On the Princes Park running track, Dylan Addison glanced around at his Western Bulldog teammates and did what you do on the first day of any pre-season: took in who looked fitter, thinner or like they really wanted to run well.

Addison wondered whether his knee, injured towards the end of the previous season, was ready for four months of training, and felt confident it was. He wanted to notch a good time, because the coaches were watching, but he knew he had to be sensible; in his first three pre-seasons, he had seen some of the best November runners look exhausted by February. He had plans: to improve his endurance, get stronger and have his on-field responsibilities spring to mind more rapidly, but the Bulldogs had a new conditioning coach, and the young defender had no idea what, exactly, was in store.

"You have a few little nerves, because you don't know what they'll make you do," Addison told The Sunday Age . "All you know is that it's going to be really hard. You get to Princes Park on that first day and it all feels a little bit daunting."

Today, the pre-season ends. Addison and the Bulldogs will play the first game of season 2009, hoping that all of the hill runs, weights and skill sessions have readied them for a strong, skilful and successful next six months of their lives. But the players aren't on their own, and many of the people around them will also throw several months of planning, preparation and personal aspirations into the fray against Fremantle.

Kathryn Young, the football department's assistant, began preparing for the season as soon as the fixture was released last October, booking the team onto the best-timed flights and into its favourite hotels. Property steward Dan Fisher can't count the number jumpers, shorts and towels he has thrown into the washing machine. Anissa Groves, who oversees the part-time team of trainers, can't count how many rolls of tape have been used to wrap various player parts.

Andrew McKenzie, hired to run the medical department fresh from four years at Tottenham Hotspurs, had to get to know the 45 players' names, and then their complete health histories. He has helped the doctors, physios and conditioning staff deal not only with the injuries that have popped up over summer but, through muscular-skeletal screenings and other tests, tried to predict problems that and do something - adjust a player's running technique, for instance - to prevent them.

Mark Kimpton, as logistics and team manager, has done everything from count the players on and off buses during their December trip to Arizona, to organising new signs for the game day rooms, matching the new draftees to the most appropriate host families - if the kids are content, they settle quicker - and updating the opposition team magnet sets. With some clubs adding seven, eight or more players to their list, it proved a time-consuming task. "It drove me crazy," Kimpton said. "I had to cheat and get the work experience kid in on it."

It was James Fantasia's job, as head of the football department, to find a new conditioning coach, a new assistant coach, a new recruiting manager, to find McKenzie and to hire Adrian Caruso, who will work in opposition analysis and recruiting. All the jobs came up at the same time and, as key positions at a club that spends more than only one or two other teams, filling them brought some pressure.

"The timing was difficult because we had a pre-season about to start," said Fantasia, in his second year at the Bulldogs. "Being inexperienced, you worry first of all about how many good people will be around, and then you want to be picking the right ones. But once we started, that all turned around. It was actually a relief, because we had so many awesome people apply."

Others also began their work before that first time trial. If even the first few hours of their pre-season are not perfectly planned out, said assistant coach Leon Cameron, the players will pick up on it, and feel flat. So while the team was away on its break, the coaches worked through any changes they felt they needed to make to the game plan and discussed how they saw the squad evolving - which players they thought could play new positions - and what they could do to prepare them for it.

It was during the summer months, said Cameron, that the players' minds were most open. "Because they don't have to perform on the weekend, and there's not that pressure on their brain, it's the best time you've got to really pump some information into them and get the development coaches involved and break their game down to a really tedious level," he said. "It's a good time to get some good habits into them."

They must also get their bodies ready. Bill Davoren, a former national triathlon coach, joined the club early last November and, after driving down from Queensland, had five days in which to map out a 17-week program. "It was a bit of a headspin," he smiled. The first step was to consult with the coaching staff, and find out precisely what they wanted both individual players and the group to be able to do by round one; they wanted a tough, challenging pre-season, in a nutshell, with a focus on endurance while continuing to build strength.

Davoren split his program into several different phases, working in the types of fitness required in each and scheduling lots of continual running. He allowed room for the coaches to concentrate on skill and strategy and, in implementing it all, also came to know both the players and their personalities - who needed nudging and who was more self-driven. With individual goals worked into so many of their sessions, the onus was also put on the players to self-manage their runs.

Davoren quickly came to learn that, even in the middle of January, schedules could not be too tightly locked in. "The one thing I've found, coming into this environment, is that you've got to think very quickly," he said. "You come in every morning, you've got information from the day before to get through and you've very quickly got to communicate with people and assess what the right moves are for that particular day, in terms of what you want to get out of it and how you're going to manage particular athletes.

"That's challenging, but I'm pretty big on assessing challenges and moving quickly, not getting flustered. We played St Kilda in a practice match a few weeks ago, and that was a watershed moment. We'd been loading the players up and after 10 minutes they looked like they were running through mud. We had a rational discussion about it and we didn't see things moving in the right direction, so we changed it. By the next morning, we'd altered a few little things and away we went."

While that was happening, others were looking further ahead. In thinking about what they wanted to do this season, the coaches also had to consider what might be thrown their way - other teams' tactics, mostly. "You're practising zoning," said coach Rodney Eade, "but you're also working out ways to counter it."

Caruso, a former analyst at Champion Data, joined the club in January and, in addition to analysing upcoming opponents and assessing game-day stats in the box, has helped the coaches develop a set of key performance indicators. It has been an interesting challenge. "I did a bit of that at Champion, but at Champion you're looking for the things that the game in general is producing or throwing up," he said. "Here, I guess you're looking at it in reverse, trying to work out what you need to be doing to win games."

Ahead of today's match, Caruso had made two trips to Perth and a third to Canberra to watch Fremantle play, keeping an eye out for any new tactics while remembering that the Dockers, like his own team, were in practice mode. He'd kept an eye on North Melbourne and Richmond, the Bulldogs' next two opponents, too; by the time they play West Coast in round four, there will be enough in-season form to assess.

"With the pre-season games, I'm basically just keeping the coaches up to date with where different players are playing and any tactics they might try to bring in," said Caruso, who has also begun analysing the composition of other clubs' lists, sussing out some premiership standards and seeing where the Bulldog squad fits. "You can almost over-analyse things for round one, but it's just about making sure you're across everything and that, if clubs do come up with something new, we're ready for it."

The Bulldogs began combing through their own squad last month, at a first list management meeting that was mostly about setting some priorities. "We have a ratings system where we'll sit down and rate our players and go through all the other clubs. But in the initial stages, you're looking at which of your players are coming out of contract and working out a bit of a game plan in terms of when to start negotiating with different guys and which ones we need to get locked in first," said Fantasia. "It gives us a starting point for the season and it also gets us thinking ahead to where different holes in the team might come up, to predicting what our needs might be."

Simon Dalrymple has also been thinking long term. For most recruiting managers, December and January are quiet months, but after moving into the job late last year, he has had a lot of work to do. The Bulldogs have put a 12-scout national network in place and Dalrymple has begun setting up a coaching program for potential father-son draftees, developing more contacts in Fiji, where the club signed two kids to international scholarships last year, setting up a new reporting system for his scouts and watching some tapes of the coming draft crop.

While most newly appointed recruiters have to start completely afresh - those in place will have already seen the next lot of names trickling through - Dalrymple coached the Vic Metro under-16 team in 2007 and will start with some strong knowledge. He has been to Perth and Adelaide a few times in the past month and, with the season starting, will be travelling much more. "It's changing from an office job to an on-the-road job, which is good," he said. "We're on the go until December, now."

Today, the team's marathon starts. Addison has trained almost right through the summer, understanding more about how important it is to recover fully from each session because "if you don't, you drop off a tiny bit in the next one, and it's hard to catch back up." He gained four kilograms early in the pre-season, but dropped two straight away, and has run much better since. He has felt more comfortable using his voice during sessions, and more assured off the ground too, "like you know people better now, and like they know you."

He has trained with both the backline and midfield groups, and the words of his coaches are embedded in his brain more firmly than ever before. "Things are starting to come a bit quicker when I'm out there playing, it's starting to feel more fresh," he said.

"I feel like it's been a good pre-season, but it's kind of a nervous time. You work so hard for so long, and now's the time when you put it to the test. There's a lot of unknowns, but it's exciting. We've trained and trained, and now we can get into it."