to stay outside and watch the eight players sprint so hard around the oval that Kane Farrell eventually collapsed on his back 20 minutes later.
It could have been out of a mischievous satisfaction in watching someone else run and hurt, or it could have been what Port Adelaide’s pre-season camp seemed to be all about — all for one and one for all.
“Put em to the sword Trenners,” they yelled at Jack Trengove.
“Get em Cluz”, “Yes Faz”, others said to Tom Clurey and Farrell.
When the group rounded the bend on the final lap the roar was like they were the Melbourne Cup field turning into the Flemington straight.
It was just one moment of connection during the six-day camp, and was probably lost on the players because it happened organically, without them sitting in a circle being told what to do, but that’s what Port Adelaide wanted.
The pre-season camp was the brainchild of Michael Voss, Brisbane’s Brownlow Medallist and triple premiership captain who knows what a good team looks and sounds like, and has now been promoted as Ken Hinkley’s senior assistant.
Port Adelaide has welcomed 22 new players to the club in the past two years including 11 this off-season. It has three new line coaches and by February will have a new captain as well.
Voss and the Power wanted them to get to know each other — in a way that only being away together 24/7 can do — where they could train together, eat together, live together and talk together.
Port has a mentor system for its players but with such significant list turnover concedes it needs to double down in those areas.
“It can be as simple as having a team dinner together and sitting next to someone who perhaps you wouldn’t as much at the club,” Wines said of the camp.
“So it puts you in those situations where you’ve got to get to know your teammates and it’s only going to create a stronger bond between us.”
Tom Rockliff was more forthright: “I think getting away as a group and the bonding aspect of football is undervalued these days,” he said.
With 46 players and 10 coaches plus support staff, Port had more than 60 in its travelling party to Noosa and they were all involved in every session.
“This is not just about the coaches or administration staff dictating what we want them to be, it’s actually far more important for them to work out what they want to be so they can maintain their own standards and monitor them,” football chief Chris Davies said.
“They have to be open to it, there’s no point coming up here and having a closed mind to what the possibilities are.
“The message needs to be that we’re in it as a group because there will be times throughout the year when we are challenged.”
They might have been on the Sunshine Coast but it was no holiday. The players arrived just after lunch last Wednesday and had their runners on by 3pm for the first of several brutal running sessions.
Port wants its players to look forward and write their own chapter but also respect the past which is why Matthew Primus and Roger Delaney were invited along.
Delaney has been living in Queensland for 10 years and arrived at training with his 12-year-old twins to run water for the players.
A few knew his face and more knew his name but not everyone, which was when Davies called the group together and introduced Delaney as a 200-game, six-time premiership player with the Magpies.
There’s nothing like six premierships to get a group of players to straighten up and Delaney’s introduction drew a wolf whistle from a few before every one of them walked up to introduce themselves as they headed onto the oval.
Hinkley then stood on the inside of the track, hat and sunnies on, whistle and stopwatch around his neck and arms crossed.
“Find a way to fight,” he barked at his players and a few eager assistant coaches who ran past him.
“I want you to get him, get after him, don’t accept the gap, you’ve gotta fight.”
THAT night Voss stood at the front of the room after dinner and the players went quiet.
“We want you to walk away from this camp with a full picture of what we are about in 2019”, he told them.
They’d already met in private to talk about values, standards, expectations and more broadly ‘mindfulness’ which is a buzz word for any modern organisation.
That could be as simple as being present in each other’s company and being conscious of their mobile phone use which can be a barrier to meaningful conversation.
Five nights later Voss revisited the topic when the players were asked what they got out of the camp and one raised his hand and said being more aware of how much time he spends looking at his phone.
“So what does that look like when we get home?” was Voss’ rhetorical question.
Players spent a lot of time thinking outside the square on the camp. From trying to communicate when they weren’t allowed to talk and getting out of their comfort zone like the draftees having to rehearse and perform a musical act, to building a children’s bike from scratch and breaking into three groups for a negotiation exercise.
It was in this robust exercise where young faces like Zak Butters, Connor Rozee and Boyd Woodcock and emerging leaders like Dougal Howard and Darcy Byrne-Jones did a lot of the talking while Travis Boak sat at the back and let it unfold.
Boak was back in his No. 10 guernsey in Noosa but is still clearly the leader of the pack with the way he trains, talks and acts, but seems content to let others now step forward.
“You’ve been watching us train — he leads the way, he trains like a beast and gives himself the best chance to get more football out of his career and I think the freedom of not having to be the captain will also be a bonus for him,” Hinkley told The Advertiser on the weekend.
“He will feel a bit of freedom but I tell you what it won’t stop his desire to still lead this team and get to where he wants to go.”
Boak was often the last one onto the training track in Noosa because he was stretching with a rubber band around his ankles or across his shoulders. He was also the last to leave.
A full blown training session is organised chaos with stuff happening everywhere.
The main group is in the middle, the rehab group that’s allowed to run is sprinting around the boundary in both directions, the rehab group that’s not running is boxing on the infield, Sam Gray is on an exercise bike and Trent McKenzie is walking laps with his arm in a sling.
At one stage Voss got caught in the crossfire of a competitive ball drill and was sent crashing over the top of Steven Motlop.
“Stand up in the tackle, Michael,” Hinkley chirped from the middle.
“The biggest bloke had to land on me too,” replied Motlop.
When the game was over, the black jerseys had beaten the white jerseys 5.5 to 5.4 with a last-gasp goal.
“You can do a lot of things right and still lose in the last 30 seconds,” Hinkley told them.
And doesn’t Port Adelaide know that after being beaten after siren twice in the last 12 months and that Showdown goal-post heartbreaker in Round 20.
Hamish Hartlett and Robbie Gray are both on the comeback from knee surgeries of varying degrees but punished themselves in the rehab running group.
At the end Hartlett dropped to one knee with his head bowed while Gray had both hands on his thighs gasping for air.
Gray is one of those old fashioned footballers with a unique running style and who looks like he hates pre-season, and would rather just turn up on game day and dominate.
But you don’t win three best-and-fairests and four All-Australians without the necessary evil of pre-season.
Dixon did a 45-minute boxing session with strength and rehab coach Daniel Buberis who would have been looking for a bath and the Epsom salts afterwards.
Dixon, all 105kg of him, wore the gloves and Buberis, 66kg, held the hand pads and a bag across his abdomen while the big fella let rip and every punch was punctuated with a roar as air gushed out of his lungs.
“I like to tell him he’s soft — it fires him up,” Buberis said with a cheeky smile.
The camp was designed to bring the Power together but it wasn’t all smiles, high fives and hugs. The players had a crack when they had to.
Teenage rookie Martin Frederick was put down hard by a Joe Atley tackle prompting some teammates to say “easy, Joe”. But Frederick got straight up, walked over to Atley and said “don’t worry about it, it’s part of the game”.
Frederick is straight out of under-18s and that moment of defiance wasn’t lost on his new coaches who were watching closely.
Fellow draftee Xavier Duursma copped an accidental blood nose on day one and Billy Frampton took issue with a bump from Aidyn Johnson during a competitive drill. But it was the competitiveness and hunger that Hinkley would have been pleased to see.
THE man everyone was happy to see slipped in quietly and largely unnoticed by the players just after midday on Saturday.
As an outsider it’s easy to underestimate how much Matthew Primus means to Port Adelaide because of the way it all ended in 2012 — with Primus in tears at a press conference after being sacked as coach.
But everyone at Alberton knew it wasn’t Primus’ fault he was dealt an under-resourced football program and told to make tough decisions that would cause short-term pain for long-term gain.
And players from the 2004 premiership say they still feel like something was missing that day when their captain wasn’t with them on the MCG because of a knee injury.
So when Primus arrived at training he was greeted by warm smiles and longer-than-normal handshakes.
He spoke to the players and coaches in private and those in the room said you could have heard a pin drop.
It was the first time he’d been back at the club since his sacking six years ago and even though he then coached at Gold Coast, said he never could detach himself from Port Adelaide completely.
He told the players it took him three years just to turn off the notifications on his phone every time a Port Adelaide story was in the news, and among other things to never give up, live in the moment and appreciate the opportunity.
Gratitude in general formed a big part of Port’s Noosa training camp.
Players were asked about an act or achievement that they’d done and were proud of or grateful for.
One player said finishing his university degree, another stopped biting his nails after 22 years, another learnt to swim and one paid for a family member’s heart surgery.
The group facilitator then asked them to remember what it was like to be a kid again.
“Now you are going to build nine bikes for kids who come from horrendous backgrounds, some who don’t own anything more than what they can fit in a plastic bag,” he said.
An hour later when the foster kids arrived with their carers they were as shy as they were excited.
“These kids have had a tough start so it’s nice to have someone in their corner,” one of the carers told the players.
A three-year-old boy with curly hair wasn’t shy however. He rushed up to the bike he’d been given, got straight on then fell straight back down on his face when he tried to pedal.
The group went silent waiting for him to cry but he stood up, straightened his helmet and got back on triggering an enormous cheer from the players.
“They have had significantly harder upbringings than what we have, we’re in a very privileged position, and they’re in a position where they might not have had a lot of Christmas presents coming their way, so to see the smiles on their faces when we gave them a bike meant a lot to all the boys,” Tom Jonas said.
“You could see how much doing a good deed for someone else makes you feel good in yourself.
“We’ve been doing some work on resilience and one of the main pillars of that is gratitude — and a way to show gratitude is to do a good deed for someone else so this is an example of that.”
Jonas is however quick to put the warm and fuzzy feelings Port players might have had on the camp into context.
The straightest shooter in the team who says what he thinks with brutal honesty which makes him a contender for the captaincy said the Power could do all the talking and have all the meetings they want, but they will ultimately be judged on what happens in 22 weeks and hopefully beyond next year.
“The real test will be once the footy season actually starts,” Jonas said.
“That is 100 per cent what we’re going to be measured on, how we go in 2019, but the training camp is a good opportunity to work on our deficiencies and make our strengths stronger.
“Every other club will be doing it but hopefully we’re working on areas that will be really valuable for us in 2019.”
Which leads back to Voss’ question to the group on the opening night of the camp: What is Port Adelaide about in 2019?
“The message from Michael in that space is for our players,” Hinkley said.
“Is what we want to do and what we say we want to do, what we actually do?”
Saying and doing are two very different things and now Port has done one, it has 12 months to do the other.
Originally published as How Port Adelaide used its pre-season training camp in Noosa to build a bond it hopes will stand up in good times and bad next year
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