Dolphins forged by ‘torture bars’, midnight drills

The second was to bring that group together and turn the Dolphins into an NRL-ready squad in the space of a few short months.

Talent is one thing – all the recruits know how to play football – but instilling the grit, endurance, mental fortitude, and mateship needed to win games normally takes time, and hard work.

Time’s one thing Bennett didn’t have, so he took the hard work aspect to the extreme.

In an effort to fast-track some steel into his troops, the coach took them south of Brisbane for an intense three-day camp likened to what soldiers are put through.

“That army camp we did at the start of the year was the toughest one I’ve been to,” Euan Aitken, a veteran of 156 NRL games with the Dragons and Warriors, told Wide World of Sports at Stan’s Dawn of the Dolphins premiere in Brisbane.

The three-part Stan Original Documentary Series ‘Dawn of the Dolphins’ premieres weekly from March 6, only on Stan.

“But it really brought the group together I think. We bonded a lot over that, it brought us really close, we learnt how to work as a team a bit more.”

Over the course of three days, the players’ physical and mental toughness were tested in the most brutal ways.

“There was this torture bar and we had to keep doing shoulder presses for, like, five minutes straight,” Aitken explained.

“It was this bar we had to carry around for hours on end doing all these things – bicep curls, shoulder press, upright row.

“They were bad – constantly holding it above your head for long periods of time.

”It was hard. Minimal sleep, the constant training, not knowing what’s going to happen. You get woken up at 12 o’clock at night to do some activity, then get woken up at 4am in the morning to do something extremely hard.

“You didn’t know what was coming. But it sort of made you a bit more resilient, learnt to keep pushing. You’re only as tired as a you think you are.”

Even Kenny Bromwich – the tenacious Kiwi backrower who played 10 seasons under Craig Bellamy’s famous regime – labelled the Dolphins camp “tough”.

Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow endured similar pre-season trips at North Queensland, but says this one was the hardest.

“It was a pretty solid camp, it was a bit different to other camps I’ve been through,” Tabuai-Fidow told Wide World of Sports.

“All the boys pushed through together and we came out more of a team when it finished.”

External expectations are not high for the Dolphins this year following a disappointing 40-16 pre-season loss to the Titans last week.

But don’t bother telling the players that.

“Realistically I think we can make the eight,” Bromwich told WWOS.

The New Zealand Test star became accustomed to success over a decade at the Storm.

He’s gone from playing under one supercoach to another – Bennett boasts seven premierships and almost 900 games on his resume.

“They are quite similar in a lot of ways, but I guess they are different in a lot of ways too,” Bromwich said of the two master mentors.

“Wayne is a bit more… I don’t know if it’s relaxed, or… he’s probably mellowed a bit at certain times when Craig could be intense quite often.

“They both care about you as a person and they care about your families, which is something I like about them both as a person.”

Fans get a rare behind-the-scenes view of Bennett in the first episode of Stan’s Dawn of the Dolphins documentary, which comes out on March 6.

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