World Footy News

One of the AFL's richest and most-successful clubs, the Collingwood Magpies, have confirmed that they will embark upon an ambitious pre-season training camp at Northern Arizona University in a bid to be more competitive in 2006.

In a previous article on worldfootynews.com (Collingwood considering Arizona training camp), we reported that Collingwood are seeking to emulate St. Kilda's recent success by undergoing rigorous pre-season training at a high-altitude location. Club CEO Greg Swann has been reluctant to divulge too many details, save to say that the camp has been confirmed, and if successful the club will seek to do it again.

St. Kilda received widespread press coverage in late 2004 when they travelled with their entire squad to Potchefstroom, South Africa, for a 10-day specialist training camp. The Saints were subsequently knocked out of the 2005 Premiership race in last weekend's Preliminary Final loss to Sydney.

The Magpies' base, Northern Arizona University, is situated at 2100 metres above sea-level and has a renowned high-performance training centre. The centre boasts that athletes who have trained there have won 191 Olympic and Paralympic medals since 1996. NAU was the base for the Australian swim team's Athens Olympics preparation.

There has been no word yet about whether Collingwood will seek to conduct development clinics with local footballers. worldfootynews.com will keep readers updated with details as they are released.