On Friday the entire Gold Coast playing, coaching and support staff contingent will travel to Queenstown, New Zealand for a six-day training camp.

The camp, which was formulated by Stuart Dew and Football Operations Manager Scott Pyle 12 months ago, will consist of conditioning utilising New Zealand’s terrain amongst standard training routines.

It also serves the purpose to unite the entire group after an off-season of personnel change.

“It will be hard work over there, obviously a different environment but the (training) block we’ve put in (so far), we’ve been really pleased with the application,” Dew said.

“With such a new group, we’ve got 13 new players and about 11 new staff so we thought it was a good time (to go).

“New Zealand is so close, such a beautiful country and obviously we’ll spend time together away 24 hours a day which will be good.”

Dew said the camp was a perfect opportunity for the club’s newest draftees to get to know their teammates in a better capacity as well as the coaching and support staff.

“Putting them under different circumstances will be good for everyone to get to know each other,” he said.

“They will get familiar with travel protocols and things like that.”

The NZ camp is one of many innovations to further develop the team’s culture in the preparations for the 2019 season. 

“I think our connectiveness as a team will be really important (next year),” Dew said.

“The group we’ve got now, they’re really hungry to work together and I think we’ve seen that over the five or six weeks now, the alignment. 

“Really they’re pushing each other which is good because obviously as coaches that’s our job but the most powerful is when it comes from player to player so we’ve seen some growth.”

The travelling party will return on Wednesday December 19 before breaking over Christmas and returning early January to resume pre-season training.