West Coast Fever will take another big step towards to Super Netball’s August restart, returning to light contact training next week.

Fever have held two on-court sessions since returning to group training, but have not done any body contact work.

As of next week defenders will start being able to apply some physical pressure to the shooters in training, with coach Stacey Marinkovich eyeing a return to a normal in-season schedule by early next month.

“It is just not going into full matchplay yet with external teams, at the moment we’re still condensed down to our squad and training partners,” Marinkovich said.

“For us it is getting back to our game plan, making sure we’re ready for that one-on-one pressure and a level of physicality which is a little bit more controlled at the moment — to have people get good, strong hands over the ball; having players be able to make decision with multiple things going on around them.

“All those types of things you haven’t been able to do when you are just going through the skills and not having someone applying that presence around you.”

Marinkovich praised their efforts in training while in isolation.

“In terms of bodies and being able to go into that loading, I think they’ve done a really good job in isolation so that we’ve been able to increase that (training) quite quickly and target whatever we have needed to around our game plan,” she said.

“We have really refined the specific skills you need to apply into unit training.

“The biggest thing is doing it under pressure.”