Being the Best You Can Be

One of the things about rugby is that on any given day only 50% of the teams can win, so there is a 50% chance that your team is not one of these; and at the end of the season only one team can be the champion team in the competition that your team are playing in, so there is a good chance that this is not the team you are coaching.

At any level of the game it is easy to get despondent and feel like you are not doing a good enough job if it is your group who are more often than not on the losing end of results, or not winning as often as dictated by your expectations and those of the supporters.

The first thing you need to plant firmly in your mind is that coaching success is determined mainly by the number of good players in the team. The better the players, the better the coaching!  Even at the highest level of the game very successful All Black coaches had records with Wales that were far from anything they later produced when coaching the All Blacks. This same philosophy pretty much winds its way down the coaching ladder.

So, it is important to judge yourself not on the criteria of winning or losing, but by using the criteria based on whether or not your players and the team are improving and whether or not they are happy and enjoying what they are doing. This applies right through to adult teams and dare I say it, in to the professional environment.

So long as your coaching is not about your own ego but is about the larger goal of building a well-rounded team you are well on the way to being successful. Personal egos tend to make coaches unhappy and take every mistake personally. You can still be ambitious but your energies must be channeled in to improving individuals, improving team play, and creating better people on and off the field.

Coaching is about a whole host of skills of which different coaches possess different attributes and it would be unlikely that a single coach has control over all of these. In fact coaching at different levels requires different emphasis, and coaches are often more suited to one level than another.

The overriding factors at any level are enthusiasm and positivism. These may seem like obvious requirements but if you look around you not all coaches are demonstrating these attributes.  It is still possible to outline faults to players and provide some negative feedback, so long as the fault is followed with ideas on how to improve, or the negativity is just a small slice amongst the many positive contributions.

This doesn't change much right throughout a player’s career from childhood to adulthood. As a player ages he just learns how to deal with the negativity better, he doesn't necessarily appreciate too much of it.

Enthusiasm and positivism will open up the coach’s mind to learn more about his players. This is hugely important in a coaching sense as a coach cannot provide a fully supportive coaching regime unless he gets to know and understand the players he is working with. The more he understands an individual and the culture within the group or the region the more likely he is to make good decisions based around the needs of the group. Only then can he design a series of expectations and head off in to the unpredictable world of coaching by knowing where he is heading.

Getting to know the player is about sitting and chatting and having the same communication with his friends and family. It's not hard to do but does require time away from the training ground.
Coaching rugby skills, techniques, team patterns and game understanding provides the basis of the coach’s armoury, but the real coaching is created through making players feel good about themselves, giving them confidence, and turning out disciplined and happy individuals.

If a coach judges himself on this criteria, and he can feel the positivism within the team, then the results are only a secondary consideration. Of course if these aspects are taking place there is every likelihood of results improving.