Article courtesy of
www.afl.com.auDAY THREE of testing at the NAB AFL Draft Combine finished with the gruelling beep test and Gippsland Power’s Haydn Hector blitzed the field to break the record held by Swan Jarrad McVeigh and North’s Brayden Norris.
Hector, a 17-year-old nominated by Team GWS to attend the combine, pushed through the pain barrier to score a 15.7 and break the previous record of 15.6 set by McVeigh in 2002 and equalled by Norris last year.
With the record in sight and with his fellow attendees urging him on, a bare-chested Hector yelled in delight and thumped his chest as he passed the previous benchmark to wild applause.
“I looked at the record before I came and I had the idea in my head that I’d have a shot at trying to beat it,” Hector said.
“I got one past it and was pretty excited; I wasn’t going to try and run any more.
“I was pretty excited about it; it was good fun.”
Hector went into the test with the confidence of having previously recorded a whopping 15.11 score in the torturous discipline.
As for the bare-chested situation, Hector was quick with an explanation.
“I was actually struggling to breathe with the compression top on,” he said.
“I didn’t want to look silly and just take it off before the test but I told the GWS people who came here to look at me that it was annoying me while I was running and they told me to take it off at about level 11.”
Hector’s big run was a fitting finale to the afternoon testing session. Speed demon Joel Wilkinson, who topped both sprint tests on day two, showed he has elite endurance to go with his pace with a 15.3 run that must put him all over Gold Coast’s radar.
The pair was part of the second group of runners who were trying to chase down Oakleigh Charger Andrew Gaff who put up a leading score of 15.3 in the first group.
Earlier in the day, Northern Knight Josh Caddy and Gippsland Power’s Dyson Heppell shared the honours in the inaugural Matthew Lloyd clean hands handball test with an efficiency rating of 93 per cent.
Heppell’s Power teammate Jed Lamb set a new combine record with a pinpoint 97 per cent accuracy rating in the kicking test developed by Nathan Buckley.
For more information on the National Combine please visit
www.afl.com.au
Last Modified on 01/10/2010 12:10
