Get the latest pre-season injury update from High Performance Manager Ben Serpell. 

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ACL group

The ACL guys are progressing really well. We're still holding firm on our decision to make sure that we give them time to come back and look at the full 12-month rehab for them. The reality is, we know, research tells us that the graft is still going to undergo some biological healing up until the 12-month mark, so where we can, we'll look after them in that space."

"Having said that, Judson Clarke's probably leading the charge with the ACL guys and, even then, we are probably not expecting him back until around about April."

"Mykelti Lefau’s doing really well and he's out there running a fair bit at the moment. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks or next couple of months, we'll see guys like him start to integrate into drills, but we'll take our time with them."

"Taj Hotton ran with Josh Gibcus for the first time the other day over the other side of the field and boys got around them, stopped training for them so they could get out and cheer them along and, and they did quite well. They've got long careers as I said, so we want to make sure we look after them, make sure they're healed well and that we're minimising risk for re-injury when they come back." 

Approach to injury prevention

“We've got such a young group here that we want to spend time making sure that we're developing them athletically."

"We spend a lot of time teaching them how to kick and so on. Reality is, our guys might be lucky to kick 20 to 30 times in a game, but they do a lot more running than that. We're willing to do 20 kicks in a warm-up every day, but we don't spend a lot of time developing our athletes athletically."

"We've taken a proactive approach this year and we're developing our young lads, our new recruits, with Dan Bailey downstairs, who's an accomplished track and field coach. He's working with them this year and teaching them how to move on field, but also teaching them how to lift so that when they come out they're a little bit more robust to play. We’re trying to have that theme right across the squad this year.”