Fremantle coach Ross Lyon has revealed that the Dockers reached out to the Perth Wildcats and coach Trevor Gleeson in an off-season bid to bolster their skills program and speed up their ball movement.

The radical idea, which echoes a similar move by Hawthorn who used Gleeson ahead of their 2013 premiership campaign, was initiated by assistant coach Brent Guerra who was at the Hawks then.

Lyon revealed the initiative in an exclusive interview with The Weekend West.

He also called for time to carry out his list rebuild and expressed confidence that he was coaching as well as ever.

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The ball-handling program is part of a fresh direction taken by Lyon to give his assistants a greater role in the planning and running of the club’s training programs.

Forward Hayden Ballantyne said this week that the top-up skills sessions were now a part of every training session at Fremantle.

“It has been a huge focus,” Ballantyne said. “We do 15 to 20 minutes every day of just pure ball-handling skills. It is really paying off with touch and one-touch pick-ups and stuff like that. It is clearly making a difference with our touch.”

Lyon said the aim of the program was to lift the skill level of his team and reduce turnovers, a problem for the Dockers in their plunge down the ladder in 2016 and 2017.

“At the initiative of Brent Guerra we put together a ball-handling program. We went up to the Wildcats, saw Trevor Gleeson and their ball-handling program. We took their patent,” he said.

“It gave us some guides to introduce a ball-handling program X amount of times per week. Specialisation, the fundamentals. In our warm-ups we introduced extra ball handling.”

Lyon said the program “probably” meant Dockers players would handle the ball an extra “100,000 times” over the course of a year.

“Anecdotally I think we saw a bit of the benefit from that at the weekend,” he said of Fremantle’s 62-point thumping of West Coast in the JLT Community series match at Joondalup last Sunday.

“A fumble is a turnover.

“Dropped marks, fumbles, tackle effectiveness. We were dropping too many marks with too many fumbles. It is something you can control and work on.”