Here's that article I referred to....
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2022/04/29/inside-network-helping-premiership-coaches-hone-craft-break/Inside the network helping Premiership coaches hone their craft and break down rugby's fads
The Grey Matters performance group brings together rival coaches to share knowledge and solve problemsWho coaches the coaches? The question is critical to the future of any sport. By the reckoning of Jamie Taylor, who has worked across a vast array of disciplines from football to skateboarding, rugby union’s very nature makes that especially important.
“I think rugby union is one of the most difficult places to coach,” he says. ”If you think about cricket, for example, you have individuals who work in a team but are not that interdependent.
“In rugby union, you have a massive variety of different people with different needs. And they are very interdependent.”
With that rather daunting thought in mind, fans of the 15-a-side code should be encouraged by one of Taylor’s recent pursuits with Mike Ashford and Dave Collins, his colleagues at Grey Matters, the performance consultancy. He is supporting coaches as they sharpen their tools together.
Figures from elite teams around Europe are part of his programme, which comprises regular sessions. He visits clubs to observe these coaches in practice – microphoning them up to review their delivery in training sessions, for instance – and facilitates group calls.
Perhaps most intriguingly, in the context of a Premiership season characterised by a ferociously competitive play-off battle, is the collaboration that has underpinned the latter.
“Four or five of them will sit down,” Taylor explains. “One will say: ‘Here’s a problem I’ve got, no names named, can you help me with this?’ That’s been a really interesting element of it because they are from clubs across the league sharing as much as is appropriate.”
Declan Danaher knows he has a responsibility to his players to “continually improve”. Having joined the backroom staff of London Irish shortly after ending a storied playing career for the Exiles, he has been grateful for different viewpoints within an “incredibly open and incredibly helpful” network. Declan Kidney, Les Kiss and Brad Davis are valued colleagues, yet these discussions have broadened Danaher’s perspective.
“When you work in any environment, sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees,” he says. “And it’s 24-7, so sometimes it takes an external resource to help give you feedback and solutions.”
Dom Waldouck, the 34-year-old defence coach of Gloucester, praises the “really impactful” virtual gatherings instigated by Taylor, Ashford and Collins.
“We’re all competing with one another on the weekend but we’ll go into the space with self-development in mind and committing to the development of others within that,” adds the former centre.
“The conversations we have are high-level enough to allow us to bounce ideas off one another without compromising the integrity of each other’s clubs.”
'Coaches must be open to new ideas - but ruthlessly sceptical'
Taylor, who previously headed up the Leicester Tigers academy and is currently the set piece coach at Loughborough University, has been a coach mentor for the Premier League and was previously a curriculum lead for the English Institute of Sport. He is an associate professor at Dublin City University and an associate tutor at Edinburgh University. Educational and scientific concepts shape his teaching.
For instance, his group has explored ways of improving cohesion in shorter timeframes by considering shared mental models – “what I know and what you know that helps us work together”, in the words of Taylor. As he points out, the inherently “unsafe” nature of professional sport means that coaches may find themselves out of a job should they wait five years for cohesion to improve organically.
If coaches are to experiment, Taylor acknowledges that agendas will need to be “meshed together” given their employers’ premium on winning. But tangible results are happening.
Tom Harrison, one of Steve Borthwick’s lieutenants at Leicester, wants each of his forwards to keep in mind a shared idea of “what we’re trying to achieve in each moment of the scrum” – how the pack sets up, the engagement and the contest. Taylor and Ashford have influenced how he relays this.
“We’ve done various things around me having a plan and then taking ideas off players like Dan Cole, Tom Youngs, Julián Montoya,” Harrison adds. “And then it’s how you get younger guys to see that and join up the two bits.”
One of Danaher’s roles at Irish is to prepare a shadow line-up for training runs against the first-team. Each week, he has half an hour to give 15 men a crash-course in the tactics used by that coming weekend’s opponents. It can be “a little bit stressful”, and Danaher has seen players fall apart when their brains are “overloaded”.
Being part of the Grey Matters network has allowed him to streamline messaging. Irish are therefore preparing more effectively for Premiership fixtures. Waldouck has a similarly positive testimony.
“Early on, I was having an issue with a player that kept on making the same mistake,” he remembers. “As a player, coaches typically coached me through video analysis, so that was the approach I was taking.
“Jared Payne [Ulster’s Clermont-bound defence coach] challenged me on that, saying: ‘Your teaching techniques aren’t landing, have you tried anything else?’ That got me thinking about how to approach the issue and getting this idea across to the player.”
Dan Soper, another of Ulster’s coaches, credits Taylor for helping him devise a “framework for decision-making”. It is used by the backs from the province every day, detailing cues on how to read defences and locate space. They refer back to the checklist as they review performances.
Overall, Taylor believes that the quality of coaching in England varies from club to club. He suggests that the vocation is at a “tipping point”, with younger practitioners “becoming aware of how hard the job is” and mindful that they must be “deeply professional” to thrive. Breaking the sport’s “faddy” cycle of imitation is one of his priorities.
“The issue I see is that, particularly if someone from New Zealand does something, everybody copies it,” Taylor says. “The classic example at the moment is everyone breathing twice together in huddles. I don’t think anyone knows why they are doing it.”
By bringing coaches together, and withdrawing the battle lines to share knowledge, he hopes independent thought will flourish.
“You want coaches that are really open to new ideas,” Taylor finishes. “But you also want them to be ruthlessly sceptical and to think critically.”
Always a Wasp
