You Don’t Need More Time; You Need Simpler, Sharper Sessions That Fit Your Team’s Identity

Ever feel like two practices a week can’t possibly cover skills, systems, set piece, and fitness? We unpack a practical blueprint that turns time pressure into sharper sessions, starting with the one choice that clarifies everything: define your team identity and let it set the plan. From there, we lean into a DIY fitness culture that takes conditioning off your training clock and puts ownership in your players’ hands, using simple prompts and social accountability to make extra work normal and even fun.

We keep set piece clean and efficient. Instead of a binder full of lineout calls, we argue for one to three options executed with ruthless quality and a hooker who throws outside team time. The scrum gets the same treatment: clear sequence, tight timing, and micro-extras for front row craft after practice. Less variety means fewer meetings and more ball won when it counts. On the systems side, we show how a straightforward one-three-three-one structure can build confidence, spacing, and predictable support, whether you have two full sides to scrimmage or you’re repping on air. We talk video, minimal stoppages, and how to lock in one to three focus points so players leave with a clear picture.

Skills are the heartbeat. We prioritize the big four—catch and pass, run and evade, breakdown, and tackle—and multiply reps through small-group rotations. With a stopwatch, tight constraints, and simple cues, you trade lines and lectures for density and intensity. Defense gets its own spotlight with two or three signature drills you can scale from no contact to live, creating a shared language and a built-in fitness hit. The throughline is simplicity: do fewer things, do them better, and connect them back to how you want to play.

If you’re a coach juggling time, roster size, and ambition, this conversation offers a clear path to more impact with less clutter. Subscribe, share with a fellow coach, and tell us: which block are you streamlining first? Your feedback shapes future deep dives, so leave a review and drop your biggest coaching bottleneck.

If you can SUBSCRIBE, RATE, and SHARE the show and series, you would be doing your bit to grow this show. Very appreciated. Ben

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Chapters

• 1:34 Framing The Coaching Challenge
• 2:53 Zachary’s Question: Too Much, Too Little Time
• 4:22 Start With Team Identity
• 5:41 Rethinking Fitness: DIY Culture
• 9:05 Set Piece: Keep It Simple
• 11:18 Scrum Clarity And Micro-Extras
• 12:22 Systems That Build Confidence
• 14:04 Attack And Defense Reps That Flow
• 16:05 Skill Blocks And Small-Group Rotations

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Welcome to Coaching Culture Reflections, the midweek spark for anyone who loves leading teams and growing through that journey. I'm Ben Herring and I've been loving this side of the game for bloody ages. Each week I'll break down key components of leadership from culture building to communication, from mindset to motivation, all to help you lead with more impact, heart and clarity. And level up. Let's get into it. Hey team, Ben here. Welcome to the Midweek Reflections episode where I dive into the things that really make you reflect on your coaching and the cultural aspect, but not just the cultural aspect. Everything to do with the game of rugby and coaching and leading the sport. Had a lovely few emails this week with people with real questions about what they wanted for me to chat about. And here's one from Zachary Hendricks in the States. I'll start it off. First off, Ben, love your podcast. I've watched probably about 80% of your interviews on YouTube and find them incredibly insightful. Love that. I am a young coach, 34 years old in America, and constantly trying to improve. And that's exactly, Zachary, the people we're looking after. You have built a high school program coach D1 college woman and I'm coaching D1 senior woman club team now. And you're constantly thirsting for more information. And this is the question that Zachary's asked. He said, There never seems to be enough time to cover everything I need to cover in a session. And goes on to say he's got two sessions a week, which is pretty standard sort of stuff. And he's debating between how to balance it out between skill, system, set piece, and fitness. And what is the biggest bang for your buck? And I'm going to assume you got about 80 to 90 minute sessions. That's kind of a standard rugby. The thing, Zachary, is that this is a pretty standard coaching setup. Most rugby seems to take this format wherever you are in the world. Two trainings a week, generally Tuesday and Thursday, and then a game on the on the weekend. That is the standard sort of stuff. And how you manage that? Well, that is the art and skill of coaching. But here's my thoughts for you. Just gonna roll with what I think is is good practice. And firstly, it's this is you've got to decide what is your identity and your team. What are the things that you want this team to be? And every team's different. So it's very hard for me to sit here and say you need to do X, Y, and Z because every team's context is very different. So that's the first massive caveat before I get going. But in saying that, there is always thought processes and thinking that you can do to actually, you know, maybe think a little bit different about how you navigate those things and what does actually give you the biggest bang for your buck. So I'm gonna go through those four things that you mentioned, Zachary, and just get you thinking, hopefully, about maybe different ways that you can be a little bit creative around maximizing what you do. So we're gonna work in reverse order. We're gonna start with fitness. Now, fitness is a must for rugby. You've got to have fitness. There's no doubt. Your sessions, uh, if you're training twice a week, you've got to have a good element in it. As you get going in that session, once you get past some of the skill stuff, you've got to actually start incorporating, you know, players' ability to play the game for 80 minutes on the weekend. So, what I would like to do though is just to take that out of it. Take that the two midweek sessions out of it. And I think it's important that if you want to get really fit, you're gonna concede that you need to do more than just what the coach has given you. I often say this to my players is that if you turn up for training and you're just doing what I say, you're gonna get the generic stuff that I'm giving everybody in this team. If you want to be the best version of yourself, you've got to go and do more things for you, whatever is pertinent to you. And I think that is a great mindset for all coaches to get in their players. That the trainings are generic for everyone. They're the base. You do this, you'll be fine or good enough. But if you really want to be good, if you really want to knock it out the next out of the park, you've got to understand what makes you tick and what you need. So this is where I would go with your fitness stuff is build an attitude where your players uh actually have a culture that they are doing more. They're driving a culture of do it yourself. So I love this concept. We've done it with a number of club teams, is building an attitude where players get together on a Sunday. You really drive, or it doesn't have to be a Sunday, it could be a Wednesday, and you just promote them getting together as players and doing their own fitness sessions. Or if they're not getting together because of work constraints, university constraints, school constraints, whatever it is, get them doing a session. And a number of phrases we've used in the past are things like this: where's your workout? And what's your workout? So getting uh people on the apps just saying, where's your workout team? Who's done the workout this weekend? Who's done gone above and beyond? And for the coach, the sell of this is massive. How do you drive the motivation of players to do an extra session? That's where you've got to get creative around the culture. You've got to draw on some leaders and really get it out of them. How this is what we need to do. We need to be this level of fitness. We're not gonna get there in two 80-minute sessions because we've got to do all that skill work and other stuff in there. So we need the players to be doing more. So driving that kind of thinking where we turn up, well, online, we we set up little WhatsApp groups to get the leaders to do it, to say, what is important? Where's your workout? And then you say, What's your workout? And you get players to stand up in front of meetings and say, This week I did uh a 4K run on Monday and I did a 3K swim on Friday, which would absolutely end me a swim. We did a lot of the stuff that during COVID, we had this was rife because we couldn't actually get out as a team together. So people were doing things like Peloton races and jumping on at the same time wherever they were in the world. And you can do it in driving a culture where it's cool and it's fun, and you're feeling like you're belonging to a group by doing it, and you don't and you're feeling guilty when if you don't, that's the social pressure we want to create. And that's a good thing because ultimately it's getting us fitter, which is going to be leading to better performances in the weekend. So that's that's one. That's a little fitness hack, I reckon, is you know, come up with creative ways to make the players feel like they need to do more. Number two is the set piece. Now, a set piece is something in rugby which you actually can't really skimp on, you've got to do some set piece work, your line outs and scrums, particularly, and some back moves. Like that is that's part of rugby. But what I would suggest is you don't need to overcomplicate this at all. I've been to a numerous club sides and seen the most uh complex line out moves and the constant changes and changing weekend to weekend, and it's just not necessary, like at the at the highest form of the game, professional level of the game, the best coaches will keep it super simple and they nail the simple stuff. Now, I suggest that you actually don't need much more than one line out with three options at most levels of the game. And some levels of the game, you only need two. You need to be able to get up at the front and you need one throw in the middle. You work on the hooker to be throwing in their own time, so they're getting better at that. But we don't need complex moves. You just don't. It's very rare that you need uh an intricate web of moves. You just need to nail the basics, do it well, and you'll win the lineup 80% of the time. A little story around that, the Canadian rugby team, when I was there, the sevens team, they had one line out move in sevens. That was just up at two at the front of the lineup, and they had the best line out stats in the whole World Series, and they had zero variation because guys like John Moonlight just nailed his two jump and did it so well that no one could get him, and he practiced his dummies and he just nailed it. And what it did was it meant there was never any laborious uh line out training sessions. It was just him and the two lifters and the hooker practicing for a sevens line out, and they just did the same thing over and over until they nailed the quality of it, and you can do that too. Pick a simple play, one, two, or probably three moves, and just get real good at them. Just get real good at them. So people turn up to line out sessions, you say 10 minutes, we're doing the three moves, let's go. And you can hustle it through. So that's massive. Don't get lost in trying to be creative and fancy and all that stuff. You just don't need it. What you do do, do it real well. Same goes to scrumming. Big rocks are working together in a scrum as always. Just come up with a really clear system, you know, like front rows go down, middle rows go down, back rows go in. And then just get your calling, get your squeezing, get your working together, and you can again by doing a really good quality for 10 minutes get you a lot of good stuff. And then you can leave some of that individual stuff like individual propping shapes and things like that. That can be done as little extras after training with individuals rather than slowing the whole team down. That's a really important piece. Then we move Zachary to the system side that you talked about. And when you're talking about systems, you're generally talking about either attack or defense. Now, sort of depends a little bit on rugby, uh, on your numbers here. If you had enough of two teams where you could actually have one team practicing their attack system over and over and over again, at the same time you could have the other team doing the defense, whatever your system is over and over again. And whilst a lot of people would argue you're just practicing against the same thing, for most grades of rugby, it doesn't matter. As long as you're working on big fundamentals of staying together, working together, understanding the person next to you, it's gonna be all right. Now, if you don't have two teams worth, you just have one, you have to rotate, that's cool too. You just do it against nobody, this sort of the whatever system you want to do. And the important thing about systems is systems give confidence. A lot of people will argue that you know systems aren't good to have, but it actually does give a nice framework to give people confidence. Like a lot of people don't really know the game super well. So when you say this is what we're gonna do, stick roughly to this and get really good at this. The most common structure and system in rugby at the moment is the one, three, three, one, which is essentially refers to where you put your forwards. You have a part of three, you have a part of three in them in the middle, and you have two loose forwards generally out on the edges with the backs. And that's what we refer to as the one, three, three, one. Now that's super easy to learn, but there's a lot of detail in there you can keep repeating. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel with that with a system like this. You can just refine it as you go, get better at your distances, your spacing of the past, where you're lining up, your communication between partners, your little tips and and inside balls and things like that, it grow with confidence. So you can actually do a good 10 minutes and just keep it going. As you go, you can actually build it up and make a little bit of a fitness drill as well. I would suggest always keep it flowing. Like do the review later or before training so you don't actually have to slow training down to critique. If you are able to video a session, video it and then watch it as a coach afterwards and then show it at the start of training. And then so you don't have to stop and talk. The more talking we do, we're just soaking up time. Show the one, two key points you want to get across before everyone goes out, and then say this is what we're working on, and just hammer those. If you just hammer those one, two, three, you're gonna find training, you get so much more out of training. If you're trying to stop every little thing you're seeing, you're gonna be there forever, and we don't want that. Defense systems are very much the similar as the attack system, probably a little bit more simpler. I guess the only thing with you can slightly modify with your defense systems is you can actually get really excited about drills on this. You can actually set up mini-wheel drills and you can scale it up to no contact, medium contact, lots of contact. And I would suggest pick one or two or maybe three drills that are your babies on this stuff that sort of are a snapshot of the whole system on defense and just go hard with them and just love them. So when everyone hears that phrase of that drill, they know what it is and they're into it. If you gradually escalate to full contact session on some of those drills, you will find that there will be a massive fitness workout, which is absolutely outstanding. You've got to build up to that. So pick the drills that you want to do and just stick to them pretty much all season for most places. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every single training, doesn't need to happen. And lastly, we get to skills, and you could argue skills are probably the most important aspect of the game to be getting. And there is so many. So again, pick which ones are really good for you and your team. You know your team better than anyone, you know the context, you know what you're dealing with. Very hard for anyone remotely without seeing your team to actually say the skills you should be working on. But I'll give you, in light of that, I'll still give you the big four is are these catch, pass, run and evade, break down and tackle. Those four, if you're doing those, you're going to be in generically good shape. And I would suggest a great way for timekeeping is to move round groups. If you were lucky enough to have multiple coaches or even some great leaders that could potentially run one of the drills, you break them down into smaller groups. So you go, there's a tackle drill, there's a catch and pass drill, there's a run and evade drill, and there's a breakdown drill. And every five minutes, we're going to rotate. That way you're the people in your drill are getting lots of reps at that drill and going hard for five minutes. If it's the tackle drill, you might have eight people and you're watching that drill and you're making sure you're getting lots of tackles and you're driving the intensity, you're driving the technique, and they're going hard. If you've got the whole team, 20, 23 people there, people stand around the back, they get lost watching aeroplanes go by and birds fly overhead, all that sort of stuff. The more you can break it down into smaller groups, the better. If you wanted to, you could replace one of those little drill sessions with a fitness session. You could just get a parent with a stopwatch, if that's what your your makeup on the sidelines like, and just say running shuttles hardcore for the five minutes, and that could be a block. That way, your smaller groups, it's more intimate, you're more switched on, you're more dialed in, you're more intense in what you do. That is a great way to really get a good culture and then flick back to the system, the fitness, the set piece stuff outside of that. That is how I would suggest Zachary Hendricks from the United States, that is is a good way just to manage a little bit of your timing and getting and and and breaking it up. There's always context to that. You had a lot of other questions, which I will mention one, but I'm not going to answer it. It's the other questions went down is how do you build and organise structures for your overall organization? And I'm pleased to say that we have some CEOs coming up on the podcast that are the biggest names in the game from the biggest unions in the game, talking about the bigger piece side of things, about how we get that overarching organization humming as much as we get the team on the field. What a pleasure to just chew the fat. Something a little bit different today, not quite culture, a little bit more structural today, but that's all right, because we like to mix it up here. That's part of a good culture. Mixing it up, keeping it interesting. I will see you next Wednesday for next Wednesday's uh coaching culture reflections session.