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Essendon's speedsters: Courtenay Dempsey, Leroy Jetta, and Alwyn Davey.
Photo: John Donegan
A quick fix
Emma Quayle | March 30, 2008
IN THE LAST week of the pre-season, Jarrod Atkinson set a new 20-metre sprint record at Essendon. The rookie lister flew down the Windy Hill sprint track in 2.73 seconds, slicing 0.2 seconds off the mark previously shared by Leroy Jetta, Alwyn Davey and Courtenay Dempsey.
"I could catch him," smiled Davey this week. "Me too," laughed Jetta, but Dempsey was less fussed. "He can have it …" said speedster No. 3. Dempsey wants to run fast, but he wants to run fast often. "I'm worried about my hammies," he said. "I have to take it a bit easy."
Before the Bombers beat North Melbourne last week, assistant coach Gary O'Donnell promised they would play not only with speed, but with "brutal speed". Dempsey burst off the half-back line and Davey ducked and weaved. Jetta chased and tackled and Bachar Houli ran, ran and then ran some more. They played a game of manic movement.
The next few weeks will tell whether the Bombers really are really quick, or just a lot quicker than North. The next few months will tell if they can keep the pace up. But Ricky Dyson is on the sub three-second list, as are Jay Nash, Jason Winderlich, Andrew Lovett and a couple of key forwards in Jay Neagle and Courtney Johns, while Brent Stanton plays in almost perpetual motion. "I think when you inherit a list, the list sort of tells you what to do with it," explained another of Matthew Knights' assistant coaches, Scott Camporeale, this week. "This was a pretty exciting list. In a way, it was pretty clear what to do with it."
How did the Bombers get fast? To play with pace, you first need to have some. It was only a couple of years ago that the Essendon midfield was most kindly described as stodgy and slow; at the time, list manager Adrian Dodoro was recruiting the likes of Winderlich, Dyson, Stanton and Nash to the club, with Dempsey to follow at the end of 2005, and Jetta, Davey and Houli the following year.
Dodoro looked for players who could run fast, but he also wanted players who could play. "We made speed a focus, but they had to be footballers first," he said. "We made a conscious effort to make sure the players we brought in had running power, but that wasn't all. There's no point drafting quick players if they actually can't play."
Or make their speed work for them. John Quinn, Essendon's high performance manager, considers running a skill — like kicking, marking or handballing. He considers it a skill that takes more effort, ability or training to do well. To kick a ball, Quinn said, the foot must move forward like a pendulum; to run, it must move in the reverse direction, in almost an "egg-shaped cycle" that is the same with each step.
"It's the exact opposite movement that you're asking them to do over and over, and then kick a football in the reverse direction. So it's quite complex to bring those things together," said the long-time athletics coach.
"I think running is the most complex skill of all. The footy heads will shout me down, and kicking a football takes a huge amount of skill, but every time they kick the ball it's slightly different, it might be that they have to try and pull the kick a little bit, or lengthen the kick, or kick a bit to the left or to the right.
"There's a slight variance on the skill each time and the difference with running is that if you want to maximise your running speed, every single time you place your foot on the ground you're repeating an action and each step you take has to mirror the last one. It's a highly complex skill, to be able to do that. It's simple in thought, but a highly complex action.
"Even if you have a subtle difference, that's where you get a hamstring strain or a quad strain. The way I look at it, sprinting at top speed is a highly evolved, highly learned speed. And then they have to kick a ball at the end."
Quinn teaches each player who arrives at Essendon how to run properly — things like knee drive, body extension and arm action, often with footballs in hand, to minmise injury risk as much as anything — and also how to move quicker.
There are different types of speed (the likes of Davey, Jetta and Dempsey burst off the mark, where players such as Stanton and Winderlich can hold their speed) but the Bombers have placed an emphasis on explosiveness that starts with their weights program and stretches to Knights' game style and their use of the interchange. "We don't necessarily want players lifting more in the gym," said Quinn. "We want them lifting the bar, but lifting it quickly.
"We do an explosive type of lifting to enable our players to be powerful and, at the end of the day, power, by formula, is strength multiplied by speed. So we want them to move quickly, to maximise power. I know it's a bit pedantic, but if you can get this power manifesting in the way the players run, it's exciting to watch. So we work on getting them more power, and when the coach comes along and puts down a game plan that in fact influences the players to run hard, that's another factor. And the other part is allowing them to maximise their effort, then resting them. You do that with the interchange."
Then there is the psychology. When Jay Nash got to Essendon, the club discovered he was its quickest player over the first five metres. But each time he got the ball, he used to give it straight off; it was an ingrained habit that has slowly been worked out of him. For the likes of Johns and Neagle, being coached how to best time their leads became important, and Quinn likens Winderlich to some athletes he has seen and worked with, who can run fast but do not compete well.
"I don't mean this as a criticism, but I often think a lot of Australian track and field athletes run extremely well but don't race very well … He hadn't been running well in games until the last couple of years. Since he's had greater exposure to the game style and his teammates and started getting more confidence in his own body to take the game on, he's started to race a lot better," Quinn said.
"It might be a small difference, but it's a significant one … If a player can run 20 metres in less than three seconds, that means he can create space or fill space of up to 20 metres in that time period. So the quicker they are and the better they can understand how to make an impact, the better players they'll be."
For Davey, applying his speed has meant honing the rest of his game so that, at almost 23 and 173 centimetres, he was draftable.
"Even with my speed, I had to stop being scared to use it," said the South Adelaide recruit who, after slipping by a few players in his first few AFL games, decided to let loose. "I just started to feel that I could get around them, and then I started to feel like if I kept running they wouldn't get me," Davey said. "You have to be a bit sensible, but sometimes I just try and think ahead about what a player's doing, and then just try and go for it."
For Jetta, being speedy meant getting his head around what it took to be an AFL player. As a junior, his talent was never questioned, nor was his love for the game, but his commitment was. Did you spend three years dodging the beep test? "Well, maybe … I don't know what happened there," and it was after playing the first four games of last season, then struggling though a groin injury, that he realised what could lie before him. "I hated not playing," he said. "I didn't want to miss any more time with injury. I knew I had to do all the rehab right so that it didn't happen again this year. I was scared of it. I just wanted to make sure I could play."
Dempsey felt the same. Having been beset by soft tissue injuries in each of his first few years, the 20-year-old spent his end-of-season break training every second day with Quinn and former sprinter Lauren Hewitt. It was like a pre-season for the pre-season; he worked hard on his power running, trained better than ever afterwards, and has been buoyed by Knights' instructions. "You sort of wonder about when to use your pace and when not to use it, but the coach has pretty much told me to use it every chance I get," he said.
"All the coaches have said just to get it and go, and that's sort of coming out in my game now, it's becoming more natural. It's given me confidence and so have the other players. It's like they believe in me a lot more."
SPEED MACHINES
Essendon's fastest over 20 metres:
JARROD ATKINSON 2.73 seconds 2.79
COURTENAY DEMPSEY 2.75
LEROY JETTA
ALWYN DAVEY
JASON WINDERLICH
ANDREW LOVETT 2.80
COURTNEY JOHNS
DUSTIN FLETCHER
JAY NEAGLE
BACHAR HOULI
RICKY DYSON 2.82
