Max steps up for crack at his best season yet
MAX Dowd is on the stairway to rugby heaven.
The 20-year-old Bond University speedster has for the third season in a row been forced to cool his heels before making a mark in Queensland Premier Rugby.
Coronavirus has club action on ice until July 1 but The Southport School graduate Dowd is not wasting the chance to get fitter and faster.
A 30-floor staircase is proving the perfect makeshift training ground for the fullback who in terms of speed is “up there in the top three, probably behind Joey Fittock” at Bond.
“We live in an apartment building at Main Beach I have been a bit crazy and smashing the fire escape stairs,” said Dowd, a John Eales Scholarship winner at Bond.
“I’ve been running them every second or third day – three sets and I’m pretty stuffed by the last one.
“I try to get each rep, from the bottom to the top, in four minutes.”
It’s a regimen built of past pain. An ankle injury and broken jaw have tempered his past two campaigns in the colts and then seniors.
“Two years out of school, and this is my third year, and I injured my ankle and then broke my jaw and this year, no one is playing yet,” he said.
“It's very frustrating; it feels like if I don’t complete the season I haven’t had a good year.
“This was the year I’d hoped to cement a professional future in rugby, or at least make a bit of a name for myself.”
A one-time Titans contract holder and junior at Southport Tigers, where his father Steve Dowd coaches first grade, the architecture student fleetingly contemplated a return to the 13-man code should club rugby fall over.
“It was a possibility if the union season wasn’t on. It was a worst-case scenario,” he said.