The Donnybrook Football Club is raring to go ahead of the 2017 South West Football League’s first bounce down.
Donnybrook Football Club League coach Julian Burgess said the club began pre-season training in January and are looking good ahead of the new season.
“Preseason is going well, we’ve had record numbers on the training track so we can’t complain, that’s for sure and they’re all up and about, keen and want to have success so that’s what we’re striving for,” he said.
“We have a fairly young squad, I’ve coached a couple of the colts – we implement a game plan and it’s just to see them carry that out, now if they carry it out 100 per cent and everybody is on the same page, well they will get success.
“As a coach it’s purely just putting something in place and then hopefully you train to it and hopefully they can put it into a game, that’s the thing that I want to see the players grow with is a game plan, taking it on board and having a crack at it.”
The Donnybrook league side finished sixth on the SWFL 2016 ladder with 28 points.
The Reserves side finished ninth last year with 24 points while the Colts finished eighth with 16.
“We’ve moved on a lot of the recruits so we probably felt we just needed to freshen the playing group up a little bit and, in saying that, there has been a pretty big revamp of the board who are very proactive in trying to get the club back to finals footy,” Mr Burgess said.
“We’ve a bit of a revamp on and off the field and we feel like we are in a good position.
“Our recruits from last year were probably starting to get a little bit old in the tooth I suppose, they were getting up around the 28, 29 mark – some were 32,33 – so what we’ve actually done is gone to get some younger blokes who are going to be able to run the games out and go and win the hard balls.”
The club will hold its jumper presentation and season launch night on Friday, March 17.
Donnybrook will face off against Augusta-Margaret River on Saturday, April 15 in SWFL round one.
Mr Burgess said the club is aiming to reach finals football for the teams, the board and for the town.
“Just a bit of reward, there’s been a lot of people at the club for a long time doing a lot of work and not getting a lot of reward,” he said.
“We haven’t played finals footy I don’t think since about 2003, so we just want to get a bit of finals footy happening for the club and the town really.
“We’ve been down for so long it would just be good to get the reward and even some of the older players who have been around for ten years have never experienced finals footy and they’re coming towards the end of their careers so we want to try and get them to experience that.”
This year marks Mr Burgess’s fifth year as League coach.
Mr Burgess previously served as coach of the Donnybrook Colts before taking on the League position.
