In this episode, I am joined by Richie Williams, Director of Rugby at Cambridge Rugby Club in England. Richie has coached across Europe and shares great wisdom from the lessons that he has learned.
As we unpack the complexities of leading a club like Cambridge Rugby, Richie imparts the lessons carved from both sweet victories and the sting of defeat. He shares a refreshing perspective on collaboration and communication, and how these pillars of teamwork are instrumental in navigating the delicate balance between asserting authority and encouraging player-driven initiatives. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the transformation of coaching methods and the evolution of player engagement, where the trust in one's coaching process becomes as crucial as the game plan itself.
To cap off, Richie and I dissect the essence of resilience in the face of adversity and the significance of maintaining authenticity through the highs and lows. We explore how emotional investment and a focus on effort over outcome can galvanize a team, and the collective exhilaration when that effort challenges full-time professionals. Richie's insights are a testament to the powerful bond forged through shared experiences and the broader impacts of coaching that ripple well beyond the rugby field. Join us for this compelling episode that promises a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone passionate about sports, leadership, or the pursuit of excellence.
In this episode, I am joined by Richie Williams, Director of Rugby at Cambridge Rugby Club in England. Richie has coached across Europe and shares great wisdom from the lessons that he has learned.
As we unpack the complexities of leading a club like Cambridge Rugby, Richie imparts the lessons carved from both sweet victories and the sting of defeat. He shares a refreshing perspective on collaboration and communication, and how these pillars of teamwork are instrumental in navigating the delicate balance between asserting authority and encouraging player-driven initiatives. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the transformation of coaching methods and the evolution of player engagement, where the trust in one's coaching process becomes as crucial as the game plan itself.
To cap off, Richie and I dissect the essence of resilience in the face of adversity and the significance of maintaining authenticity through the highs and lows. We explore how emotional investment and a focus on effort over outcome can galvanize a team, and the collective exhilaration when that effort challenges full-time professionals. Richie's insights are a testament to the powerful bond forged through shared experiences and the broader impacts of coaching that ripple well beyond the rugby field. Join us for this compelling episode that promises a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone passionate about sports, leadership, or the pursuit of excellence.
Welcome back to the when Coaching Goes Wrong podcast with me, the contact coach, craig Wilson. Today I'm joined by Richie Williams, the director of Rugby at Cambridge, who are a championship team in England. He has coached many different types of teams, from England counties through to club and national teams in Belgium. Now this expansive career means he has bags of wisdom to share with us, and I particularly enjoyed our chat around what defined success at Cambridge Rugby Club, who have been promoted to the second tier of English rugby and are now competing as an amateur team versus professionals. It's just so insightful about what defined success, from going from winning seasons to really finding it much harder to get results. And Richie says some really cool stuff around how he maintains his KPIs, his metrics to define success. So I know you're going to like this one. Richie is a brilliant guest, so settle in and enjoy the show.
Speaker 2:Richie, how are you going mate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, really good. Thanks, craig. Good to finally connect and catch up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been following you for a long time, so I'm super excited for this one. But just set the scene for us. Where are you? What you up to?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, currently based in the UK, based in Cambridge and head coach of Cambridge, who are in the championship. We recently got promoted from National One. We won the league last season. The club's gone into a centene re-year this year and it's the highest level that we've ever operated at. So yeah, really exciting times for the club. Some obvious challenges have come up into this league with some of the opposition that we're playing, but no, I'm really enjoying coaching at the minute and, fortunately, working with a really talented and hardworking group of players.
Speaker 2:Now that's great, and I think we're going to dive into what you do, what you're doing at Cambridge, a bit later in the show. But just tell us a bit of your background from playing, how you transitioned to coaching and what that looked like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's certainly been a non-linear route to where I'm at at the moment. I grew up in Wales and, as is with a lot of people growing up in Wales, you're exposed to rugby from an early age, got some really fond memories of going to watch Neath play on a Saturday. My dad and myself had season tickets there from when I was about I think five or six years of age, so it was always part of my upbringing, watching rugby and playing rugby. I then studied in Wales to the teacher training degree and was playing semi-professional rugby alongside that. I was lucky enough to represent Wales students in my final year at university, so we had a really tough game against England students back in. I think it would have been 1999 or 2000,. A long, long time ago. And now I got offered a job in Oxfordshire and a sports college to start my teaching career and I was always really interested in coaching alongside teaching and playing. It's something that I think. Watching Neath from a young age and probably watching things like the British Lions documentary, I was always fascinated by how some teams are more successful than others, so I was really intrigued around the difference that coaches could make to a team, what things some coaches were doing that others weren't doing, and I think probably one of my early memories was around that Lions documentary that everybody has probably watched that likes rugby and someone like Ian McGeaton and Jim Telford looking at how they sort of delivered messages to players, how they really focused on developing environments and creating a really strong culture, and that's something that I think I've been able to sort of refine over my career of coaching and teaching.
Speaker 3:My journey then took me across to Belgium, so I coached over in Antwerp for two years and that was something that was really interesting for me to be able to experience one a different culture. Rugby wasn't a mainstream sport in Belgium. It sits well below football and golf ball and many other sports. But what I learned very quickly from my time in Belgium was something that worked in the UK didn't didn't necessarily work in Belgium, and I think I had to probably appreciate that culture a little bit quicker than what I did, and I think what what I was able to do in my two years there was to build a really successful group of players that cared about Antwerp and cared for what they were doing, and that was a really useful lesson that has put me in good stead now for wearing coaching. I also worked with the Belgian women's sevens team, so that was another a really good process, certainly improved my communication skills, my player management, the importance and significance of doing that.
Speaker 3:And then I moved back to the UK. I got a role with the England counties under 20s which I held for five or six seasons, and we got to tour places like Georgia, russia. We went to the Netherlands, we went to Hungary and all of those were great experiences of working with players that probably weren't quite good enough to play at Premiership clubs. A lot of the players were new into rugby or had been released by Premiership clubs. But I think the common theme in those five years was all of those players at that age were really aspirational. They wanted to become high level rugby players.
Speaker 3:We were there really to support them in their development and their growth and we tried to make it a really positive experience for them.
Speaker 3:We brought together a group of players.
Speaker 3:We had a short amount of time, so it was so important to be really precise and really clear around how we wanted to play, what the game model wanted to look like, but equally given them a positive experience of touring somewhere like Georgia for 10 days going to somewhere like Budapest in Hungary.
Speaker 3:So they've all been wonderful experiences and I think throughout my coaching career and playing career I've become accustomed to not only winning games but losing games as well, and probably more losses than wins of late, and that really stimulated my thought process around what success looks like, how we probably redefine success and how we maintain that really strong team ethos and team spirit. So yeah, it's been a bit of a diverse journey for me so far, but I think where I'm at at the moment has been a culmination of all of those sort of different experiences of coaching in Belgium, doing a lot of work over in Hungary as a consultant, coaching throughout the National Leagues, working in schools and, as you know, I think those varied experiences allow you to really shape your coaching philosophy and figure out what means a lot to you, what your values are and, more importantly, how teams can be successful.
Speaker 2:Brilliant and there's so much in there already. And what resonated with me is that coaching in many different environments and I look I'm biased because that's what I did, whether I knew it or not, that's the path that I went down but just coaching in different environments, terms of different countries, different age groups, men, women, kids, adults it's just such a grounding for a coach and I would encourage that massively. And I also smile when you talk about Belgium, because one of my caps, what I got for Hong Kong, was against Belgium. Actually, hong Kong played Belgium in Dubai, so figure that one out, but it was really good to play against and they're a big bunch of tough guys. Actually they really were. And yeah, I'd love to know more about your time in Belgium, because you mentioned that there was a few learning lessons there, because that might. Was that your first kind of real experience coaching outside of what you used to in the UK?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So in the UK I was very much still playing and coaching at the community level and then, moving across to Belgium, it became a full time role, working at Amtswerp and then working with the Federation in Belgium, and I think that the key thing from those early experiences was not trying to bring too much detail to the players and almost expecting that they'd know a style of rugby or you know, or know what I was really looking for as a coach. And I think once I realized that that wasn't the case that their lack of understanding around how we wanted the game to look, you know, we suffered, I think the first four games of that season we lost. And then there was a Eureka moment in training where I spoke to one of the senior players and he, you know, he said to me that look, we probably have to tone things down a little bit. The level of understanding, the disparity between some of the older players and the younger players was really vast and I think that that message landed and stuck really quickly and we brought things back to basics.
Speaker 3:I focus more on trying to generate a really team, a positive team spirit, and put a lot of emphasis and a lot of time in. You know, in those connections player to player, player to coach and the success then followed off the back of that. We won more games. We were then able to layer on a little bit more detail to the players and it was a very young group.
Speaker 3:A lot of the players that I coached at the young ratings level at the Colts then transitioned into senior rugby and there was that natural progression and natural transition between the two and it was a really tough decision to leave Belgium. I think we got to a level where we were runners up in the in the Belgium League. I was having a really good experience coaching the women's sevens team that were operating. They got into the top European level playing against France, england, some of the top teams. So it was a really good experience. But I felt that I wanted to come back to the UK to challenge myself at a national league club there and really put into practice some of those things I learned in Belgium.
Speaker 2:I guess what I heard there. It was a senior player who came over to you and mentioned that. Now, was that deliberate on your part? Do you think that came from them? Obviously it was a cool learning moment about utilising the people in your environment, was it? I'm not saying you were, you didn't seek out that advice, but was that your weaker moment? Where did that come from?
Speaker 3:Good question. I think now I really value players taking ownership of a lot of what they're doing and I've used a leadership group play leadership group for the last five or six seasons and that's been really successful. But I think subconsciously, before that moment in Belgium I always felt I had a good relationship with the players and was really comfortable with players giving me feedback, but I think I didn't give enough attention to that before that conversation happened. I think there was always a reliance. Because I was coming from the UK, I'd had some probably more experiences than a lot of the players. I felt that I had to come in and make all of the decisions and be a little bit more direct than I probably would be in the UK with my coaching. But the moment that the senior player had that conversation with me, that probably then reinforced what I probably should be doing and that was leaning on those players a little bit more in trusting those in driving some of the values and the behaviours of the group.
Speaker 3:And I think what happened then off the back of that were there were another two or three senior players that felt a real part of that environment and that culture. They were then able to shape a lot of the game model that we put into place and it was definitely more of a collaboration than probably what it was in that first month of being there. So that was really interesting and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think that would have happened if we'd won those first four games. So immediately there you start to think that losing games, as long as you frame things in the right way, as long as you're reflective after a loss and you have those conversations and you're open to having those conversations, I think some really powerful lessons can emerge from it.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. And it's yeah, winning can often be winning or losing can often be a poor barometer of where your environment is. That either way, yeah, winning on the outside, everything looked like it's going rosy, but it's something might be coming around the corner that you might have a blind spot to if your results focus. Likewise, if the losses have been mounted up, that's also not to say that you're running a bad environment. There might be some really good things around what are happening around the corner and it resonates with me as well like coming over here to the US, I'm often coaching students 18 to 22, who have got very, very minimal experience, like some have never played before, and it was interesting if I look at how I coached the team eight years ago to how I coached the team now.
Speaker 2:The collaboration are worlds apart. Like I lean on the players so much because, at the end of the day, they're living it, they live in the environment, they're living what the environment is, and getting their feedback is just so, so important. Just to keep a finger on the pulse that, yeah, things are going well or, coach, have a think about this. And yeah, I can't. I can't agree with you anymore about that use of collaboration.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really interesting, craig, and I think that that resonates a lot with me and that experience that I had would have been back in 2012 or 2013, a long time ago.
Speaker 3:It still comes up in my coaching now. I've had a recent experience where apologies, I'm jumping around a little bit here, but the losses that we've had recently with Cambridge coming into the new league I think there's a temptation when you're losing games to go back along that coaching continuum and be more direct and take decisions away from other coaches and players, whereas actually you've still got to trust that process. As you reference there, the players are the ones that are living these things on the weekend. So I think you've got to be brave sometimes with your decisions and that there's a temptation and a risk of when you're losing games, you want to be the sole person that's in control of all of the decisions, whereas the risk of doing that you are rode away a lot of what you've built in previous seasons around giving players responsibility, making them in charge of a lot of their learning. So it's a constant battle, but I think you've got to try and maintain that balance, irrespective of what the outcome of games are like.
Speaker 2:And collaboration doesn't just mean everyone's in agreement all the time. In fact, it's actually quite the opposite. But what it is I feel it should be is a respectful conversation that everyone's heard, and then alignment is gained from there on whatever direction is chosen, and eventually someone's going to make a call and it's probably going to be the head coach. But people need to be listened to, particularly in this day and age. People need to be listened to. If there's communication there and the collaboration, that doesn't mean there's always agreement, but there's alignment, and I think that's a really powerful thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%. And, again, you're probably noticing this every day when you're coaching in your environment. I think there's a clear and distinct difference between coaching now to what it was like 10 years ago and I think the age profile of a lot of our younger players who've been exposed to Premiership academies they've been in rugby, play in schools they want a lot more information, a lot quicker. They want to be part of that sort of learning process. So it's a really sensitive one how you manage that whole process and, as you've said, their collaboration is key to have that sort of alignment around what you're doing, for everybody to be completely clear around what the expectations are that you've got to follow and being comfortable having difficult conversations as well. That's something that probably resonates with me at the moment.
Speaker 3:You've got to be prepared to have difficult conversations with players if it means that being for the benefit of the wider group. So there's all these different things that are probably more magnified when you're losing games and going through those tough experiences. But I'm quite a reflective person and when I lose games or when I win games, I look inwardly at myself first, around how I feel I've prepared the team in the week, but I'll also try and look at the bigger picture stuff as well around what my conversations were like with the players in the week, what their conversations were like to the other players. So it's a big field, isn't it? And I think you can be quite forensic sometimes with your analysis of games, particularly when you lose. But I think, essentially, if you pick out some things that you can improve on moving forwards to try and avoid making those same mistakes again, then that becomes a really healthy thing to do.
Speaker 2:Really interesting what you just mentioned there about being really forensic and that tends to rear its head when things aren't going well, and on the previous podcast with Chris Davies he mentioned that as well. When things weren't going well. It was almost like diving into the analysis because it's like, right, this is what we're going to fix and this is how we're going to fix it. And it's not always that transactional it can be. It could be actually stuff away from a field which is potentially affecting performance. Yeah, it's just losing sometimes and it can People just dive into, like try and really dive into it instead of having that bigger lens and maybe seeking other people's input too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, absolutely that, and I think there's a tendency now to you obviously maybe overuse analysis if things aren't going well.
Speaker 3:You will focus, as you said, on the minute detail of what's not going particularly well.
Speaker 3:But something that has been really successful for us over the last probably 12 months is the players taking ownership of a lot of their learnings in games and being part of that analysis review after games and part of that preview process, and it has taken a long time to get to that level where players are comfortable challenging other players if they see something in an individual's performance that probably doesn't relate to what we've been working on in the week if there's not that clear transfer from some of the themes that we've been working on players and how really comfortable to have those difficult conversations between, you know, between themselves, which I think is a really positive place to be at, and I question if that would have happened if we wouldn't have had all those losses at the start of the season.
Speaker 3:We've tried to, you know, create this environment where players are comfortable, coaches are comfortable having conversations, as long as they're done in a respectful manner, and I think that that's the key for all of this. I think you can have those difficult conversations if there's that level of mutual respect, if there's an agreed action after you've had that conversation and, once again, if those conversations make the team better moving forward. So it's yeah, it's an evolving process and I think I'm starting to see things now that I've probably never seen in my coaching career to date, and a lot of that has been forged because of the you know, those difficult experiences of losing a long run of games.
Speaker 2:When you mentioned there how some peer to peer coaching, particularly around the analysis piece, and I remember vividly and this is something I'm constantly working on because I'm I'm big on analysis like I love it, that's the thing I really like getting stuck into.
Speaker 2:But for the same reason, I really encourage the players to analyze their film as well. And I remember in a team meeting when the players are presenting and it was a million miles away from what I would thought was like a key barometer of success, and I'm sitting at the back of a room like biting my tongue like I shouldn't say anything. I shouldn't say anything, I want to say something. But the greater good wasn't necessarily what they were saying. It's the fact that they were saying it to each other, and then you can start to refine the conversation around are we think about this or think about that, or even let it go. But I had a massive moment where I was struggling to not interrupt or add or put my input on it, because it would have taken away from actually the goal I was trying to achieve and that was communication amongst players.
Speaker 3:Oh, no, 100% degree on that, pragan, and it's still a constant battle. On a Sunday evening after a game on a Saturday, all of the players are encouraged to watch the game to highlight particular areas of their performance and the team performance, and they do that on the Huddle platform and every week you're questioning whether you need to bring up that player to try and get them to go into a little bit more detail. But we've got everybody on the same page. Everybody is doing this. There was quite a slow buy-in initially. Not every player was doing this or probably not understanding what the benefits of doing this would be, and then fast forward a few months.
Speaker 3:Everybody is now on the same page. They understand the benefits of doing this. Being in the semi-professional environment, I think a lot of the stuff that we can do before a training on a Monday, tuesday, thursday alleviate the pressures of when they do turn up. So they understand the process of trying to get their analysis done before a training session. But I think that the really powerful thing for me now is that players are starting to have those conversations with other players or how they can get better, how that will improve performance, and it's done in a really constructive way, which is really encouraging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great. And before we jump into your environment, you're in now. Do you remember your first ever rugby session? You coached In the first few weeks, a few moments, what was that like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's going back a long time. I think my first session was when I was at university. I was on a teaching practice at secondary school. I remember delivering an after-school rugby club and I think I did a carbon copy training session of what I'd had on the Tuesday when I was playing but then quickly realised that what worked for my coach, who was coaching the training session for me, didn't necessarily work for me when I was delivering and I almost tried to morph myself into his personality. He had certain character traits that I really liked, but then I quickly realised that that wasn't me. I wasn't being sort of authentic to myself. So that was a big moment.
Speaker 3:I think I'd written down my session plan. I followed my session plan particularly minute by minute, but after that session, on reflection, I thought that wasn't me. I'd just copied that session from somebody else. There probably weren't any moments in that training session where I'd actually observed what was going on with an individual player, so I wasn't able to identify any faults or correct anything because I was so probably concerned and nervous about just following this session plan and being really structured. So yeah, that was a long time ago. I'd like to think I've evolved since then and improved my coaching, but I think that that was a really useful starting point, knowing what wouldn't work if I was serious about becoming a coach. Trying to be somebody else definitely wasn't the way forward.
Speaker 2:I reflect back on my first session, or first few sessions, and, oh man, I was like a little dictator. I was desperate to tell everyone how much knowledge I knew but, bearing in mind on reflection, I knew very little. Again, I was rehashing what other people are session before me, or rehashing a drill I'd saw online on the last minute Google to figure out how am I going to keep people entertained for the next 90 minutes. These are experiences that are worth going through, but I know there's people listening who are on the very early part of their coaching journey and one word that stuck out to be there. What you mentioned is just your authenticity to yourself, like be yourself. Obviously, you've got to be prepared to be planned and have the ability to manoeuvre through a session and that comes with time. But at the very, very start of it, be yourself, because it's hard to keep a mask on for a long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. I think something that rings true and has been one of the main drivers for me when I'm coaching is I'm doing something that I love doing and I've clearly got passion around rugby and the sport and helping others develop. But I think that was true from that first session where it was probably a little bit uncomfortable delivering that to where I'm at now. I think I have refined my delivery and that's come through experiences of coaching different age groups, going to different countries, working in different environments. But I think the thing that's run true throughout that coaching journey is that I'm doing something that I love and I'm passionate about and I think as long as you can reflect that in what you're doing and be authentic, as we said, in the delivery, then I think other people will sort of feed off that and hopefully develop as a result as well.
Speaker 2:And as you progress through, you're usually coaching on your own, but eventually, as a head coach, you either inherit or you bring along a coaching team with you. How do you build your own coaching team and how do you work with your assistant coaches to maximise them in the environment, or has there been a development in your own practice in doing so?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's one memory that jumps out there, talking about coaching teams and inheriting coaching teams and my first year in my role at Cambridge. So back in 2017-2018, I was my first year coaching at the club. We're a national one. The club were probably a bottom of the half table team, but a very sort of historical rugby club runs a very strong Minion Junior section, a very good community club. But I'd inherited a team, probably an agent team and quite a large coaching group as well. What I felt was the right thing at the time was to see if I could improve the team, see if I could work with the current coaching team that were there. The head coach had moved on the previous season, there were still two assistant coaches, there was a player coach as well, and then I came in, so I think there were four, maybe five coaches in total, which was quite heavy for the level that we were playing at.
Speaker 3:What I quickly learned, probably halfway through that season, was that the relationship between the coaches. Everybody had a different outlook on coaching. Everybody didn't share the same philosophy, would all come from different backgrounds, which wasn't necessarily the problem, but we weren't aligned in our thinking. What was quickly happening was that one message that I was given in a team session would be completely different to what the forwards coach was saying, would be completely different to what the defence coach was saying. Players are pretty perceptive. Players realise quite quickly what the coaches are saying and if there's not much alignment between them, we fortunately survived relegation that season. We won our last game and we think we relied on two other games going in our favour.
Speaker 3:But we stayed up and won that season and I then changed the coaching team. So I brought in the two guys to support me that I'd worked with before, that I knew, shared the same philosophy as myself but, more importantly, who I knew could develop the players. We'd just lower the age profile of the group. We'd identified some leaders from that really difficult season. That second season our results slowly started to improve but there was more alignment between the coaches and the players. There was a lot more direction around what we wanted to do for that season for the next two or three years and I think three years later we ended up winning national one and got ourselves to the level we're at now. But that first season was the big moment for me, making some mistakes and making some errors. But ultimately, those mistakes and those errors again, whilst I didn't realise at the time how useful they would be, they've allowed the team and the club to grow on and off the field and get us to the highest level that they've ever been at.
Speaker 2:So, with managing the initial coaching team that you inherited when you joined, how it sounded like you brought in new coaches at that, the second season you were with them. You must have had trust of the board and the club to be able to make those decisions. So did you know that was going to come, or was it an off-season decision? Or was it just? How did that develop? Because that again, that's such an important part of a coach's life is how actually not managing the players, it's also managing the staff around you and then managing up to the board, the chairpeople and people who make decisions at a higher level.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the coaches first. We had a conversation as a coaching group probably two thirds of the way through the season around moving forwards. This is what the coaching group is going to look like next season. I had some really challenging conversations with two coaches that had been at the club a long time. One had played over 150 games for the club so that was very difficult. But I made sure that I was honest in that conversation. I'd sort of explained there on some of the failings that I felt that we'd had this season around, how we weren't aligned as a coaching team and whilst it was difficult, I think we did it with a level of sort of sincerity and empathy which is really important. And then I tried to manage that process throughout the season with the board and managing upwards.
Speaker 3:I think that's something that I learned in that first year about the significance of having that regular dialogue, that regular conversation with the board, and explaining probably some of the hardships that I was experiencing from a coaching perspective and how that was reflected ultimately on the results that we were experiencing as a group. Unfortunately, we had a really supportive board in place that were prepared to keep me for another season to see if things could change around, and fortunately things changed pretty quickly in that second season and every year we moved from a team that finished third from bottom. The season after that, I think, we finished 10th over 16th, and the season after that we finished fourth and then we won the league last season. So, yeah, there's been a real sort of growth in the group that we're working with. The coaching team have evolved and grown over time as well, but I think from where we were five years ago in that really difficult first season, I think things have accelerated a really steady rate.
Speaker 2:And how would you encourage coaches who are currently in that situation now where there might not be alignment amongst the coaching group or there might be different voices saying different things at different times? What advice would you give for those in the moment right now to try and potentially overcome that and try and move on from it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the first thing is to have open conversations between coaches, and that's the most important thing. Still, surprises may go into other sort of clubs and other environments where coaches don't have that honest dialogue between themselves and sometimes there's a clear blank spot around what one coach is seeing to what another coach is not seeing. So I think if you're having those regular conversations as a coaching group, you're talking about things that are going well. You're also talking about areas that aren't particularly working very well. Until you can have those conversations, you're making things very, very difficult for yourselves. The more often you have those dialogue as well, the easier things become, and something that we've done the last two years we try to try to connect as much as possible away from rugby as well, which I think is really important.
Speaker 3:I think when you go back to your playing days, a lot of the good relationships that you build players players have done away from the training pitch, done away from the games on Saturdays, and I think that's true for coaches and a management group as well. I think you've got to be prepared to get to know each other away from rugby to see if you've got those common interests away from the sport. If then things don't improve, you've built up a little bit of a relationship with someone and those hard conversations are a little bit easier to have. But I don't think there's any magic formula there. There's no right or wrong. But from my experiences the earlier you have those conversations with other coaches, the more you probably outline any fears that you've got. I think you at least then give yourself an opportunity to improve those and give those an opportunity to get better.
Speaker 2:No wonderful advice and it was great to hear in the year after that, once you've got alignment with the coaching group, that reflected down onto the players and in such the environment, improved and inevitably the results tend to improve as well. So if we look at Cambridge as it is today, so you're at the highest you've ever been. You're in the championship, which is the tier below the premiership, so at extremely high level. Now it's interesting from a club, cambridge, who have been on the up for the last under your leadership on the up, and they still are on the up to when now results are not going your way. Now this is really, really interesting. How do we define success of a club outside or inside with the results?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that that's that's exactly where my headspace is at the moment around managing, I think, my internal expectations of myself and what I define as success, and that's definitely changed over the last 12 months, I think last last season we won 90% of our games, so you tend to look at things slightly different when you win into what you're losing. I think this season I've had to very quickly reframe what success looks like for me personally and I think, once I've come to terms with the fact that we've lost, I think we lost 12 games, 12 consecutive games, which which, again, I've never experienced before as a coach. I think midway through that that loss, or that losing streak, we played Bristol Bears on a Friday night at Ashton Gate and that was in a Premiership Cup game at the start of the season and it was the last game before the Premiership was starting. So when the team sheets came out on the Thursday, we saw the Bristol Bears squad and it was fully loaded a lot of international players and subconsciously you probably know how challenging it's going to be on the Friday night. Little did I know how difficult that was going to be. So we lost that game 98-14, which was, I think well was my heaviest loss of ever experienced as a coach, and I can remember sitting right at the back of the North Stand at Ashton Gate just scratching my head. I'm feeling helpless, not being able to have. It was a horrible, soft situation to be in. We'd kick off, bristol would catch the kickoff, go the length and score, and it was almost, you know, repeat every few minutes. So that that was very, very difficult and that was one of the longest journeys home that night.
Speaker 3:Got back home at about three o'clock in the morning, couldn't sleep, watched the game back, and I think that that following week I then realised that actually, if we're going to continue on this losing streak, if we're not winning games, how can we redefine what success looks like for us as a group, if it's not necessarily winning games? And then what we started to do was to, I think, hone down on our sort of values and our behaviours as a group, which I believe have got us to this level. We've got a really a really strong environment. Our group of players have good relationships amongst themselves, as there's a really, really positive culture that we've created. So I thought, right, what ways can we we sort of hone down on those things to bring those to life. So I think that that definitely helped things.
Speaker 3:But also, we then measured a lot of some of the key areas or key themes that we've been working on in the training week and rather than just measuring what the outcome of the game was, we would actually focus on you know, how many entries did we make into the opposition? 22? What was the speed of our breakdown ball? Things along those lines. So we're still we're still very process based and outcome based as well, but there were more tangible things for players to measure success on, and that really then allowed us to take a little bit of pressure off the players, both from inside of the club and externally around.
Speaker 3:Like the Cambridge have lost another game. We've conceded 50 points, whereas the noise that we were given as a group was around, like our. Our relationships are still really strong as a group. We're improving, we're working on these particular areas of our game and then fast forward to the last game. Before Christmas, we eventually won our first game against London Scottish. So, yeah, that that was a byproduct of six months of some real hardships as a, as a playing group, definitely as a coaching group. I don't think I've ever had as many conversations with the coaching team as I've had in those six months, but I think, definitely on reflection, the fact that everybody kept turning up on a Monday, tuesday, thursday, everybody stuck to what they were doing, that culmination of those actions have now got us to a really competitive level at this league.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I can just, I can just see you now sitting in the stadium at Bristol after that, after that defeat. Now, obviously, you sense it was going to tough day and I was listening to you when you said, on reflection, like it was like right, we need to. This might not be uncommon, as in getting the defeats in a row, so it's. This is the perfect example for this podcast. When coaching goes wrong, because you can sit there, you're feeling the weight. There's a big old score line which you're not used to before. However, that has provided you with the best opportunity to kind of rewrite your own script.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you're always, I think, as a coach or a head coach. You're always in charge of the narrative that you give to your players and the media and the board. So I think if you can come across as being positive on the outside and you can pick out areas that have worked well and you're able to articulate those to people, I think that that definitely helps. And it took me midway through that losing run to realise that you know we'd lost six or seven games. I was probably still dwelling on those losses and not not failing fast, whereas now if we lose a game, we've lost that game. We'll review, we'll analyse, we'll pick some things out and we'll go again the following week and we tend not to probably dwell and let those losses manifest themselves.
Speaker 3:Because that was part of the problem, I think, early on, because we were so unfamiliar with losing so many games. We probably spent too long then reviewing those games, to the detriment of what was going to happen moving forwards. So that was really really useful for me to probably reframe those losses and actually still look forwards. There was even in that 98-14 loss, there was still some really good things to take from that game that we've been working on and training that we transferred against, you know, one of the best teams in the Premiership. So it does require a lot of work. It does require a shift in mindset. You've got to have that sort of growth mindset around what you're doing.
Speaker 3:But for me, the key thing around all of this was maintaining that level of authenticity, being open and honest with players, but giving players that narrative around look, yes, whilst we've lost this game, things will get better. Things will get easier, because we've never experienced these things before. We've never, ever played at this level. So, yeah, I think personally I've come to terms with things a lot quicker now than what I did at the start of the season, and I'm pretty confident to think that if you spoke to any of the players as well, they'd probably share that those same sentiments as well.
Speaker 2:I found, when just watching the faces of the players once we've had a tough defeat which either a game we should have won or a game where we just weren't even close to getting that win when you show them in the review the stuff you did, well, it's amazing because they're kind of all filter in thinking, oh, here we go, we're going to get it.
Speaker 2:Today the coach is going to unleash on us and actually show you right, obviously was areas where we would like to improve. But when you have those measurables that you mentioned, whatever it might be you mentioned entries into the 22, ruck speed or it could be tackle completion or kick percentage, whatever it could be soon as you have smaller tangible things to nail and you mentioned this you've really you've always got something positive to review, as opposed to the final scoreline. You know that's, that's the big one. And when you show them, look, this is we got into the entry. We entered the 22, three times. Ok, we didn't convert seven, but then what could we do to increase our conversion rate? And you just put in that positive spin on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we can be guilty as coaches of over complicating things, both in the training week but also when we're doing our reviews of games and previews. So you know, I'm a firm believer that if we can keep things simple, if we can reinforce some key messages during the week and if we can then reflect on those post game good or bad then that makes that whole process a lot easier. And I think the big thing for us was, in addition to highlighting skill execution errors as an example, we really hope down on a lot of the behaviors, the good behaviors that we were seeing on the field. So how fast players were getting back to their feet post tackle, how much players were celebrating post try, the little things that we built a lot of our success on. We were, we were starting to focus on those things in training, focusing on those, those things in the game as well, and got a really nice example of that game that we won against London Scottish. We were, we were trailing by I think it was by six points and we were. We were defending our own tri-line and we've gone the length of the pitch and scored a try in the corner and our kicker is a stepped up and kicked the conversion to win the game. But I think that the panoramic view of that game really shows some really good qualities about the group.
Speaker 3:We've got a number of players that are on loan to us from Premiership Clubs and we had two players from Bath that have been with us for for two or three games and the expectation that anyone coming in is that they become as invested as they can be in the group. You know, on an emotional level and I know that's difficult with with players coming in that have not been part of the journey that we've been on but once that conversion went over from the touch line, one of the Bath players that had come off with a leg injury was the first one to sprint on that pitch to congratulate the player. And you know if you sometimes need reinforcement around, you know the environment that you you're trying to create and grow then that example was fantastic for me. Just to see the you know the joy in the elation on that player was new to the club, to see how much it meant to the other players understanding some of the challenges that we'd experienced at the start of the season. That was a really sort of good moment to observe.
Speaker 2:I love that and they're the tangible things as well that you can, on the analysis as well, forget looking at maybe the line break, what led to it, or whatever. Like, just you can highlight that player coming on the field because that's and anyone can do that right, that's, that's a mindset, that's an effort thing. Well, maybe not everyone can do that's, but that's what you've built into your environment and that's what you highlight. And when people see it, they can, they can replicate it and they go okay, that's what it looks like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, absolutely, and it's powerful if you're able to draw out those things from training the matches and talk about them. I think that that then those are good behaviors and it's something that you can. You can reinforce that moving forwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of our most important award is like the just the effort award, you know. I mean like someone who's just putting a real good shift, regardless of what's happening. It could be speed off the floor, it could be Three tackles in a row and a turn over, three tackles in a line break. Whatever. It is just really highlight in those things and that could be achieved by everyone.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it can, and I think, as long as is that relevant, surround what your you know, what your promoting, what your values are as a group, what your behaviors are. I think the more of those that you can reinforce from a game and pull out those good examples, that the stronger that environment becomes.
Speaker 2:I remember vividly remember we were similar thing it was. We were getting real beat up on the road. It was like fifty odd, near the half time, whatever, and the opposition, they went into the changing rooms. We just stayed out in the field, forget the point, going to change your message, getting a huddle, and it was classic and instead of talking about the game I don't know where this came from because it was not, it was not deliberate, but it was one of the most profound coaching moments I've ever had. We're in the huddle and I asked the question. I was like what does what does your rugby mean to you? Just to, and I knew a senior player who would. You would give an answer. I mean, he talked about it and then he goes are you just kind of gave it to someone else who goes? What does it mean to you and why? You hear?
Speaker 2:In the huddle we started again to some deep stuff. It was like, look, I've just had a family deaf and the reason what's got me through is, yeah, I'll be like. Tears are all starting to like come down people's eyes and I'm wearing the huddles. I didn't expect this. Like we're literally crying, like in the huddle, and then the opposition run out and it's classic, they were wearing black. They ran out of their clubhouse like the classic bond villains. You know what I mean. Like I, here we go, we're all in the huddle crying like what is going on here? And we went out and you just even in the huddle and I can feel it now. Everyone was getting tighter and tighter and tighter and it was so amazing to be part of now the next 48 minutes of the next 38 minutes, about half it was the same in terms of the result.
Speaker 2:They run up try after try, but what happened? In our 22, we got a turnover scrum, got the ball out wide and we scored under the post and I think it was like a hundred to five. At that point we got the conversion hundred seven and we celebrated Like we won the World Cup and they were looking at us going. What is? What is going on with you guys? But we know the moment we just had and how we were never going to give up. And and then that moment where we scored and that bus journey home was like a four hour journey home, was one of the best moments we've ever had, because the connection of the group Through so much more, because we just highlighted something beyond the result, and it was what we highlighted. There was the what, what it meant to be in this huddle, regardless of the result, and I just thought I'd share it because it was just such a profound moment, way away from any exes, and I could have taught.
Speaker 3:Well, that's that's golden, isn't it? And that's such a such a natural process that's not manufactured. I think that that's that's something that those players that were involved that were reflected on as well in years to come, and that's that's the big thing. Right, we're coaching and something like quickly learning is that it's not all about the outcome of games. It's not all, you know, all about winning those first games. I think players will remember Moments of the week. You know moments the bus trip coming back, some of those conversations that they've had and I think we sometimes forget about that as coaches and neglect those moments we're very focused on. You know results of what we want from each match, but I think, certainly, speaking from an ex, you know, as an ex player, a lot of those really good memories that I've. I've had been on some of those little things that happened in the training week Something funny, this happened, a deep conversation that you had with someone, and it's trying to create as many of those moments as you can, and so on as those as well.
Speaker 2:And the players do do talk. And coming back to the example I mentioned there, because it was the end of the season, I think we went up with like seventeen players or something, people dropping off left, right and center. End of the season. Everyone, you will gonna go up and get beat, like everyone. You guys turned up like I'm stuck with it.
Speaker 2:What was really interesting, the next monday session, what is one of the biggest attendances we've ever had, and I never had a conversation with anyone, but what that told me is the players went away. They discussed all they, whatever they did, they talked about their, their experience, they had away and all of the sudden, people like all I wanna be, I wanna be part of that, because it was something bigger than themselves. It was, it was profound and again there was no strategy around all I want to say anything here. They voted with their feet and then the player group got stronger and that's where their ownership went through the roof, because it was like, well, hang on, these, these are the custodians of the Of the group run the environment. I'm there to help facilitate and direct it.
Speaker 3:I love that. That's a really good example and we tried to do something similar and probably manufactured that that Moment that you explained that. So little bit false, but it worked nonetheless. So we had a triple H that we use. Last season I think One of the old england coaches did this, is now working with the nrl club name working at manly is named I can't get anything but anyway.
Speaker 3:So the triple H was every player had to stand up, stand up in front of the other players in a team meeting and talk about who is hero was in his life, what is hardship was and what is particular highlight was. So it started off. The confidence plays go up first. We do two or three of these a week and it would be a five minute conversation and players would talk around. Most of the highlight would be winning a game around, be winning a league, so it would be a result of a game. So that would have been the first two or three weeks and then very quickly we found that Players would be coming a bit more open with each other. So one of the players highlights was being at the birth of his son. I'm hardship would have been a death in a family. Hero would have been a family member that is no longer with them. But it became really powerful and the players Started to see the importance of standing up in front of the group talking about some difficult experiences that they had done. They were unable to talk away from rugby and some of them had shared experiences someone else experienced a death in their family. So it became a real sort of catholic experience. And you know, we did it to start with just to get the players talking amongst themselves, away from rugby, but it grew organically into something that you know we lean upon now and think a lot of the successor on your environment has been built on Knowing no one each other away from rugby. So that has been great and, I think, something that dovetails on from that.
Speaker 3:We've got a lot of Antipodeans that play for us. We've got a couple of Aussies, couple of Kiwis and one of our Australians is a guy called Ben Adams. Don't mind mentioning him, but he turned. He turned thirty two last season and it was his 30th in Covid. So he hadn't seen his parents back in Australia for maybe two or three years and he's a very family orientated man.
Speaker 3:I was just having a bit of a you know a down couple of weeks, was really missing missing his folks from back home. So what we managed to do was to was to fly his parents over to the UK, and it was an idea from one of the other players. They contributed to the cost of the flights and we're in one of these team meetings, one of these triple H team meetings, on a Tuesday night, and as Ben Adams was talking at the front of the rest of the group, his parents walked into the door in the team meeting and we've got this on camera Just to see the range of emotions that he went through. You know he's not a very emotional guy, but he burst into tears. You know his dad is a big Australian guy. He was emotional and it's just little things like that.
Speaker 3:When we go back to, you know, saying that players remember certain things in their careers, I guarantee that that would be one of the key things that he remembers. So Just little things like that that we, you know, we constantly try and do to improve.
Speaker 2:You know the environment that we're working in, I guess that is incredible, not not only the triple H which I wrote down I've never heard of that one before which I've written down and definitely gonna use, moving forward, but then Then that moment for the Ben, just when his parents come over and how that came from a player and then the club organised it. That will live with them, as you say, forever and ever, long beyond lifting the National One Championship or anything like that. It's just having those experiences and actually having others experience it with you is, I think, there's a really profound thing. So, yeah, I absolutely love that example.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, there's other little ones there that we could probably reference, but Ben Adams, his parents were over to watch our first game, actually, that we won in the championship. So they were over to watch his 100th game for the club, which came later than expected because he picked up an injury in that Bristol Bayes game, I think. So he was due to play his 100th game in probably the end of October, so his parents had come back over from Australia to see that occasion and he was injured. So they decided to stay in the UK for an extra month and they saw that game against London Scottish that we won. So it's yeah, there's little things that happen that we were able to draw upon, and we try to do as many of those little things as we can to enhance what we're doing on the field. I guess.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's excellent just testament to the environment you're building and in terms of you as a coach and where you find your coach development. Where do you seek for those opportunities?
Speaker 3:Different things. I think I always try to develop my learnings by going into other environments, looking at other sports, trying to pick up some key messages from sometimes outside the sport. I use podcasts a lot. I've got an hour commute into work every day which I use as a really good opportunity to listen to things and try to sort of grow my knowledge base there. I like to read, so I get a lot of my knowledge from reading books and I try to suggest some books to players.
Speaker 3:And we've just read a really good book as a group. You may have heard of this. It's called Keep Chopping Wood from Kevin DeShazo. So it's a short read. It's only about 40 pages long, but we bought three or four copies for the players, for the to circulate around the playing group, and there's a couple of really key messages that they're resonated with where we're at as a group, around the work that you do now. So if you chop the wood now, you're then able to burn the wood in a year's time when the wood has dried out.
Speaker 3:So there's some really good messages that we were able to sort of talk about as a playing group. If we keep turning up now, if we keep doing the work now, we'll see the benefit in six months or 12 months time. So, yeah, I guess a lot of my knowledge and my growth is from reading and listening to things and having conversations like this and just being really open with people. I think if you take away a couple of things each week around, things that you can possibly bring into your environment and try and refine, but keep that level of authenticity, then I think that's so important for me to keep sort of growing as a coach and as a person as well.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting. When I ask that question, it's very rare someone gives me a tactical or technical answer. It's really really interesting. A lot of it is around around the environment, like the keep chopping wood. Again, this is a resource I've not seen or heard of, so I'm going to be certainly getting out so, even in, even like. That's why podcasts for me are so, so invaluable. In the last five minutes I've got keep chopping wood in Triple H. That's something I'm going to add to my toolbox and that's why I find these forums really, really powerful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's that's learning Now, isn't? I think people want things a lot quicker than there's that need to get information in a lot quicker than the model was maybe a decade ago. I think all the stuff on social media, the stuff that you do with the contact coach stuff there's some brilliant stuff there that's available to everybody and I think as long as you're open to go down some rabbit holes when you're looking for stuff, then there's some really transferable stuff across different sports as well.
Speaker 2:And in terms of your next steps, what does the rest of the season look like? Where are you in your season, any goals you're willing to share with the group about, with the podcast, about where you want to get to?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we're coming up to the halfway point of the season. Now we want to. We want to carry on developing as a team. We want to win more games. That probably contradicts a lot of what we've just said of the last half an hour, but I think where we're at in terms of our growth as a team, we know that we're more competitive now at this level than we were in September at the start of the season. So we've targeted a couple of games that we want to win between now and the end of the season.
Speaker 3:Another key thing for us is working with some of the younger players in our team to develop them as leaders. We've got a leadership group at the moment where the age profile most of those guys are around about the 30, the 30 year old marks. We want to try and lower that age profile and probably develop some of the younger guys that we've got in the group and we've given them some some responsibility and given them some opportunities to grow that aspect of themselves as well. So I think on a personal level, we want to invest a little bit more time in those younger players and to see how much we can develop those, so that that's another key thing that we want to work on.
Speaker 3:I think the final thing really is just to make sure that everybody's still enjoying themselves. I think we move away from that. Sometimes we become really bogged down with the results and working really hard and training every week, but ultimately all of our players are working nine to five jobs. Rugby is still very much secondary to them. So we've got to make sure that when they turn up on a Monday, tuesday, thursday, we're giving them some really positive experiences. We're making things fun as well as competitive. So, from a coaching perspective, then, we've got to make sure that we remain current with what we're doing and not forget the sort of values that we're trying to promote.
Speaker 2:On a personal level, I think the semi pro environment is one of the great environments because there still has to be an element of love for a player and the coach to turn up and physically show up. You know, no one's telling them they have to be there, but when you're there you're ready to perform. It's all about working hard and really trying to be at the sharp end. So that semi pro level just really excites me because it's like you really get the I don't want to say true rugby environment, because what is that? But you get people who are voting with their feet. They don't have to be there. They can either turn up or they're not, and it's all about how do you keep those guys coming through the door.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really important. I think that the players, one of their goals between now and the end of the season is to beat one of the full time professional teams. Whether it'll happen or not, it's another thing, but I think they've won some games now against other semi professional teams. But we want to make sure that we give ourselves a really good opportunity of being a bit more consistent with our actions against one of the top teams in the league. I know the players really want to test themselves against the full time teams just to see how much we have developed, I guess, from that Bristol game where we lost by 98 points.
Speaker 2:And I think it's safe to say and I feel it, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to win and really giving everything to win. So this, particularly this podcast, it's not all about why. Of course it's environmental, and the byproduct is we play a sport and we certainly want to win. If you don't, it's all right, we can reflect and we can get better when there's other measurables. So I think it's really exciting. I've definitely got a newfound appreciation for Cambridge and yourself and what you're doing. I'm certainly going to be looking out for results and I have no doubt that there's going to be a good upset down the down the road and if not, I know internally you'll be working away to see those measurables that you've achieved. So look, I just want to say a massive thank you for your time. I want to say thank you for being so open and sharing some really great golden nuggets there. What I know personally I've taken away, and it's just been a pleasure having you on for the last hour.
Speaker 3:Topman Craig really loved to connect tonight. Really nice to talk about all things coaching and listen to some of your experiences as well. Yeah, we really look forward to listening to the future ones that you do with other coaches as well and learn a bit from that. So thank you.