A team-building paintball skirmish was a highlight of day four of Port Adelaide’s pre-season camp on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast on Saturday.

Here rookie Trent Burgoyne provides an insight into the day at Lake Kawana.

We got to the paintball course around 8am. We had four teams mixing up players, trainers, physios and coaches. It was basically a team bonding activity to bring the group together but also based around tactics, getting out of situations and teamwork as well.

I had more of the older guys in my team like Charlie (Dixon), Ollie (Wines), Trav (Boak), Karl Amon, Hoff (Justin Westhoff), Jackson Mead, Jake Pasini, Tim (O’Leary) from our medical staff and a few others. We were pretty good, our team won so we had some pretty good tactics.

They said the rule was to grab the flag but for us it was more about getting territory. Wherever we started, we decided to rush and take one side and flank them and then push them all to one corner. We did it to the coaches at the end and ended up winning.

It was mainly Charlie who was taking it pretty seriously and Trav who were the leaders and led the way. Charlie has that big voice and directed us all. He loved it – he didn’t even wear a shirt under his overalls, just went bare chested and took a few hits, it didn’t bother him.

I got a few hits. I got stuck in a corner and had Thommo (Scott Thompson) and Hentch (Trent Hentschel) firing on me and I was just stuck. I was trying to run but they kept lining me up so I got hit a few times.

We wanted to beat the coaches because it was about bragging rights and getting them back for all the hard work they’ve been putting us through. We rushed them and in the end they surrendered so it was good to win.

I’m definitely better at footy than paintball. At one point I was being an idiot and firing 60 metre bullets.

We went back and showered up before getting a talk from this fella Michael Groom. He’s pretty incredible and has climbed four of the five highest mountains in the world. He told us about his journey of climbing Mt Everest – I think it took him four attempts to get there. He had a lot of setbacks.

I think it was more about resilience and one message I took away was that tough times don’t last forever but tough people do and it stuck for me having gone through some hard times in the last couple of years. It was good to hear his story and how he was able to battle through some testing conditions on the mountain.

We had the afternoon and night off so I rushed out to get a present for my Kris Kringle – which we’re doing as a team. I won’t give away who I’ve got. A few of the boys went to the beach but I couldn’t be bothered so I went to the recovery room in the gym an then had a rest. About 20 of us went to an Italian restaurant which was all you can eat pizza and pasta which was pretty good. When we got back, we had another table tennis tournament with the first and second-year boys but this time nobody had to go swimming. I think Butters got scared of me!