Leadership, legacy and isolation
Alice and I have been firm allies from opposite sides of the world. Alice has been coaching in Aotearoa (New Zealand) within grassroots rugby and shares learnings, reflections and insight.
Head Coach as Cultural Lead of the Team
This season I coached at my local club, Wainuiomata. I was with the women’s team, although in reality in grassroots Aotearoa, that means working with a wide range in ages. The youngest player in my team this season was just 16 and the oldest in her 40s.
I’ve been coaching for two and a bit years. The bit added onto the time frame is due to when I returned to this club in 2022. I was still playing, but was called upon to take the forwards as a senior in the side.
Within the team split in our second training session of the week, I would regularly run our set piece sessions. The duality of that role was more stressful than I wanted.
I took this as a sign to step away from the playing side and more definitively into coaching. The following season, I put myself in with a group to coach the team, being named officially as the forwards coach.
This meant I could put some structure into my sessions and do the necessary prep for us all to get something out of it. Rather than just being asked to do something on the fly.
This is a common misconception that folks have about me - that I’m a good improviser. I can perform under pressure but that is because I do A LOT of prep to make things look intuitive.
Just like as a player, the skills that look effortless are the ones you’ve put the reps into. The same is true for me in everything I do.
I don’t wing it, I draw on experience. It was really important to me that I gave my players the respect of my full preparation.
This first season was a challenge. We ended up having to merge a neighbouring team a week out from season kick off, due to numbers. It also became apparent that the person who was named as head coach wasn’t so comfortable in that role.
I recall Tors Grant, Black Fern #135 and Hurricanes Poua head coach, speaking a while ago about how the core role of a head coach is really as the cultural lead.
So myself and our backs coach, naturally ended up stepping into that role. This aspect was particularly important given the merge.
We had to get the vibe right first before worrying about the game plan. We nailed that and the rest followed. Leading us to win the second division.
This year, we were strong enough in our numbers to play under our own colours. Although this was thanks in part to players sticking with us rather than their club of origin.
We picked up where we left off from the season before, establishing myself and our backs coach as the co-head coaches and retaining that division of labour.
Co-Coaching Team
I co-coached with Mary-Ann Collins aka Mac. Mac and I have played together since our high school rep days. Against each other for years in the club scene as well as winning championships together.
Together, we were amongst the first group of players to be recognised by our club with our 100 game blazers. Mac’s represented our province seven times, our country in rugby league and her heritage playing for Samoa at the 2014 Rugby World Cup.
This season was tricky though, as a change in Government has led to rampant cuts across departments and contracts here in Aotearoa.
Being that we live in the capital city, many people’s jobs have been impacted, Mac’s being one of them. This meant that she was not as present as she would have liked to be during the season and I steered the ship, in parts, on my own.
When we are able to tag team, it’s kind of a venn diagram like this.
So we have our areas and play to our strengths. In terms of temperaments we joke that we are mum and dad, where Mac is more of the bad cop at times.
Underpinning that, is a shared value set and goals which means we can flow across to pick up from one another if need be. It’s a volunteer gig after all, so you always need a plan B.
It’s worth noting that the speeches mentioned on the diagram are post match and formalities. We both talk at training obviously. It’s just when it comes to those settings, she prefers that I take the lead.
I know my team is terrible at time management. So I have structured the training to always start at the same time but for the learning to kick off once I know we usually have the full complement of our team.
We have the same warm up for training and game day, so that it can be self led. I want to start our session with them connecting with each other. It’s that group that will be out on the field together anyway.
Then from there, we will have an area of focus for the session. Start with the micro skill and build that up into a game scenario. So by the end of the session, they are somewhat sick of the key points we have been hammering at them all session.
In terms of the feel of the session, the vibe from me is pretty relaxed. I trust the team to switch on when they need to and they have key leaders within them to drive that.
It doesn’t need my voice barking at them and telling them off. It’s also just not who I am, so I can’t fake it anyway.
I also empower players to help each other. This is as much about pragmatism as it is about respect. The practical piece is that with a large range of ages and experiences, it’s going to be impossible for me to deliver a drill that will develop all of them.
By allowing space for that peer to peer learning, it means players can step in and support those that are newer to a skill to help bring them up to speed. This means the more experienced player is developing their mastery in the specific skill too by teaching others.
The second part is about respecting the knowledge in the room. Some of these wāhine I coach have played for decades and up to a high level. So there’s not a lot I can teach them but a heap that they can share.
The motto behind this approach for me is “If you know better, show better”. We must pass that knowledge on.
Legacy and leadership
There are two key moments stand out for me this year. The first came in our first game. We welcomed Riana Paki-Le’afa onto the field.
Riri has grown up, quite literally, on our sideline. Watching her mum play with us and running us waters. She finally was able to be eligible to join our team this year and she had a phenomenal game at 10.
This moment was emblematic of why we had come back to the club, which was to try and hold the space to ensure there was a place for our local talent to play.
The second was confirmation of the environment I was trying to build within our group. We had a player who was new to the game last year and who was quite anxious to be learning in front of her peers, especially the things that they did confidently.
I was blessed this season with an extremely long call sheet in the forward pack and so I had put it to the group that if they wanted minutes, they needed to be able to lift, jump or throw at lineout time. This player had been struggling with the lift, getting close and then overthinking.
In this particular session, her lifting partner was locked in to carry the weight of her inexperience, her jumper was selflessly putting body on the line and I was on standby to speak directly to player’s self-doubt.
These pieces came together and she successfully executed her first lift with all the other forwards watching on. They were all so proud of her that they immediately broke out into applause. To me, that’s the whole point.
Sport offers us that ability to connect to our own and our collective power.
For all our growth, our game is still very unstable at the grassroots. Particularly for women. I only have so many volunteer hours available so I wanted to put that into the place where they could have the most impact.
I know from my playing experience that a coach can be the difference between having a team and not. So it’s a no brainer really.
Add to this, the frustration I can have at times, with the way in which us old heads talk about entitlement within the younger generation.
I was once one of them and I had to be taught how to be a women’s rugby player. The foundation of which is service leadership.
The easiest way to teach it is to role model it. Make sure I’m passing on the lessons that were taught to me as a younger player by my rugby mums, to keep their legacy alive.
It can be tough to lead and coach within women’s rugby. I did not receive the support I needed from my club this season.
I’ve been consistent in my approach but the response has been changeable. People are often on board with the theory but not willing to put things into practice.
There’s a quote from a short story written by Barbara Kingsolver that I often think of, “It’s frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful thing you grew up with.”
I see this in our game all the time. When we are going through a rough time, we revert back to the worst of where we came from. That’s what this season felt like at my club.
It felt like we were going back to the place I believed we had grown from. It hurts but it’s okay. I am very clear on what my role is. From the beginning, I have always wanted to be known as a good teammate over anything else.
The only power I have in this game is what they have given me afterall. Those alongside me, those under my care, they are people whose opinions I care about and whose strength I draw from.
I do what they need. I will serve them until they are strong enough to serve others.
Leadership is lonely but is it a privilege. To be able to see something different and have people trust you enough to follow that vision.
Coaching Philosophy and challenges
The short answer about challenges within women’s rugby is the system we operate within. I challenged someone that worked at NZR about this a while back. About the need to create dedicated women’s only coaching courses.
There’s a waitlist for level 3s and while we still need endorsement from our local unions for our places on this course, we are going to continue to be overlooked in favour of a man who is known in the game.
They said to me at the time, “But these women are going to need to learn how to work alongside men at some point.”. I told them we have done that at EVERY point up until now.
If we played, we would likely have been the only women’s team in the club. So few of us had the opportunity to be coached by women. Then when we became coaches, chances are we would again be the only one in our club or in our teams set up.
It’s such an isolating experience, being a women in rugby. More needs to be done to create the same experience of connection and belonging that we try to offer our teams.
Thankfully, they introduced a women’s level 3 course shortly after this conversation. It’s still one step at a time, slowly marching toward closing the gap which was a century in the making.
Coaching Philosophy: I had a conversation with my friend Daz Burns recently and something she said really resonated with me. Daz has spent a lot of time coaching and managing netball teams and she said her goal is to never be someone’s last coach. That’s it for me.
I never want to be someone’s last. My particular coaching style might not be for them but I never want to be the reason they walked away from the sport.
I think this is why I love coaching new players too. Helping players fall in love with the game and realise their potential within it. That’s what fills my cup.
 | A guest post by
|