Progess to date

Training has continued and we are progressing well for this early stage of the season. The times of 8:30pm – 10:30pm Mondays and Wednesdays is pretty hard on all of us, but we work what we are given. I would prefer more training too, but again we are limited in what we can do. In regards the squad, Mike Jones should be arriving soon, with Tim Kruge soon to follow. With this and some possible late additions to round out our personnel, we will be ready to hit the season running.

I am trying as a coach to maintain intensity and as I have mentioned before, increase the scrimmage component of our training sessions. I have tended to interrupt sessions a lot in the past, and crammed them with drills and when they run over (which they inevitably do) the time for scrimmage has generally been less than 25% of the session. Now I am aiming for a minimum of 50% and so far, so good. It seems to be allowing the players to become familiar with each other’s games, preferences and at the same time learning the team philosophies and gaining game specific fitness.

We have our first hit out this weekend in a scrimmage against the Joondalup Wolves. Then the Country Cup at Perry Lakes over the 1st and 2nd March. Country Cup provides a great chance to rotate players through various scenarios, try different things and see where we are as a team. Both these hitouts are very early in the schedule so we (and I assume most of the participants) are nowhere near ready for a ‘real game’. But it is a great opportunity to identify areas to work on (aside from the ones we already know about) and perhaps areas where we could exploit a previously unknown strength or hide a weakness.

We then have a tentatively scheduled scratch match a fortnight after against the Perth Redbacks, and a fortnight until our first hitout at Kalgoorlie. I’m pretty happy with that schedule, I believe it gives us a nice workup to the season and opportunities in the right places to review and tweak things.