WAGGA Tigers will be without a number of key players when it opens its new campaign with a trial against Ovens and Murray League club Lavington on Sunday.

Tigers will host Lavington at Maher Oval in its annual pre-season hit-out against the Panthers and the Wagga club has no great aspirations due to the unavailability of several senior players.

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New assistant coach Matt Rava will don the Tigers strip for the first time since returning from Ganmain-Grong Grong-Matong, while recruits Matt Noonan and Adam Norton will also play.

Tigers will also look to promote promising teenagers such as Jeremiah Maslin, Ben Farrell and Dougal Howard in Sunday's clash.

Wagga Tigers captain-coach Tom Power said player unavailability was set to make things difficult.

"We're keen, but we've got that many people unavailable it's going to make it tough," Power said yesterday.

"We're going to use the game to give blokes a run in different positions and see how they go.

"Obviously we'll try and put in place the things we've been practising since November.

"That's probably the thing more than anything given we'll have a number of senior players away."

Power said several of the club's promising youngsters will get a chance to impress selectors at senior level.

"We'll be trying different players in different positions and want to give a lot of the kids an opportunity," Power said.

"We want to give them a taste of it so they can get used to the pace and physicality of senior footy."

Tigers adopted the "press" game style last year in a bold move that caused a stir in the competition.

Power said Tigers had been working on its plan for this year for some time.

"I guess with our game plan, we sorted that out pretty early once we finalised our list and knew what we had," Power said.

"Hopefully we can put into place our game plan on the weekend, but that's going to be hard with a lot of senior blokes not being there.

"It's not going to be a full scale hit out for us."

A mixture of Tigers' reserve grade and under 17s will take on a similar squad from Lavington at 11am, before the first grade teams clash at 1pm.

Wagga Tigers v Lavington

Maher Oval, Sunday

First grade: 1pm

Under 17-Reserve grade: 11am