Dan catches up with one of the most experienced coaches and coach educators in rugby, Pete Drewett.
After working with England Rugby since the early 90s, as well as coaching international age-grade (U21s), Pete went on to help build the Exeter Chiefs ready for their ascension into the top league. With stints in high-performance with Hong Kong and Georgia, plus working at the WRU, he is now a World Rugby High Performance consultant developing Kenyan rugby and their ambitions to play in the next World Cup.
Having coached Dan at Exeter University in the late 80s(!), they discuss the following areas:
Some of the greats of England Rugby coach education, including Don Rutherford and Chalky White.
What’s stayed the same and what’s changed since then in coach education.
Using Mosston’s Teaching Styles.
How to develop as a coach.
The highs and lows of being a professional coach.
What makes Rob Baxter, the current Chiefs coach, so good at what he does.
He also runs his own performance consultancy, Perform 2XL. For more information, contact him on peterdrewett@perform2xl.co.uk
Dan Cottrell chats to Owen Woods, Community Rugby Coach for Gosport & Fareham RFC.
Owen was previously in the Air Force for 4½ years and then the police for 17 years. In June 2021 he started up his full-time role to promote rugby and its core values, the vision being to put the club and values at the heart of the community.
He has coached his son's rugby team for the last six years. He is a level 2 coach, a qualified referee working in schools in the local community delivering rugby sessions to children from 7 to 13. MORE
Dan chats with former Fiji captain Deacon Manu, who's now coaching in Singapore.
Deacon has traveled the rugby world, representing Fiji and the Maori All Blacks, as well as playing for Waikato Chiefs and the Blues in Super Rugby and then for the Scarlets in Wales.
They chat about the coaches he's experienced and now coaching with developing players and new players to the game. MORE
Dan chats to Jacob Ford about his remarkable journey to becoming Bury St Edmonds RFC and Ipswich School's director of rugby at the age of just 23.
The topics covered included:
The best way to speak to players to allow them to grow
What makes the players respect a coach
What efficiency in training and a game looks like
Being mentored by your dad (Mike Ford, former England and Bath coach)
The differences and similarities between coaching professional players and school players
Should bench players get paid the same as the starters
Working with players who are older than you
Developing a style of play that suits your team
Can a coach make excuses for a poor performance MORE
Dan Cottrell chats to top sports psychologist Dan Abrahams about how even non-expert coaches can make a difference in their players' mindset.
Dan Abrahams is the author of four best-selling sports psychology books and is the founder of both the Dan Abrahams Soccer Academy and The Sport Psych Show podcast. MORE
Dan hosts a discussion between Professor Rob Gray and Dr Mike Ashford about how players make decisions.
The discussion is based on a paper that Mike wrote reviewing different academic approaches to decision-making:
Understanding a Player’s Decision-Making Process in Team Sports: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence
https://doi.org/10.3390/sports9050065
Rob Gray suggests that the role of ecological dynamics needs to be viewed differently from the paper's conclusions. MORE
