Inside story of Travis Boak’s dedicated preparation to become Port Adelaide’s AFL games record holder
Travis Boak will break Port Adelaide’s games record on Sunday — and he’s not close to being finished. David Koch, Warren Tredrea and other select Power people pay tribute to him.
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When Travis Boak runs out against GWS at Metricon Stadium, he will create history for Port Adelaide.
A week after celebrating his 300th game milestone, Boak will become Port Adelaide’s AFL games record holder — surpassing Kane Cornes.
Selected by the Power with the fifth pick in the 2006 Draft, Boak has resisted the lure of going home to Geelong to become a modern-day Port great.
Those who have been with him on the journey, talk about his time since he walked in the door at Alberton.
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DAVID KOCH
Port Adelaide chairman
When I welcome new players to the club I challenge them to write their own page in Port Adelaide’s incredible 151 year history. I reckon Boaky has written his own chapter.
Others can comment on his playing contribution.
For me Boaky is much more than his elite football skills.
At the end of 2012 I took on the role of chairman at a time when the club was in the wilderness … on the brink.
First-time chairman, first-time head coach and the reigning premiers send a supposedly secret delegation to Adelaide to lure Trav back home to Geelong.
Trav didn’t just decide to stay at Port Adelaide, he put his hand up to Ken and wanted to help lead us back from the brink.
That is the character of Travis Boak. Unbelievably loyal with an incredible sense of responsibility.
He has done way more than play 301 games for this club.
He has led it, he has helped define its culture, he has made a significant contribution to its community and its people.
I will be eternally grateful to Trav. He is one of those rare special people that you feel privileged to know.
WARREN TREDREA
Port Adelaide premiership captain, 255 games
I was his first captain, his first game was my 200th.
For me he always came into the club as a talent, he was our highest ever draft pick at the time
And he has not disappointed since.
He was a professional from day dot, he was always very driven and came into the club very focused on becoming an elite player.
But he has developed in other ways.
Travis is all about leadership and strong leadership, he is a wonderful human being.
He is very kind and being a leader has allowed him to focus on other people and help them.
He has been focused on staying mentally fresh as he has gotten older and that has really benefited him.
To grow as he has it has been really impressive to watch
Your legacy is judged I think after footy and for Travis the greatest challenge was when he was playing in that half forward role and was struggling.
But he never complained, it was always about embracing the new role and then Ollie Wines goes down in 2019 and Travis is able to go back in the midfield.
He should have never been in that role in my opinion, he was always a gut runner and should have been playing in the midfield.
I think his legacy is a player who got everything out of himself.
Every player has strength and weaknesses and he played to his strengths and worked on his weaknesses
He has got the absolute best workrate, for me a big thing is how players react when they aren’t playing well and for Travis he has always been able to work his way into form
I think that’s a testament to him, and that’s why I don’t think 350 is beyond him.
DOMENIC CASSISI
Port Adelaide captain 2009-2012, 228 games
I guess the standout thing about Boaky is that he has never changed as a person from the first time he walked in.
He’s always been that hardworking, humble person. Which says a lot about the way he was brought up and the family connection he has.
I always remember Boaky as just the rock of the family with his mum and his sisters as well. The amount of love he has for them, you can see he is family first so it is pretty awesome to see and he sets a great example with that.
He has just become really determined and he always had this look in his eye that he always was going to try to be the best he could be.
So he is a pretty unique character, and he’s had a few things along the way that has tested him and he has always stood up in those tough times.
The thing with Boaky is and I reckon this one of the keys as to why he has had a long career is that he’s never rode the highs too high. And he never rode the lows too low.
Even when he first walked in he was really calm and composed and he’s always been that way. He has never let anything get to him that much.
And he works on that side of his game too, he works on the mental side of his preparation and having clear thoughts.
I’m not surprised that he has gotten to being the record holder for the footy club. To be honest there is no more worthy person to be the record holder if you look at the character of the bloke, his hard work, his commitment to the club and loyalty.
It was the natural progression, he was the absolute standout and he might have even been ready 12 months before he actually became captain to be honest.
He had taken his game to another level and the way he prepared. It was just great timing for the club, Kenny came in as coach, a new captain in Boaky and we started on that journey of turning the club around and it was well led by him.
I remember speaking to him in the week he gave the captaincy to Tom Jonas and Ollie Wines and I said “mate you won’t know yourself” because it is such a huge weight off your shoulders.
As you get older you have to put a lot more time into your game, once you hit 30 you are not recovering like you used to. You sort to get over the game mentally a bit quicker than you would do at your prime at 25.
So you do have to shift all that energy you are putting into leading the club and if you redirect that into yourself and how you can be the best player you can prolong your career.
And that is what Boaky has done.
I also think he has revolutionised the game in terms of player preparation. He was the one who started going overseas in the off-season to train, not to get pissed.
He was going over there to get better and that is what a lot of the best NBA and NFL players do, they use that window to get better.
And Boaky was the first to do that if you look at the competition, and now there are guys at every club doing it.
That will be his legacy, taking the AFL professionalism to another level.
JUSTIN WESTHOFF
280 games
To make 300 games is a huge milestone for him and his family. It has been good to see it up close.
It feels like a long time ago now (when both were drafted in 2006), we were at the polar opposites of expectations when we came into the club.
For him he came over, he was a top 10 pick. There was a lot of hype around the potential he could do for the club.
And I was just one of those other guys that was tacked onto the end.
It was really good to see him go about it, especially as an 18-year-old. I was a little bit older and just to see him come through the ranks and overcome the adversity that he had is a true testament to the guy now.
To be able to share that with him, there were a lot of ups and downs, but it was special.
For him just putting the work in and knowing that he was getting the best out of himself and that being reflected in the way he was playing.
But for a time we didn’t have the cattle to back up kind of what he was putting onto the field and it is always hard to forge a career when your club isn’t performing the way it should be.
It has been well documented what the club has gone through but for him to come out the other end, and pretty much put the club on his back being captain and all the things that he has done is pretty amazing.
He was the pick out of the guys (to be captain) that were coming through, he excelled in that area.
He has spoken about whether he was ready for the role, but he was ready in the eyes of the guys playing around him and he was able to support me and a couple of other guys who were able to stick around.
The club also had a new coach and it kind of started the club afresh with the guys coming through and he was a real pillar to build that period of time.
It falls back to what he does off the field, just doing everything for the team. I know he was doing a hell of a lot of that as captain and sacrificing some of what he was best at.
And to be given an opportunity to go back through the midfield and absolute dominate over the last three or so years is a real credit to him being able to stay tough and stick to the process and all that.
It is just a true testament to the way he goes about it. He is playing as good as footy as he ever as.
I think his footy takes care of itself, people who are close to him are probably more proud of the stuff he does off the field. With his family and in the community, his honesty around that is probably what you admire more about him than what he does on the footy field.
Just the support he gives charities and people doing it tough is probably being a good human, rather than a 300 game player.
The dedication behind Boak’s climb to 300 – and beyond
Dwight Lowrey looked at Travis Boak and rolled his eyes.
The powerful American gridiron player was about to tackle the Aussie in a set of demanding physical challenges.
They had been brought together at a high-performance centre in Santa Cruz, California, and were told to go head-to-head in the series of drills.
Boak, we know, was an elite AFL midfielder with Port Adelaide. Lowrey played with the New York Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars, Atlanta Falcons, Indianapolis Colts and San Diego Chargers as an NFL Safety — a position that demands players sprint and tackle opposition as the last line of defence. He could run 40 yards (36m) in 4.54 seconds.
“He (Lowrey) is an amazing athlete and he kind of rolled his eyes at Travis and was like here is this Aussie athlete whatever no big deal,” sports and human movement specialist Austin Einhorn told The Advertiser.
“And he (Boak) gave him a run for his money.
“He held up against a 10-year veteran NFL Safety and he is just as much a great athlete as the ones from the Australian sports.”
Einhorn, a sports and human movement specialist in Santa Cruz, described Boak as “extremely skilful and quick, and is able to adapt to physical challenges”.
“That’s part of why he has had such a long and great career, his ability to adapt,” he said.
On Sunday Boak’s “long and great career” racks up another milestone when he plays his 301st game for Port Adelaide against Greater Western Sydney, breaking Kane Cornes’ club games record.
HEADING TO THE STATES
Boak first went to California to work with Einhorn around five-years-ago at the recommendation of Port Adelaide’s head of high performance Ian McKeown.
He would return every off-season before Covid stopped international travel, and would expand the circle he worked with – linking up with two-time Olympic snowboarder Tyler Jewell at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Centre in Santa Monica.
On his last visit to the US in late 2019, he and Jewell worked on strengthening his knee after recent surgery on it.
“We would have single leg balance on a bosu board but then we could challenge that stability further by having him kick the ball over a target,” Jewell said.
“And then he said “you’ve got to do it” so I jumped on one and he was teaching me a little bit.
“And I think often if someone can teach something then they really understand it.”
Boak went to the US in 2019 off the back of a career best season – averaging 30 disposals a game after he was being written off following some struggles playing forward – with all the work he was doing off the field paying dividends.
But as he sat with Einhorn on a sidewalk outside his Santa Cruz gym Boak was fearing his career was coming to a premature end.
The then 31-year-old’s knee was coming along fine but it was his shoulder that he had operated that was causing him to question whether he could play again.
Boak has revealed in interviews that he was making such slow progress from a shoulder operation to repair torn tendons that he was contemplating retirement.
But it was a simple question from Einhorn that recalibrated Boak, who was training at the facility along with Charlie Dixon, Marcus Bontempelli and Cale Hooker.
“For him and I, we felt the turning point wasn’t anything we did in terms of his shoulder but the conversation we had the first day at the gym when I asked him, ‘Hey, what can you do’?” Einhorn said.
“He had listed off all of his limitations that he had been told by his surgeon, and rightfully so, and he got into a mindset that he can’t do anything.
“And as simple as that question was it just turned the tide and changed his perspective towards everything that he was ignoring of what he could do and the momentum shifted and we became extremely exploratory of his shoulder and what he could do and he made progress extremely fast.”
Einhorn’s gym in Santa Cruz has a rock climbing wall and that became a big part of Boak’s path back, a training program he described “as the most challenging yet, mentally more than physically”.
The next season, in 2020, Boak finished runner-up in the Brownlow and was named as an All-Australian for the first time since 2014.
“He is just extremely open minded and not a lot of athletes are, especially when they are at the top of their games,” Einhorn said
“And to me that speaks of a confidence, a lot of athletes and coaches I sense they don’t want to change anything.
“They are fearful that if they change anything that shit is going to hit the fan and things are going to mess up and they will become less skilful.”
BREATHE IN, BREATHE OUT
On the field Boak has become know for his supreme workrate and ability to keep calm under pressure.
It is an area he has worked on with Nam Baldwin on the Gold Coast — breathing techniques that help regulate his heart beat and wind down the brain and the nervous system.
“He has developed that mental strength where he can regulate how he performs on the field,” said Baldwin, who met Boak at a Red Bull training camp on the Gold Coast five years ago.
“He is not overdoing it, he is using that knowledge to maintain energy and not overcook it.
“So injury risk drops because he is more mindful about how he plays, both playing on the field and what he does off the field.”
Baldwin has worked also worked with Boak on mindfulness and being vulnerable in sessions that often involved Australian surfing legend Mick Fanning.
“When he is off the field, he can really regulate his attention on what is important and not get consumed by having to get external recognition,” Baldwin said.
“So he has that clarity about who he is as a footy player, who he is as a human and
really being able to regulate expectation on himself and the effects of others and
their expectations of him, which he can’t control.”
HOW LONG CAN HE GO?
The question everyone wants to know is how long can Boak continue?
He himself has spoken about wanting to play on until he is 40, channelling American football superstar Tom Brady, despite the AFL industry generally viewing 30 as the beginning of the end.
Einhorn said there was a determination with Boak to prove this wrong.
“And that’s what he has sensed too. For some reason or another and we see this in the states with Tom Brady who is 43,” he said.
“Especially the media, who say oh he is 43 now as if on his birthday mother nature mailed him a box of bad hips and a bad back and replacement parts and all of a sudden all of his skills are going to fall apart.
“And that’s not the case. When athletes stay healthy as they age they should get better.”
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