Young Swans kick off Premiership defence

After a well-deserved break, the Sydney Swans were back on the track this morning for the first day of the club’s pre-season program.

There was no holding back in the Swans’ first session, with the 1st-3rd year players taking on a gruelling three kilometre time trial followed by a skills session to open their pre-season campaign.

Swans defender Alex Johnson led the group for most of the 3km journey and stormed home to post the best time of the day ahead of Shane Biggs, Luke Parker and Harry Cunningham.

Johnson told SwansTV he was pleased with his first time trial result for the year.

“There are always nerves and that coming into running a 3km first up but I was really happy, I reached my target time and it’s good to be back amongst the boys,” he said.

“It obviously gives me a lot of confidence going into the next few weeks of pre-season.

“It’s only four weeks until Christmas so I really wanted to come back and make an impact straight away, so to take out the 3km today made me really happy.”

In addition to improving his trial times, Johnson said his pre-season focus was to build up his strength as well fine-tune his skills.

“I just want to get a little bit more size about me, just because it will enable me to play on those bigger types of forwards next year,” he said.

“Just to remain injury-free is the number one priority for most guys throughout preseason and I also want to keep improving on my kicking and my decision making.”

Fellow premiership players Lewis Jetta, Mike Pyke, Sam Reid and Lewis Roberts-Thomson also took part in today’s session as well as 2013 Swans rookie Dan Robinson.

Johnson said the full Swans squad, including the senior premiership players, would return to the club in early December to notch up some pre-season training hours before the end-of-season break.

“I think over the next two weeks everyone will be back by early December and then we’ll have a good solid couple of weeks before Christmas and then that will be it until we come back,” he said.