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Running power and skills Swans' focus for 2012

Monday, 31st October 2011

By Chris Pike

SWAN Districts coach Greg Harding will have his team's focus squarely on improving its running power and on their skills as pre-season kicks off ahead of a 2012 WAFL season that he firmly expects to see Swans' back up being a finals contender.

Swans had a tough season in 2011 in what was Harding's first campaign as senior coach, but quite early on a couple of things became apparent that his team needed to improve in quickly.

Now with a whole pre-season to work on it, Harding has vowed to make sure there are no such deficiencies in the Swans' line-up in 2012.

Harding noticed that the running capacity, conditioning and skill level of Swan Districts wasn’t able to match it with the best sides throughout 2011, so that's the focus this pre-season and with dual Subiaco premiership veteran Shaun Hildebrandt signing up, and plenty of improvement to come from within the group, he's confident it can quickly turnaround.

There are a lot of things to work on. The best thing out of having a year that is unsuccessful is that you review every aspect of your footy club, and your playing list. We found that we need to go to a new level in terms of our conditioning. We were uncompetitive against the best running sides in the competition and a long way behind the rest of the league in terms of skill level

Harding said.

They are pretty much the two main areas in terms of the playing group that we need to fix. In terms of positives, we had a look at 47 players at the end of the day, which is a huge number, and a lot of those boys showed that they could play. We thought that Jukes, even though in terms of endurance he's a long way off, that he showed some really good signs.

If you go through the kids, obviously Coniglio, Newman, Garlett, Howard, Gault, Boekhorst and those guys were superb with the signs they showed. We looked at a lot of guys and a lot of others out of the colts in the reserves like Broad, Burnham and Marcus Adams, who came up and played league.

Those sorts of guys were the real positives out of the entire year because it allows us to look forward and think that if they stick around we will have a nice core group of players who can take the club forward if the draft doesn’t get hold of us again.

Swan Districts' pre-season training will commence this week and given the fact that the conditioning and running capacity was so far off the mark in 2011, that's going to be a massive focus. Harding, though, is just hoping for a bit of luck as well in terms of injuries to help it all improve.

Our pre-season is in place already and we're looking to bring some people into our system who can strengthen us up in this area. The conditioning of our group was partially our fault for not identifying the strength of the running power in the WAFL competition," he said.

East Fremantle would have nine AFL-listed boys plus McGough, Hadley and Doddy who have recently come off lists who are elite runners. We didn’t identify that it was going to be a year where the competition jumped in terms of running. Then on top of that we had Hams come in, who was super but had no pre-season and was 70 per cent of where he needed to be conditioning wise.

Jacky came into pre-season severely underdone with hamstrings and worked his way strongly into the year, but was coming from a low base. Ryan Davis had ankle surgery, Robinson had a thyroid issue and it just snowballed for us after a few injuries took their toll.

The conditioning is something that we've identified and we already have a strong program in place so that when we roll out in Round 1 we will be a good 10 or 15 per cent ahead of where we are now.

Harding is also glad that the likes of Tyson Hodge, James Grabski, Wes Mortin, Luke Miles, Luke Pratt, Jarrad Blight and Brett Robinson should be back to have a big impact in 2012 after missing a lot of, if not all, of 2011 through injury.

We're going to have to work really hard in the gym and rehab to get those guys up and going because it's always hard to come up off those major injuries. The young kid Nathan Blakeley also had had a major knee reconstruction as did Hodge out of our colts so they are both quality boys as well

Harding said.

Wes Mortin didn’t play any games this year either, Grabski broke a foot and we need to get that right because he was playing some great footy early in the season. Then we have Miles, Pratt and Blight to come back as well.

We are really looking forward to having them back and fit, and if we get them back as well as Robbo can get back to 100 per cent then that's a list of quite a few boys who will give us instant improvement. I have no doubt that we can bounce back on the back of a better attitude and sound playing list.

Another thing making Harding confident that Swans can turn things around in 2012 is the fact that the entire playing group is so determined and motivated to make up for last season. If that is their attitude, then Harding is confident that it's pretty hard for things to go wrong if they do all the right things.

The response from the playing group has been pretty good. We've had our player reviews and everyone is really looking forward to turning it around. Even though everyone identified that we had a poor year and never really got going, there's a real confidence that we can step back on the training track on November 2 and turn it around for 2012

Harding said.

I'd expect that to happen given the strength of that mindset from so many players. They are just so looking forward to righting a wrong from this year. We will put a program in place that gives them every possible chance to bounce back physically, and then it will just come down to our attitude and how badly we want to claw our way back up the ladder.

 

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