Article on Hase

[Kenny_01]

Thought it was a good read...

http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2004/05/07/1083911403463.html

 

[nineteen eighty]

Good read. Excellent player.

Spent a little bit of time in Perth a few years back with work and went to a Freo derby day one Sat afternoon to kill some time. My workmates couldn't understand why the hell I would bother heading out but it was a great afternoon. Sumich was coach of one of the Freo sides (was it South?) and there was a good crowd in attendance. Good atmosphere. Smash the Saints and all the best for the rest of the year.

 

[ImperialPurple]

Any chance someone could cut and paste the article... I'm having trouble logging in.
Thanks.

 

[Moo]

The fastest ball magnet in the west
May 8, 2004


Once the butt of jokes about his appearance, Paul Hasleby has become a role model for hard training at Fremantle.
Photo: Iain Gillespie


Paul Hasleby has become one of football's elite midfielders the hard way, writes Mark Duffield.

Adam Larcom knew only about three Fremantle players when he came to the club as conditioning coach two years ago.

There was Shaun McManus, the previous skipper. There was Peter Bell, the hometown hero who had returned after two premierships with the Kangaroos. And there was Paul Hasleby, the brilliant young ball-winner who had won the Rising Star award in 2000.

Unfortunately, the main reason he knew of Hasleby wasn't because of his ball winning or his award, rather an article written about him in a Melbourne newspaper suggesting he was overweight. It was accompanied by a less than flattering photograph.

And so began Operation Hasleby, a painstaking program aiming to turn Hasleby, the ball magnet, into Hasleby, the athletic ball magnet.

After coach Chris Connolly pinpointed him as one of several key players in the club's quest to climb the ladder, Larcom set about teaching the laid-back country kid what to eat and how to train.

Everyone knew Hasleby was already a good player and likely to become a very good player. The question was: could he work hard enough to become a great player?

Just in case the 22-year-old's brilliant form this season hasn't been enough to convince people that the program is working, a peek at Fremantle's Sunday recovery session after the western derby last week would have provided ultimate proof.

As most players dragged aching bodies through a series of sprints, Hasleby looked as if he had just come off a four-day break, bolting away with each race.

His condition was stunning for any player who had completed a hard match the previous night, let alone one who had run up 30 possessions, kicked two goals and won his third Glendinning Medal for best on ground.

Larcom is rapidly getting used to the new Hasleby - a driven professional determined to add a finely tuned body to an extraordinary talent to win the ball and a razor-sharp football brain.

Larcom still remembers his first impressions of Hasleby. "He was just a relaxed, easy-going type of guy who, for me, didn't really look like an AFL player," he says.

The kid from Northampton was not "genetically gifted". In other words, while many top footballers look athletic - in training or not - Hasleby looked more like the everyday man in the street.

"He had a run-of-the-mill-type body. Hase wasn't athletic, wasn't fast and wasn't strong. He was just a laid-back, nice guy," Larcom recalls. "I don't think he realised the level he needed to get to be able to utilise the skills that he had.

"Hase was a guy that had to be manufactured in all ways in terms of his conditioning. He is the sort of guy that if he eats a little bit extra one night you will see it the next day."

Several Fremantle players have undergone radical body changes since Connolly and Larcom arrived at the club.

Matthew Pavlich has gone from bulky, key-position player to a streamlined, power-packed midfielder. Peter Bell has added pace and a leap to his renowned stamina and Troy Simmonds has added umpteen kilos of muscle to his lean frame.

But Larcom says no player has undergone a bigger change than Hasleby. This year the results are there for all to see, on and off the field.

He now has lean muscle mass, stamina and speed, although he will never look like Shane Crawford or Ben Cousins.

But he hasn't had fewer than 24 touches in any match this season and club officials believe he may have polled Brownlow votes in as many as four games, so no one is too bothered about appearance.

"Over the first two years the focus with Hase was working on getting an AFL body for an AFL midfielder, based on what I saw at Hawthorn," Larcom says. "This year has been completely individual where he has trained on his own most of the pre-season, not with the team.

"He has met the team for three skills sessions, done all the running on his own. His diet stuff and his weight training he has done on his own. We have organised everything based around him being a repetitive, athletic AFL midfielder."

The AFL media guide lists Hasleby at 86 kilograms. Larcom remembers him being 84 or 85 when he first got to the club but "it was an overweight 84 kilograms".

He believes his weight now is more like 82. He weighs Hasleby as much if not more than any other player.

Maintaining this condition, Larcom emphasises, will be "high maintenance" for Hasleby because it doesn't come naturally to him. A brief lapse in an off-season will mean that a lot of the work will have to be done again, rather than built on.

But if the attitude the young star has shown so far is any indication, Larcom is confident he can not only maintain but also continue to get faster for the next five or six years. "He has got very low body fat and he has got an athletic body now," he says. "He went from looking like your average guy in the street. Now I see him as an athletic guy, an athletic player.

"Pre-season I ranked him in the top three of running in the whole club - that is, taking into consideration speed, speed lactic, speed endurance, all running components."

Speed means how fast he runs over 40 metres. Speed lactic is his ability to cover 150 to 400 metres. Speed endurance is his ability to belt out a series of hard 800-metre runs. He recently raced Troy Simmonds, in the top three at the club for raw speed, and matched him over 20 metres.




If Hasleby has learned rapidly about the requirements of being an elite player, Larcom has learned equally rapidly that the laid-back image is deceiving. It hides a desire to succeed as fierce as that of skipper Bell.

As Hasleby has learned more about the benefits of all this extra training, he has also learned his body responds well to it. He now does two extra running sessions a week compared with one by most teammates. Every now and again he is given a recovery week to compensate for the extra work.

Larcom recently sent him to train three sessions with Olympic hurdler Kyle Vander-Kuyp to give him a further insight into how an elite athlete prepares for an event on the world stage.

Hasleby not only relished the training, but lapped up any knowledge Vander-Kuyp could give him. He was especially pleased when Vander-Kuyp attended the game against Adelaide, watched him closely and complimented him on his running during the game.

"Paul is so enthusiastic about improving his conditioning and his speed; he just has a thirst for knowledge that you can't quench, you just can't," Larcom said. "He is so passionate about it he will ring me up to ask me how he has been running in games. He just wants to learn."

Once the butt of teammates' jokes about his dumpy physique and his running, Hasleby has emerged as a role model for hard training.

"He is outstanding," Larcom says. "It is weird but I see him now like a disciple in the group. He promotes conditioning. All the young guys look up to him, guys like Andrew Browne, and I see Paul as a guy who promotes it really heavily.

"It makes my job easy because he is out there doing that. I have to modify him a lot because he is so keen. I had to give him a recovery week two weeks ago. His training volume is that high that he can afford to have a couple of weeks off from training and still be at 100 per cent.

"I gave him the most difficult pre-season one-on-one that not many guys would have coped with. But over a couple of years we have been able to pick him up to the level where he can cope and he is in Pavlich's league now, Bell and Simmonds, too.

"He is on such a strict diet, in season. It is a daily diet, that is how strict it is. We maintain a certain level of body shape and body type every day.

"It has to be at that level. It is manufactured, but as Chris Connolly said, no matter how much time needs to be put into him we need to do it because on the weekend we see the byproduct."

 

[ImperialPurple]

Legend...

Thanks for that Moo... and oh you can be a legend too.

 

[Kapow!!!]

Deadset Haselby is an absolute F***ing CHAMP!!!

He's my early tip for the Brownlow.