IT sounds like a brutal form of football club hazing - take the first-year players to country Victoria, shove them in a caravan, get them up at dawn to run, jump off a pier into icy water and get in a ring to box each other and some older bigger, tougher teammates.

But at Melbourne it is more bonding than belting. The Demons' eight first-year players this week trouped to Brent Moloney's family home in Warrnambool for a ''boxing camp'' with Moloney and Nathan Jones.

Four years ago Moloney organised the first of these now annual camps to show the club's new players something of his life and in turn learn something of them.

"Really, I just try and get them out of their comfort zone and away from the club. I want to show them where I am from and open myself up a bit and they do the same," he said.

''You get to know the players and probably talk more openly and ask questions you wouldn't ask sitting around the club in Melbourne.''

Staying at the local caravan park, being buffeted by howling winds, they would rise at 5.30 each day and head off for a run, then it is into the gym of "Rude" Rodney Ryan where Moloney boxed as a teenager, for sparring, then down to the breakwater where they would all jump in the bay.

But it was the times between training as much as during that drew the players together. Like sitting around the Moloney family dinner table chewing on a roast cooked by Mrs Moloney.

"We do a bit of training and boxing but it is more about bonding. We are footballers not boxers, " he said.

After the first camp four years ago the new players have done it each year. The rest of the group, liking the idea, have separately gone away. Most of the rest of the group went to Sorrento this week - it is always during the bye week - and had a Vietnam War veteran speak to them. Jack Trengove said the players were moved by his words.

The bye and the camps have come at an opportune time for a club that has spent enough of its time this year on the ropes and working out a way to fight back.