SA Weekend cover story: Inside the mind, methods and mystery of Crows fitness guru Darren Burgess

New Crows fitness boss Darren Burgess could be the club’s best recruit and play a leading role in helping Adelaide climb from the depths of the AFL ladder, say people who have worked closely with him. Matt Turner reports.

Paul Seedsman looks off to the side for a moment, draws a wry smile and ponders the question. Has he noticed much of a difference at the Adelaide Crows since the arrival of new head of high-performance Darren Burgess?

“He’s probably a little bit more secretive – you don’t really know what’s coming until you get hit with it,” the 132-game wingman says.

Burgess – a former fitness boss with AFL clubs Melbourne and Port Adelaide, world-game giants Liverpool and Arsenal, along with the Socceroos – looms as a key Crows recruit. The 47-year-old has a reputation as one of the best in his business – and for keeping players on their toes.

Fresh from a 13-hour flight to the United Arab Emirates for a pre-season trip at the end of 2013, Port Adelaide’s squad was sure a light session was on the cards under Burgess, after checking in to their hotel and grabbing training gear.

“We thought we were going to cruise around, do a couple of laps, stretch, then go home,” ex-Power fullback Alipate Carlile tells SA Weekend.

Burgess had other ideas.

First, he made the players ride bikes about 4km in the Dubai sun to the training complex.

Then he took Hamish Hartlett aside.

“He said ‘when I ask you before training, what’s the hardest running session we’ve done, I want you to say it was the hundred 100s (100 100m runs)’,” the former Port Adelaide vice-captain remembers.

“He asked me at the training facility and when I said ‘hundred 100s probably’, he just said ‘right, everyone line up and away we go’.

“So that was pretty much straight off the plane, the first activity we got into.”

Darren Burgess. Photographer: Liam Kidston.

Carlile adds: “That threw everyone. The guys who had bad backs thought ‘what about me’ and he just said ‘I don’t care, put your runners on’.”

It was part of Burgess’s plan to build players’ fitness and mental resilience by taking them out of their comfort zones. Now he is seeking to do the same at the Power’s cross-town rival, Adelaide, which is entering the third year of a rebuild under coach Matthew Nicks.

Surprises might remain part of Burgess’s kit bag but joining the Crows was hardly a shock.

Adelaide was linked to him in 2020 as Burgess sought a return to SA for family reasons.

He stayed at Melbourne last year and played an important role in the Demons’ charge to their first flag since 1964.

After the grand final in Perth, Norm Smith Medallist Christian Petracca hailed Burgess’s influence. “We knew we were probably the fittest team in the AFL,” Petracca said.

What Burgess achieved at the Demons, who placed 17th in 2019, the season before he came, enhanced his stature.

After starting his career with Sydney Swans’ fitness staff, he first made the AFL world take notice when he helped turn Port Adelaide from a five-win team in 2012 into a fast-finishing flag threat in 2013-14. Trying to harden the Crows, coming off consecutive bottom-four finishes and without a major-round appearance since the 2017 grand final loss, is his next big challenge.

“The moment Burgo stepped through the door I reckon all the (Adelaide) players would’ve been thinking ‘from a physical point of view, we’re going to be in as good a condition as we could possibly ask for at the start of the season’,” Hartlett says. “As soon as you’ve got that belief in your mind, that’s half the battle taken care of.”

Few fitness bosses in Australia are as well known as Burgess. How many others can you name?

Yet as much as his cross-code moves, heat training and gruelling sessions have made headlines, former charges say it is his connection with players and focus on the mental side of the game that make him one of the best.

“He trained us hard and worked us hard, and pushed us to the limit from a physical point of view, but the thing he did better than most was psychologically he made us really believe we were of better fitness to any other team,” Hartlett says.

In 2013, Port Adelaide won several games from late deficits, including being 41 points behind in the third term against West Coast and 20 down with minutes remaining against the Crows.

“We were hurting at three-quarter time in those games but we had that mental belief that Burgo had instilled in us from day one of pre-season,” Carlile says.

The Power snapped a six-year major-round drought that year on its way to making a semi-final. It went a step further in 2014.

Ex-Port Adelaide player Billy Frampton gave Crows teammates an insight before pre-season began into Burgess’s monster sessions, which got “some of the boys worried”, according to Will Hamill. “Burgo’s brought that attitude of ‘keep going, keep trying to find another gear, don’t stop until I kind of say stop’,” Hamill says to SA Weekend. “So you can’t plan out to take this rep easy and the last one you go hard because you don’t know when it’s going to be the last one.”

Carlile reckons Burgess was ahead of his time in tapping into mental resilience. “We’d go out running, doing 100m sprints and he’d just say ‘keep going until I blow my whistle’,” he says. “You’re like ‘well, that doesn’t give you much of an end point’ but it was more about challenging you mentally to make sure you’re up to the rigours of a full season of AFL,” he says. “You don’t know how long a quarter’s going to go.”

Adelaide Crows training at West Lakes on Monday December 6. Picture: Michael Marschall

Carlile reckons Burgess loves when players push themselves harder than they realise they can.

“He spoke to us about some of the (English Premier League) soccer guys and the level of intensity that they train at,” he says. “He said ‘this is what the AFL is going to get to and we want to get there first’. Burgo had a really good relationship with (Power coach) Ken (Hinkley) where he’d say ‘we can keep going’, even when some of the doctors would be stressing big time thinking ‘how much more can they take?’”

Crows chief executive Tim Silvers told SEN in December that Adelaide’s first all-squad session of the summer featured a surprise – four 1km time trials. “He just brings an element of experience and enthusiasm and something that we probably haven’t quite had,” Silvers says.

Adelaide defender Luke Brown has likened Burgess to former coach Phil Walsh. Walsh, who died during his only season at the helm in 2015, expected his players to train with intensity and high speed while demanding “elite standards”. He too was known for his energy, enthusiasm and driving the squad to reach new limits.

Hartlett says Burgess knows how far he can push players because of the relationships he forms with them. “There’s probably a small element of fear, knowing you’re going to work your arse off harder than you’ve probably ever worked before,” he says. “As much as Burgo can be a real hard-arse … he can also be very empathetic and understanding of people as individuals. He has that great balance.”

Carlile adds: “He just cares about the players – their lives, their families, and he understands there’s more you need to get the players to that point where they put in the work”.

Connection has become a buzzword in the AFL in recent years and the teams that have had the most success, such as Richmond, have tapped into that space better than most.

Burgess says part of his job these days is to understand what makes players tick.

“That can be financial, that can be family, that can be career longevity, and once you understand that, you can mould conversations around that,” Burgess tells SA Weekend.

It was not always this way.

“When I first started out it was everyone does the same thing, mark out 100m, everyone does it at the same speed,” Burgess says.

“Whereas now everything is a bit more tailored, even your conversations and connections around different aspects of life, not just a whistle and a stopwatch.

“Players’ motivation dictates how they go about their training off and on the field, so my job is to understand that as best I can.”

For Burgess, the motivating factor behind his move back to Adelaide has been his two children, Harry and Millie. With them living in SA, Covid border restrictions made it difficult to see them. “It has been a really rough two years in that front,” Burgess told reporters in October.

“I have been trying to explore opportunities … to get home with the kids once it was clear that the borders weren’t going to open anytime soon.

“It has just been brutal.”

Burgess’s departure from the Demons was announced immediately after their drought-breaking triumph and he started at the Crows in early November. He is excited by the new job, including working with 2020 No.2 draft pick Riley Thilthorpe – “for someone of his size and weight, I didn’t know he could run that well” – and rejuvenating Wayne Milera after his season-ending leg injury.

Burgess not only knows Frampton from the Power, but Nicks too. He also reunites with ex-Port Adelaide and Arsenal rehabilitation co-ordinator Tim Parham.

At a hot summer training at West Lakes, Burgess keeps a close eye on his players. He mixes instructions with encouragement, while wearing his whistle around his neck.

Some footballers thrive during pre-season, others can get exposed. It begs the question: What happens to players under Burgess who are not the greatest runners?

Burgess says the last two years of Covid and border restrictions have been “brutal” and says a desire to be closed to his SA-based kids was a motivating factor in him taking the Crows job. Photo by Michael Klein

“If you were smart, you’d play fullback,” Carlile says, self-deprecatingly. “There was one guy, I won’t name him, but he wasn’t a very good runner – actually he was horrendous. Burgo got him in his end-of-year meeting and said ‘we need to get you fit, how much running can I get out of you without you getting bored’ and the guy came back with ‘about a lap’. And Burgo almost fell off his chair and nearly started crying (with laughter). He was thinking ‘what am I meant to do with a lap?’”

Carlile says Burgess has a great sense of humour which helps him relate to players. “During your reps he’d get around everyone, he’d have a couple of crap jokes, dad jokes.”

Even those hundred 100m runs in Dubai came with a twist. “He just gave us an extra 10 for a laugh, which he was pretty good at,” Carlile says. “He made it fun.”

As for Burgess’s high profile, Hartlett says that comes from his CV, not his attitude.

“He’s tainted with that reputation that ‘gee, he must be a big deal’ but he doesn’t bring it upon himself,” he says.

Burgess’s time in the EPL bookended his second stint at Port Adelaide. He rejoined the Power from Liverpool in 2012 and left Alberton again in mid-2017 to sign for Arsenal.

“I know he has a real passion for soccer – his young fella certainly always had a soccer ball around the footy club – but Burgo’s the type of guy that whatever sport he’s immersed in, he’ll give 100 per cent and want to get the very best out of those athletes,” Hartlett says. “I’d suggest soccer is his No.1 passion in terms of sport, but footy wouldn’t be too far behind.”

Burgess was Football Federation Australia’s head of sports science and the national team’s fitness coach for three years from 2007, including the 2010 World Cup. The heat training Burgess has become renowned for in the AFL may have evolved from that time, venturing to Asian countries to play World Cup qualifiers.

“We’d travel and you’d have to adapt to the weather quickly, whether it was in Bahrain or Oman, and like 40 degrees and have to deal with the hydration, the recovery, the ice jackets, you name it,” ex-Socceroo Luke Wilkshire says.

Darren Burgess during his time with Port Adelaide. Picture Sarah Reed

Wilkshire recalls Burgess as meticulous, having a great connection with players and ultra professional.

“Some people can come in with an arrogance and it can go the other way but he has that demeanour to deliver a message the right way and get the players to buy in, and believe in it,” Wilkshire tells SA Weekend.

“He’s a great guy and I don’t think there’d be one player who would have a bad word to say about him,” the 80-cap international says. “At that time under Burgo, I was probably at my fittest and you feel like you’re almost invincible.”

Wilkshire, now coach of NSW club Wollongong Wolves, says Burgess can have a huge influence at the Crows and says the squad needs to “use that source as much as possible”.

“It’s pointless having someone with those qualities and experience if you don’t really use them,” he says. “If I was one of those players, I’d be going to him saying ‘what can I do? How can I get better? How can I run faster and run more kilometres? How can I jump higher?’”

Carlile is also expecting Adelaide, coming off a 15th-placed finish, to climb the ladder in coming seasons by having Burgess on the sidelines.

“100 per cent he’s going to give them a lift,” he says. “Burgo will be doing everything he can to bring it all together.”

Adelaide’s least surprising recruit may prove to be one of its most important. ■

Originally published as SA Weekend cover story: Inside the mind, methods and mystery of Crows fitness guru Darren Burgess