This essay is a reflection back on the time spent in USA Rugby’s Elite Coach Development Program (ECDP) and two lessons I took away from the week long National All Star Camp (NASC) that helped develop me as both a head coach and assistant coach.
Since England and Clive Woodward won the 2003 world cup specialized coaches have become commonplace on club and international staffs. The days of 2-3 coaches operating in the traditional head coach, forward coach, and backs coach role are quickly disappearing in favor of 5-6 coaches with new titles like skills coach, point of contact coach, or attack coach. In this essay I will share with you two personal learning experiences of mine as a specialist coach. These two experiences will focus on the need for clearly defined roles and the issue of time management when coaching a specialty area. These areas are often points of contention on my own staff as well as others around the world and it is my hope that my experience can help others with the same issues.
I entered the 2015 NASC camp in a familiar role as assistant coach. For the previous two years I found myself working with the backline for the CAAs and again would be filling the role for one of the two college teams at this camp. An added bonus this year was I would be tasked with coaching the attack for the squad making this my specialist area. As I mentioned above the two learning experiences that I would like to share will focus around my role as the attack coach and the need for time management and defined roles by using my background in both business and rugby.
What’s my job as the attack coach?
How would you define it as besides making sure the team scores enough to win? What responsibilities are associated with it? These are all questions I had for myself. The learning experience here is the same lesson I had when I was hiring employees for a company, the need for a job description. Just like you wouldn't take a job without knowing your responsibilities so why should you coach something without knowing your parameters? A job description for a specialist coach should be an up-front contract and cover 5 key elements;
The purpose of the position
Expected outcomes of the role
What input the other support staff will have in systems, patterns, etc.
Expected time and tools to perform role
How much input will be given by the head coach
By creating a description of the specialist coach role you are giving you and your staff a point of reference to work from on any decision that will need to be made now or in the future. These should also be flexible so it can change with the game and your staff and constantly be reviewed.
The Time Truth of a Specialist Coach
As a specialist coach you should always remember two time truths:
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| 'scrum better!' |
Time is irreplaceable. We never make it back once it is gone.
Time is measureable . Everybody has the same amount of time… peasant or king. Its not how much time you have it is how much time you use.
When you’re a specialist coach you have block of time to deliver a message, develop a skill, and execute it in a game situation that will carry over into a competition. With that title of specialist comes a certain level of pressure of being the expert and an over inflated sense of self worth that if you don’t reach your outcomes the team won’t perform. Because of those two factors we make the mistake of trying to do too much in one session which leads to either completing some of the outcome or completing nothing because of over explanation and not enough reps. This is a violation of time truth #2. Once this happen we fall into the cycle of moving things around in a later session to accommodate what missed and this violates time truth #1.
I made the same mistake the past two years in my preparation for these camps. I decide that I would reinvent how teams can score a try with elaborate systems and patterns. Then I arrive, look at a roster, and I’m reminded that this is an ever changing team with different names, skills, and experience levels. This year, I changed my approach by focusing on a process that is broken down into three areas.
Assess the squad- I was successful in this by putting them into common rugby scenarios (i.e. 2v1, 2v1 with support, etc) and watching their skills while only giving small coaching points. The outcome was simple, we wanted to see what they were good at.
Identify the strength and then build around it- We immediately ID’d that we were good with ball in hand so we started to build an attack structure around moving the point of contact and working to keep the ball alive.
Keep it simple- We had hard runners in the middle and speed on the outside. Instead of 5 elaborate but poorly executed starter moves we went with 2 simple starter moves that we focused on executing perfectly.
I made sure to hold myself to this three step process for every training and it had a direct effect on the time managment of that session. We would assess what we had done the previous session, build on it in the current session, and keep it simple by not over burden ourselves with unnecessary scenarios or instructions . I also worked to avoid the rabbit hole of coaching skills during team attack time. Often players won’t struggle with the concept of a pattern but will lack the skill to perform it. In the past I’ve been bogged down by this, using up precious time to coach a skill when I should’ve shelved it to work on with the individual player before or after training.
There is no one right way to manage your time but as you are planning a session or even performing a session ask yourself if you are respect the time truths. By doing that you are being an effective coach and not taking time away from other areas of the game.
At the end of the day these are just two personal lessons I've taken away from my time as a specialty coach. As these positions grow and become commonplace within the structure of a team we, as a coach community, have to make sure we develop with them. It is as simple as of respecting our personal time, our staff’s time and our team’s time by establishing and honoring our responsibility. While some of us might never have the staff of Clive Woodward we can still work to delegate portions of the game to worthy coaches.
