Essendon's senior players remaining in Melbourne have played a key role in assisting with the training of the club's younger players according to development coach James Byrne.
Dustin Fletcher, Jason Winderlich, Brent Stanton and Paul Chapman are the four senior Bombers not to travel with a group of 25 players to Boulder, Colorado for high altitude camp.
"We are trying to promote this younger group to coach themselves and it has been very helpful with those four guys here," Byrne said.
"They have been fantastic, they are helping coach the players through and giving a lot of feedback during the training which helps us as coaches."
“That is promoting the message that we are trying to achieve that we want to get the players to coach themselves.”
The players wrapped up an intense week on the training track with a skills session under under overcast skies on Friday at the True Value Solar Centre.
“The guys that have stayed are predominately the one to three year players in our development group along with four of the senior guys,” Byrne said.
“We have tried to keep the program as similar to what the guys are doing in Colorado minus the altitude.”
“As of next week we are going to put the young guys through a camp which will be pretty testing but pretty much we are trying to follow the program as is.”
“We get the chance to get more specialized coaching as we have five coaches to about 20 guys so the coaching becomes a lot more specific around what we are doing.”
It has been the first full week of training for the club’s new draftees from the Rookie and National Draft.
“They have been fantastic. They are really keen to get out there, impress, push themselves and from what we can see they are fitting in well to the group,” Byrne said.
“Patty Ambrose has been around for a while in the VFL so he knows our system and the terminology which has been really good.”