Trust in the team mate on your left and right - but have their back

I refuse to succumb to the people that say I write about rugby too much, so if you don't want to learn a valuable teamwork lesson from the slightly damaged mind of Coach Kiwi then just skip the rest of this weeks post and proceed directly to the fridge and grab a cold one :)

A year or so back I was at a USA Rugby Coaching clinic. There was a great group of people there including a couple of buddies whom I coach with me, a couple of big fellas called Byron and Jason, there were guys that work down at Bragg and travel a bit to sandy locations and coaches from some other clubs. The awesome Katie Wurst ran the course that was moved to a local cross fit location (scary place) as it was a tad chilly at the time. The course was a combination of discussions then setting up drills and getting the other coaches to act as the players. Training was a part-whole-part model (or a derivative of that) and after doing a part training teaching how important it was to come up in a line on defense we then played some touch rugby working on the defensive line concept.

The person who had taught the importance of coming up in a line then proceeded to ignore the training 100% and ran to where the ball was - like 10 year olds tend to - leaving a wide open gap in the defense. I am not sure if he thought that the other people on the defensive line were incapable of 'touching' the offensive players, had completely forgotten what we had been coached on or had some kind of weird attraction to inflated oval shapes. Either way it left a big hole in our defensive line and was a bit bloody annoying, especially with all the shouting of 'defense on me' then committing Stupid Rugby 101 transgressions. Particularly as he told me I was carrying the ball wrong into contact and how easily he could strip the ball from me (he couldn't). He would be a tough team mate to trust out on the paddock, that being said he was in training :)

In the real world, as in the game of rugby (and probably some other non-important sports when you either kick or bounce a round ball) you often have to work as a team and more often than not you have to trust that the person in the team knows what they are doing. Obviously, unlike me, not everyone is perfect so you also need to know your team mates strengths and weaknesses to see how best you work together. It might be that someone is the spreadsheet guru, someone knows how to communicate well and someone is best suited as a turnstile as they let the offense run straight past them. There is a position for all types on a team, the knuckle dragging forwards pounding the message north-south and the prancing backs getting all the praise and big paychecks. Rugby is analogous to an work environment in that the forwards are a bit like the Operations side of the business and the backs are like the Sales and Marketing folks. I am not saying that all Operations people are knuckle draggers (not all of them) - more that they tend to run more North-South and the Sales team are a bit like the backs, running all over the place and relying on Ops to tidy up the messes they make.

Well at least that was more the case back in the old days. These days in rugby as in any well managed team there is much more cross functionality. Sure forwards/ops are still the grunt and it can be embarrassing when a back tries to play in the scrum as much as a sales monkey trying to do anything technical. In the modern game of rugby backs and forwards are fairly interchangeable on offense and defense. Yes Forwards/Ops are more likely to be the North-South pounders but there are also some Backs/Sales people that can work the front line.

The most important thing that this new style of rugby conveys over to an effective management style is that you have to trust in your team mates on the left and right of you, trust that they were put there by the coaches/execs for the correct reason and that they have the required skill set to be there. That being said you have to have their back incase they trip up, are a touch slow to the line or a nursing a Kiwi sized mind numbing hangover :) If you have to chase the ball all the time because you don't trust the your team mates either you are on the wrong team or you are the player on the team creating issues for everyone else.

It is the person mindlessly chasing the ball and not trusting in their team mates that creates issues on a team - trust might be something that you earn, but sometimes you don't have to earn it from the person next to you if the reason you are there is that the coach/boss trusts you.


Having read this and re-read this it seems quite obvious that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. It also seems that I am being way too nice at the moment and need to write, at some point soon, a good old fashioned rant with lots and lots of bad language and naughty innuendos. Problem is I am so sick of people pushing their bs opinions on social media at the moment I don't want to join the King Richard crowd, plus I really like rugby :) Either way this is officially my last post.................before my 48th birthday and I need to go now :)


Work hard, play hard and earn your inspiration

Happy Poets Day