Adrian Cois & David Battersby

BEHIND the success of Gold Coast United’s inaugural Hyundai A-League season lies a dedicated backroom team who have worked overtime since pre-season to ensure their machine-like athletes of muscle and might are always well oiled for the challenges ahead.

In Australia’s top level football competition, where players are expected to run as hard in the last minute as they do in the first, and can often cover over 10kms during a game, maintaining their health and fitness are the building blocks of a successful season.

For newcomers Gold Coast United, this comes in the form of team Physiotherapist Dave Battersby and Strength & Conditioning Coach Adrian Cois.

The dynamic duo and their support staff have worked with United since training began in April last year, laying the foundations to combat the wear and tear of such a physically demanding game, where good fitness is essential and ankle strains and hamstring pulls are occupational hazards.

It comes as no surprise then that this partnership has played a signification role in ensuring Miron Bleiberg’s troops remain well-conditioned and in perfect playing shape.

For Battersby, who runs his own physiotherapy practice on the Gold Coast when he’s not healing United’s battered and bruised warriors, managing players’ welfare is a continual process, which requires close collaboration with both Cois and the coaching staff.

“Things change by the day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute, and it’s a full time job to look after 23 guys,” said Battersby, who has had a long involvement with elite junior soccer on the Gold Coast.

“Adrian and I work closely in terms of making sure we’re both aware of how much the players train and what they do. Every session is monitored carefully and we withdraw people or add people in depending on the session and any particular problems.

“At the end of every session I monitor and review the whole team’s physical state and talk to Adrian about what we can and can’t do. They also have their own individual rehab programs, so it’s really an on-going, daily process.

“A lot of planning and a lot of work goes into keeping the players on the field – it’s not just what happens at the two hours of training every day, it’s the work afterwards,” he said.

The conditioning of the team has been a long-term process in the United camp, to which Battersby credits the groundwork set in pre-season as largely responsible for United’s physical fitness.

“I think the biggest thing for us was the platform we set in pre-season – we had a long, hard and generally really good pre-season, in terms of our physical preparation of the players,” Battersby said.

“While there were some issues with the amount of games we played and the amount of travel involved, we basically had a really good pre-season, and I think the planning and structure for the year really starts there.”

Since the early stages of the competition, the club’s fitness regime has been built around a combination of adequate game play, intense training drills and performance monitoring, which has kept them in peak condition throughout the campaign.

“About 90% of the squad are playing a decent amount each week, so that’s a really good way to maintain their fitness,” said Cois.

“We also play a lot of small sided games and use drills which are fairly intensive from a conditioning point of view to maintain their fitness.

“There are specific drills which are designed to improve their fitness, including a combination of straight line running drills and different agility drills.

“The aim is to combine them all together and work with the coaches as well as with Dave to find out what the best recipe is for each player.

“We live week by week – the majority of the players are getting enough playing time and are at a good fitness level, so we’re basically just trying to keep that ticking over and keep that level of fitness maintained.

While continuous improvement throughout the season is important, measures of training load and volume are important indicators for Cois and Battersby, who use set ratings to ensure players don’t over exert themselves during the week.

“It’s a delicate balance between training them to get improvements and making sure they are fresh again for the weekend,” Cois emphasised.

“We have a couple of set ratings that we don’t want the players to go over, so we look at those closely and if a player is rating sessions highly then it means they are finding it difficult and we then need to investigate why.”

While working with a new club and unfamiliar players made this a challenging task at the start of the season, Cois said the relationships he has formed over the season has equipped him with the knowledge he needs to understand each athlete’s requirements and responses to different techniques.

“It’s taken a bit of time, but the different tools we’ve got and the recording method’s we’ve used have certainly helped to accelerate that process,” said Cois who has previously worked with the likes of swimmer Libby Trickett and ironman Zane Holmes.

“We’ve got a pretty good system now where we know what players can tolerate within a week, and we have fairly good individual timetables for each player based on what their different tolerances are towards training load.”

And looking ahead to the club’s future he added: “I think next season will be even better because we can build on what we already know about each player and individualise our training protocols.

“Because we know what injuries they’re prone to we can do a lot more preventative work as well, so we can definitely work a lot more effectively on those different areas prior to the season and then keep it under control.”

Like any club, United have been through the normal ups and downs of a team competing in an elite competition, but Cois commended both the players and staff at United who have remained motivated throughout the club’s first year in operation.

“I think the beauty we have is that our backroom staff want the players and club to succeed. Even when we have gone through rough patches, like during the middle of the season, we really banded together as a staffing unit and as a playing group to try and succeed and improve,” Cois said.

“The quality of the players is a testament to the club, because realistically we don’t have problems with motivation.

“There may be a couple of off days here and there, but in general all the players want to get better and they’re always hungry for more information and more techniques to improve on whatever their deficiencies are.”