Hartlepool United's full pre-season set to start on Monday as Dave Challinor explains schedule

The Pools players have been given the last week off ahead of the start of their full-time pre-season schedule in preparation for the start of the National League season start on October 3.

On July 20, Dave Challinor’s side returned to East Durham College for the first time since lockdown and have since spent the last month training intermittently.

Now the countdown to the new season is drawing ever closer for the players as they’re back on a full-time basis from Monday with friendly matches starting next month.

“For us, we’ve obviously been training and then the players have had a week off,” Challinor told The Mail.

"We’ll be starting in earnest properly on 24 August. We’ve been ticking over and doing three days a week and then last week we did a normal week of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

“Monday is when we’ll start our full-time pre-season if you like and we’ll integrate games into that.”

Pools will return to training on Monday with a squad full of 15 senior players plus young forward Joe Grey, out-of-contract midfielder Luke Williams and any trialists who may be present.

Challinor has signed eight players so far this summer and is hoping to bring in around four more which would take the squad size to his ideal 19 to 20 mark.

While the Pools boss is in no immediate rush to get more business done at this stage, he has recognised the benefit of getting players in early.

"In an ideal world, we’d have had everything in place and all our players in for Monday so it gives us five, six weeks to integrate them into our squad,” Challinor added.

“I love being out on the training pitch and working with the players so the more time we get with each player the better.

"But if we're looking to bring players in on loan, most teams have only recently returned to training so we’ll have to see whether certain players are part of their team’s plans first.”

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