PLAYING THE PART 

“I usually play centre. In sevens you have two props, a hooker, a halfback, 10, centre and wing. A good chunk of my role is around the mid-field; a lot of organising in defence, set pieces, just helping out the halves with moves. When you’re out a bit wider, it’s a lot easier to see what defences are doing, as opposed to those players who are always right in the thick of it. Communicating is a big part of the game when there’s only seven people on the field.” 

TEAM MEETING 

“Usually we’ll have two team meetings each week. Mostly these meetings are a review of our own training. We’ll review Monday’s and Wednesday’s training sessions on a Friday, and on the Monday we’ll review Friday’s session. Leading into tournaments, we’ll use that Friday meeting to analyse opposition teams as well. Today, for example, we had a look at Kenya [in Australia’s pool for the now-completed Wellington 7s] and earlier in the week we analysed Portugal and Canada, the other two teams in our pool. 

“The squad will break into groups for this analysis. Some people will look at attack, others at defence. It might be a set piece we’re focussing on; ‘restarts’ are a big team meeting subject, too; a big and important part of sevens. Our meetings usually run for half an hour. Some days they’re over quickly. I guess today we had a lot to go through, so it went a little bit longer. As well as our coach Tim Walsh and the players, our team manager Luca Liussi also sits in on these meetings; often they might have something constructive to say; housekeeping – getting passports in for travel, things like that.” 

BEND AND STRETCH 

“Before each field work session, we’ll prep to train. Here, we’ll go through a range of warm-up exercises so that when we hit the training paddock we’re ready to go. Especially now with heavy training loads, guys are quite stiff and sore when they arrive here in the morning, so it’s a good opportunity to roll out any niggles or trigger areas that need work. There’s a generic component of this prep where everyone’s doing the same thing; on the rollers and different trigger [massage] balls and mobilisation exercises. Then at the end everyone breaks off and does specific movements catered just for them; they might have shoulder exercises they need to do, for example. Using the rollers and balls gets the body moving, as opposed to taking five-ten minutes to get going out on the field until you feel good. It’s all about injury prevention as well; making sure guys have all the right muscles firing and ready.”