Me and my boy headed up to Old Albanians RFC clubhouse on a wet and windy weeknight for a Q & A session with Saracens stalwarts Schalk Brits and Kelly Brown. The evening was a charity fundraiser for the Hospice of St Francis; we put some money in the pot for a great cause and took away plenty of intel in terms of the tries and tribulations of the modern-day rugby professional.
Lots of good questions from an audience of rugby connoisseurs old and young, and some candid answers. Here’s a few of the messages I took away from the Kelly and Schalk show:
A question of culture. One of the questions from the audience was ‘what sets Saracens aside as a club’? Continuity in terms playing and management personnel, team ethos and doing things differently were some areas flagged by the two players. On this last point, a great example was preparing for a crucial game a few years back by taking the squad to the Munich beer festival. That’s a pretty different sort of heavy lifting!
When measuring performance, the little things count. One of the big factors is Saracens’ success is how individual performances are measured. When Schalk first joined the club, the coach was Brendan Venter who devised an intricate points system which totted up the specific contributions made by each player: kick chases, rucks, types of tackles made etc… As well as providing objective analysis, this was a way of recognising the often unseen contributions that all add up and make for a good team performance.
It’s all about process and hard work! The Saracens mantra is to focus on process and doing the right things; the outcome will take care of itself. Schalk and Kelly explained that players are encouraged to express themselves, if a technical mistake is made that’s the coach’s fault, they haven’t working on the right skills in training. What this means in practice is that players go out on the pitch with just one clear objective which is within their own control: work hard!
Living & breathing the growth mind-set mantra. The focus on rewording effort not talent, on not being afraid of failure but always learning from it and on using data to analyse performance are straight from the pages of Matthew Syed, Malcom Gladwell and Michael Lewis! You could argue that the Saracens success story is a living and breathing case study of growth mind-set and ‘Moneyball’ principles.
Things have changed on the rehydration front! As an interlude during the Q&A session, OAs club captain and host for the evening Chris Butterworth laid down a challenge: Which of the two Saracens men could down a pint first. The twist was that these were pints of mineral water. I tried to explain to my boy how this would have been unheard of in previous eras, when big men would sup down pints of strong ale for fun with the odd after-shave chaser!
So what else did we learn on this Wednesday night at Wollams? Kelly Brown is a great singer, Schalk Brits is a next gen front row forward who loves literary pod-casts and Chris Butterworth deserves to host his own late night chat show. Most of all, the chat around hard work, doing the right thing and enjoying your rugby were a great message for the younger generation in the room – as was the demonstration that you can be a professional sportsman at the top of your game and remain humble, approachable and always looking to learn.
Well worth being up late on a school night for, I reckon!