Josh Rachele gym feats prove Adelaide Crows are set for a big season, Graham Cornes says
AFL pre season has only just started but SA footy stalwart Graham Cornes has already found a sign the Crows are switched on, and are leaving the Power in their dust.
Pre-season training started in earnest for our two AFL teams this week.
Fit young guys back on the track running and kicking the ball around, they showed plenty of enthusiasm and humour. It’s a great time of the year.
Without the pressure of match-day performances, the spirits are high and the players are buoyed by an optimism of what is to come.
The new players, those young draftees, full of expectation add a new dimension to the group. Oh, wait. Port don’t have any do they?
On the other hand, even the Crows players who didn’t have to be there rocked up. But that wasn’t the only difference between the two teams.
There is a difference in size. The Crows look bigger – men compared to boys – and it has much to do with their gym culture. Strength training is an important part of a player’s development and weekly routine.
The Crows have taken it to a new level. The social media clip doing the rounds of Josh
Rachele bench pressing 150kg sent a message to the rest of the competition.
What was also obvious was the spirit around the group as the successful attempt was cheered on by his teammates who had gathered around to support.
Additionally, it wasn’t recorded but word filtered out that Nick Murray, obviously a much bigger man, pressed 160kg later in the session.
Still, Rachele’s effort meant much more than a personal best in the gym.
He is a player who has polarised footy fans and been criticised for his self-indulgence.
Be it perception or reality, there were times when his coach and teammates have been critical of his self-absorption.
Of course that can be explained away by the impetuosity of youth but he did pay the price of being dropped for the last round of season 2024. But he bounced back in 2025 with a maturity that defied his critics.
A knee injury in round 18 looked ominous but he avoided rupturing the ACL and was back for what would be the Crows last game of the season – a disappointing semi-final against Hawthorn.
And it seems he is well and truly recovered if the gym effort is anything to judge.
The “Gym Culture” of the Crows is interesting to behold. It is still open for debate how important weight training is to an AFL player’s preparation.
The strength and conditioning coach instructs the players but the culture is always led from within. Some teams have it, others don’t.
The Crows have it. Patrons of Next Generation gym are regularly surprised that on their days off, a group of Crows players will be seen working out. It’s led by the captain Jordan Dawson.
There’s always a leader who drives culture. Port’s leaders, Connor Rozee, Zak Butters and Jason Horne-Francis don’t have the same enthusiasm for weight training as do those at Adelaide.
So there is the debate. They are three great players. Do they need an intense weight training program?
It’s obvious however, that with a relatively young list Port players do need to put on extra size.
Things may change this year at Alberton because their new strength and conditioning coach, Tim Parham, has arrived from the Adelaide Football Club where he worked closely with the Crows’ GM of high performance, Darren Burgess.
One would imagine his emphasis will be on developing stronger, more robust players to execute Josh Carr’s game plan.
Strength and conditioning are vital components of most endurance and contact sports. Australian football is still a game for all shapes and sizes, but today’s footballer is a unique animal. He needs to be quick, he needs to be strong and he needs endurance.
Darren Burgess, who recently resigned from the Crows to take up an appointment with Juventus in the Italian Serie A, also worked as high-performance manager with Liverpool and Arsenal in the British Premier League.
He brought to the Crows a culture that you can train hard but still back up on match day.
It was obvious last season that the Crows, as well as their enthusiasm for the gym, were also a strong running team.
It wasn’t always so here in South Australia. It was obvious when the Crows entered the AFL back in 1991 our players were smaller.
They lacked the size and strength of the established Victorian teams.
No doubt we could run, and in many ways our developed skills were better, but we needed to be bigger without sacrificing speed and skill.
Research at the time showed that several American NFL teams were using Olympic weight-training coaches for their strength and conditioning programs.
Fortunately, here in Adelaide we had the coach of Dean Lukin, the winner of the 1984 Olympic gold medal in weightlifting.
Long-suffering readers of this column will know that I’ve written about Lukin’s coach, Leon Holme, before.
Rarely has there been a more enthusiastic, multi-talented sporting coach.
He accepted the task of introducing a strength and conditioning program to the players on the first Crows list. And he did it at first without having a gymnasium or weights. His talent was underappreciated.
The same could be said of Trevor Jaques, our first fitness coach and runner, who studied postgraduate sports training at the elite Michigan State University in America.
Nevertheless, he later served the Adelaide Football Club faithfully over many years.
As training services manager he was a driving force behind the design of the once state-of-the-art facility at West Lakes.
Leon Holme was a fascinating study of a sports coach. He knew the importance of explosive strength and introduced those early Crows to plyometric exercises – leaping, bounding and jumping – as well as weight training.
In three years he had improvised three different gyms and slowly won the players over to the benefits of weight training and competitiveness in the gym.
The older players (and Tony Modra) were a little harder to convince but if there was a genesis for the adoption of weight training at Adelaide, it probably was with Leon Holme.
I’m not sure he even got paid. Everyone was part-time in those days.
I’ve never met a more energetic, positive man who encouraged enthusiasm and record-setting in the gym. It was a sad time when last I saw him.
A man in his 80s with the physique and fitness of someone 30 years younger, he was in the grip of early dementia which was slowly dragging him down.
But he was still smiling, his long-term memory was OK and his enthusiasm had not deserted him.
Sadly, he is no longer with us, but he would have been delighted to see that raucous scene in the Crows gym when Josh Rachele set his new record.
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