Baxter gears up for pre-season start

By Howard Lloyd
26/6/2016

Exeter Chiefs head coach Rob Baxter has started to focus on how to manage the club's pre-season schedule.

The Chiefs leave for their now-annual warm-weather training this week, before really knuckling down into the pre-season campaign.

This has left Baxter considering how to plot their schedule and workload prior to the Aviva Premiership kick-off, although he believes the first few weeks generally take care of themselves.

He said: "I've been back in at the club a little more this week and we were catching up and talking about organising our first couple of weeks of training.

"There's still plenty of time to not get over-focused on rugby but to talk about setting the scene and that's very much what I'm doing now.

"We're organising the first couple of meetings where we'll set the scene, as the first couple of weeks of training tend to look after themselves, really.

"We get the guys back in, get the testing and measurements done to make sure we know where everyone stands physically and where anyone with any bumps and bruises hanging over from last season are.

"We'll get some initial testing done and make sure everyone's ready to go, so for the first week or two, we need to talk about wrapping up last season as a group, as after the final we let the guys go pretty quickly.

"What we've got to do is wrap up how we think the season went and start setting the scene for how we think pre-season will go and what we think the key focuses are for next season.

"That's really what my focus is at the minute, just getting those things down in a format we can introduce to the players and get them focused on pre-season."