England Rugby head coach Eddie Jones talks about his coaching philosophy.

In a brilliant webinar with England Rugby, Jones explains the importance of empowering players, developing leaders, communicating effectively, making relationships with athletes, developing trust and caring for the group.

The 45-minute chat really is a valuable listen, with many take-aways, including the following, which Jones ended the webinar with…

“If your kids look at you with blank eyes, the problem is not them it’s the coach. Find a way to engage them.”

What emphasis do you put on empowering players?

“Rugby is a players game, there are more and more decisions to be made in the game. Just look at when I played the game 30 years ago there were eight forwards to every breakdown. Then when I started coaching maybe 25 years ago there were four forwards to every breakdown and now you have as many forwards at the breakdown as you need.

“Coaches can give structure but all the decision making in the games is from the players. The game has evolved and is much less coach directed and more player driven that it has ever been. That has meant there are more coaches in the sport. Go and watch the U10s and they have even got two coaches, so we have put more coaches into the game.

“The role of the coach is to put more structures within the team for leadership and then situations in training for leadership and allow the leadership to evolve from the group. There will always be a player in every team, even in the U10s, who wants to say more than the others, but he is not necessarily the leader and what you have to find out is some players will be good social players off the field, some will be good tactical leaders and some will be good emotional leaders.

“But can you find a group of players that can push the team in the right direction?”

How import are social leaders?

“They are massively important. If you look at two things that drive performance; you need to be learning and that generally revolves around hard work and you need enjoyment. Enjoyment is from playing the game but it also comes from how you conduct yourself off the field and those guys off the field are really important.”

Player-led meetings?

“Basically there will only be two meetings in a week where the coach is the lead: the first meeting of the week and the last meeting before the game. The rest of the meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday and the Friday night will be led by the players; we will create a framework for them to operate. They can’t just get up there and say what they want, they will talk within the framework that we have agreed upon.

“The more the players lead the meetings, the more ownership you have and the players feel like it is their team. You want the players to be accountable to each other. You want a team where the players are accountable to each other and not to the coach and when they get up and speak about something to the team it helps that accountability.”

Would you look to give players autonomy in sessions?

“We want players to make decisions all the time, because whatever they see they have to go with it in games. I want the players to have 100% autonomy in training in terms of their decision making, but in terms of the structure of the session coaches are there to make players do what they don’t want to do. Look at Roger Federer in tennis, he’s 40, but still has a coach, because the tennis coach makes him do what he doesn’t want to do and makes him better.

“There’s a fine line. You want players to make decisions, but the coach is there to give structure to the session and you want to get feedback from the players about the session and make them feel like they have responsibility to make the session better.”

Transferring sessions to the game

“You always have to go back to the game, what does the game look like? You have to know your game, how many of each activities do you have in the game and where are they?

“What are the key episodes in the game that are going to be crucial for you to win? Make sure you win those. We have approximately 11 line outs and six scrums, so our sessions will revolve around those numbers and we get 60% of our ball from unstructured situations, so it’s no good doing a session from line out and scrum when most of your possession comes from turnover. You need to replicate the game, that is important and then the intensity will come from specific training. The specificity of the training will give you the intensity you need.

“If I was coaching an U12s team and they generally had the ball for five rucks, I would do one part of the session where they had the ball for 10 rucks. So you are gradually trying to get above the game and eventually they will cope with that and then you have to raise it again.

“It’s important to keep improving the players and if you have keep training the players at the same level they will not improve.”

Observing

“If you’re a one-coach team, then make sure sometimes you’re in the session, and then out the session watching. Vary what you do.

“If you are a two-coach team then one coach should coach the team and the other one should observe and look to see how to improve the session.

“It’s good to have nicely planned sessions, but what is important is to give the players what they need. So if you want to do line out plays in the attacking third but find the players need to work on their running lines then don not be afraid to change the session.

“Have the plan, but work out what the players need, they have to learn at the session.”

Coaching elite players

“I was reading a book recently by Vince Lombardi, the Greenbay Packers head coach, and in his first meeting with any team regardless of what they had won previously he would be to pick up the football and say ‘this is the football’.

“You have to go back to basics whatever level you are coaching at. The basics and core skills are the building blocks of what you can do. When you coach a junior team those core skills have got to be proportionally higher in your sessions.

“The trick is to practice the basics in more game-like situations. It might be a simple catch, pass game where you are emphasizing catch early, so it might be a simple game of touch rugby but if you don’t catch early it’s a turnover straight away. Always reinforce a core skill within a game and then you can put restraints in.

"Every coach in the world wants more time, but it’s how you use that time. Planning of the sessions is important but observation of the sessions is crucial.

“It doesn’t matter whatever level you are at; learn to coach on the run, have huddles to make a point, learn how to say things quickly and be as individual as you can.”

‘The one thing I hated…’

“The one thing I hated was when the coach stopped the session and there would be a monologue on what we needed to do. Players just want to train, so try and do your coaching on the run and that is a skill you can learn.

“The first thing is have a common language. As soon as you get expenditure of energy, people’s ability to understand complex language is difficult. You need to have words that summarize an area.

“We talk about contest of the breakdown, we talk about first man, second man. So I can say to Tom Curry ‘how is our first man doing?’

“You can ask that on the run, have questions that are short, sharp and concise. Sometimes you might have to say ‘stop, we need our first man to be quicker’ then get on with that.

“Your player then would speak to the rest of the team about that and again it creates leadership opportunities within your team.”

Self development

“If you want to keep coaching, you have to keep improving. You never become a good coach, you are just trying to become a good coach.

“I have a system that I started years ago and every three months I write down my own professional development plan; work out the areas I need to work on and do that.

“We’ve got new staff and I’m working out how to develop those staff and another thing is trying to make our training more effective. So I’m speaking to as many different people as I can; after this call I’m speaking to the England hockey coach to get his opinion.

“All of us can improve at communication. How do I get the message across.”

“I’ve looked at football, because it’s so big in England and it’s such a competitive area. To make it in England as football coach you have to be good.

“I’m continually speaking with football coaches and it’s their management skills which are key. They are dealing with players who are earning massive amounts of money who have made it, but how do they get more out of them?

“There’s so much information out there now. You can look at a lot of things and not learn a lot, or you can look at a few things and learn a lot.

“One of the great websites I’ve subscribed to is The Athletic, which has some fantastic coaching articles on it. It had a great article on the difference between a head coach and an assistant coach. Really good.”

Relationships

“What you do on the field; you want the highest standards and you can’t get away from that. A lot of coaching now is about guiding players and not telling them. Off the field there is a real difference in the generations we have now and the way they need to be treated.

“They talk about the Millennials wanting to be individual, tech savvy and now the Generation Z are more about the individual but they are more giving and more tolerant. We have done a lot of work on how the players learn and what generation they are from and how we can develop a better relationship through learning.

“At the end of the day the player-coach relationship is very similar to a pupil-teacher relationship, so you need to understand how they learn.

“As a coach you have to show you care for the player. As soon as they understand you care for them they are likely to give you a bit more. What you want from the players is always that bit more - firstly for their development and the team’s development.

“If you care for the player, you grow trust and as soon as you build trust you will get a bit more from your players.