G’day Tiger Army. Great to be back with you with the 2024 edition of the Pre-Season Camp blog.

Personally, this is my 8^th Pre-Season Camp, and it’s always an honour to support such an important part of our preparation for the season ahead. The Camp is vital in not only building a physical base for the players, but also to grow connection and reinforce values and attributes around who we are as a group and how we want to train and execute. So the agenda for the next four days is a mix of hard physical workouts coupled with regular Richmond Man sessions.

We’re based at the Twin Waters Resort on the Sunshine Coast. We held a Pre-Season Camp here previously in January 2018, so the venue holds some emotional sentimentality. The resort also served as the base for the Melbourne Storm during the 2020 NRL Season, so it’s well set up to host high-performance sports teams. The region is also blessed with some amazing sports facilities which we will take advantage of during our visit.

So we travelled up from Melbourne at lunch time yesterday. We have close to 100 people in the travelling party, so the majority of seats on our Virgin flight to the Sunshine Coast were taken up by persons wearing a Richmond FC polo. Once we wrangled all our luggage - and it is considerable to support our training activities away from Punt Road - we headed to the Queensland Academy of Sport Swim Training Facility in Maroochydore. It’s no surprise that this facility has produced an extraordinary number of Olympic gold medallists, with an extensive gym facility, three 50m pools, hot and cold plunge pools and first-class information technology infrastructure. The players did repetitions in the pool and the gym, under the close watch of High Performance Manager Ben Serpell.

We then travelled to First Bay in Coolum for a Welcome to Country. We are on Country of the Gubbi Gubbi people, centred around the Maroochy River and the Coast. First Bay is a beautiful beach surrounded by Pandanus Trees, and the waters are plentiful with mullet this time of year. As a group, we waded into the water and soothed some tired muscles. Incredibly the rain cleared and a rainbow touched down just off shore. A good sign to start the trip.

After a carbohydrate-rich meal, we then had a team meeting. Adem ran us through our theme for the year ahead. It’s always a privilege to listen to that presentation, and over the next few days the coaches and our leadership program, overseen by Shane McCurry, will explore how the themes look and feel collectively, as a line group and individually.

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An exciting start to the trip. Something tells me that Day 2 is going to be very challenging.

Speak tomorrow. Go Tiges.