Coaching Culture with Ben Herring

Reflections: From D Team to the Working with the Worlds Best

• Ben Herring

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A team list can teach you more than a scoreboard. Ben opens up about growing up in New Zealand rugby culture, missing A teams year after year, and how that sting forged a durable kind of resilience that later powered a professional career and a life in coaching. The story tracks an unlikely path from D team disappointment to Super Rugby, through concussion and identity loss, and into a craft that puts people at the center of performance.

We dive into three formative gifts: learning to live with setbacks without letting them define you, discovering the freedom to think in environments with less structure, and being shaped by teachers who coached the person before the player. Those lessons become the backbone of a culture-first approach: standards that lift rather than crush, honesty handled with skill, and belonging built deliberately, not by accident. Along the way, Ben shares how early obsession with skills and tactics gave way to a deeper truth seen in clubhouses and national programs across Japan, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada: the difference between good and great is cultural, not just technical.

The new book gathers practical wisdom from world-class coaches who have been hired and fired, doubted and trusted, and who keep showing up with clarity and care. You’ll hear why plays and systems age quickly, but human laws endure; how to grow people, not just players; and how to design training and feedback that keep the flame alive while raising the bar. Whether you lead an under-12 squad, a professional side, or a business team, these principles travel because they are grounded in lived experience and behavioral science.

If this conversation sparks something in you, grab the book on your local Amazon—How to Be a Great Coach: Lessons from the World’s Best Coaches by Ben Herring—then subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review to help more leaders build cultures that win and stay human.

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SPEAKER_00:

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, welcome to the Coaching Culture Podcast Reflections episode this weekend. It's been an awesome week because the book has come out. Uh, the first one, How to Be a Great Coach, Volume 1, the first 15 Lessons from the World's Best Coaches. The first 15 of them. And it's great to get that out there just for Christmas. The likes of Eddie Jones, Steve Hansen, Johan Ackermann, Paul Tito, Conrad Smith, Richard Cockrell, Wayne Smith, Mike Ruddick, Scott Lawrence, and others. And really proud to get it done. And they will be coming out uh every 15 episodes or so, I reckon. But this is the first one, and just a great reflection piece for me to be doing. Taking my notes, which I take pages of every podcast, and put them into a print form so that it's accessible, can read through. I I personally I love listening to the podcasts, but I also love having something physical I can write notes on and underline and highlight stuff. So yeah, privilege to get it out there. And thank you for a huge number of you have already uh pre-ordered it and got it and loving that. So I thought in honour of that, uh for this midweek reflection, I would actually read out the introduction. Just uh a little bit of background on myself and who I am to write this book. And I think that's uh it's a piece when you're a podcast host, you don't always uh share a little bit about yourself. So I thought I'd take this moment to read the intro of the book. Um we did Edie Jones last week. Here is the intro. Who am I to write this book? So here it is. For those of you who are interested in the book, a little bit of my background and what's grown me, here it is. I grew up in New Zealand, a country where rugby sits, you know, somewhere between sport and religion. I went to a big traditional boys' school where the first 15 were pretty much celebrities. Their names are read out and assembly, that sort of thing. Their photos are up on the wall, teachers talked about when you boys make the first 15, if that was the natural order of things. But I never got close. I did not make an A team in any age group. Most years I did not even make the B team. When the team lists went up on the notice board, I pushed through the crowd, scanned the names, and find myself in the C team or more likely the D team. Every year, every age group. And yet I had an enormous desire to be as good as I could possibly be. And looking back, that mismatch between my ambition and my selection sheet turned into a gift. In fact, three gifts that shaped the way I coached today. And I'd like to talk to you about those three gifts from my childhood experience with rugby and not making the teams I always wanted to. Number one was learning to live with the setbacks. Because I was constantly overlooked, I got very familiar with disappointment. I know the feeling of walking away from a board with your stomach in a knot. I know how it feels when your mates are talking about trialing for repsides and you're not even in the conversation. I know they're quite right. Car rides home. Rejection and loss never became something I particularly enjoyed, but they stopped defining me pretty early on in life. Rugby is a game that's built on resilience. You get knocked down, you get up, you go again. That's not a metaphor. It is literally the job description of rugby. My school years gave me thousands of lived repetitions of that skill. I did not have a smooth, decorated pathway. What I had was a long apprenticeship and how to keep turning up after a no. And for me, it's that same grit that got through me through my playing career, my transition after concussion, a coaching life that has been full of sharp turns, foreign countries, and uncomfortable challenges. Number two, the three the freedom to think for myself gift. The second gift of living in the lower teams was this. Nobody ever tried to put me in a system. We had no playbook, no patent sheets. When the coach talked about where I should defend from the kickoff, what my role was in attack, the answer was usually the same word. Everywhere. And that was the closest thing to structure I had. At the time, that felt like chaos, but later I realized that it gave me something rare in high-performance sport, the freedom to think for myself. When I left school, I started going to the gym. There was no program waiting for me, no academy trainer. So I sat there and thought, what actually helps get me better on the field? And I picked movements that made sense to my game and went hard at them. I almost certain, I'm almost certain, that a professional strength and conditioning coach would have stopped me doing nearly all of it. But that freedom to experiment was absolutely priceless. I did the same on the field, designed my own drills, I played with the lines of running that suited my body, not the textbook. I noticed what worked for me and chased more of it. And over time, that way of thinking became my edge. As a player, I carved out a niche, as someone who could see an opportunity differently. As a coach, it turned into a craft. I am known now as a really creative drill designer, someone who can build trainings that feel fresh, fun, and useful. And I'm proud of that. And that started in the D team. And number three, the third gift, is learning from my non-rugby coaches. And the third gift came from men who coached those lower teams. They were all teachers, they had to fill a co-curricular requirement. Coaching the under-14 D's or the under-15 C's is not a dream job for them. It was a box to tick. On paper, they were not great technical coaches. They did not know much about the breakdown shape or tackle technique, but they were outstanding coaches of peep. They lit fires. They kept my love of the game alive when every logical sign said I should give up. They saw when I was flat and they knew when to put an arm around me, when to give a quiet word, and when to give a rocket. And they never made me feel small for being in a lower team. And they never stamped out my ambition. They did not kill my flame. And those men were the first model of what I wanted to be as a coach. They taught me that your first job is not to download your knowledge. It is to keep someone's light on, to be the person in the environment who never diminishes another person's flame, no matter how good or bad they are right now. And that idea is still central to how I work. It shapes the way I speak to players and staff, the way I lead meetings, the way I critique, the way I construct sessions. I coach with their example in mind, with a clear promise to myself. Do not be the coach who makes someone fall out of love with the game. I'm going to repeat that because I think it's in a powerful statement. Do not be the coach who makes someone fall out of love with the game. So from there, from never being picked to playing with some of the world's greats, and I'm actually really proud of this. After school, something unlikely happened. From relative obscurity, and I cracked the Highlander squad, sort of picked almost out of nowhere, really. I played a uh a couple of seasons, a lot of seasons, good club rugby, and got picked for the Highlanders Super Rugby team. I went on to play for the Hurricane for four years and then Leicester Tigers for four years. At best, I was a 95 kilo open side flanker, often 20 kilos lighter than the next man in my own forward pack. I was privileged to pack down with loose forward trios, the likes of Jerry Collins and Rodney Silwalo. Guys like that. On paper, there was no way I should have been there, but I was, and I literally punched above my weight for a living. And a lot of me when I think back, I put that down to the years of disappointment, the resilience I had built and the freedom to think for myself. My playing career exposed me to a wide spectrum of coaching and culture. I saw the last remnants of an amateur era with court sessions and lock-ins and the new professional world arriving fast. I saw the good and the ugly in both. I lived inside environments that were healthy and some that were absolutely not. Then the game reminded me that I was human. The concussion period, I got knocked out too many times, and I was no good. I suffered serious concussion-related struggles. The fog, the mood swings, the headaches, the sense of my brain was not quite my own. And with the help of my wife, who is a very gifted wellness specialist, I took responsibility for my recovery. And I will talk with my wife next year, 2026, about protocols and the culture around concussion and how to really do some real practical things you can do as coaches for your teams to make recoveries better and even reduce it in the first place. But that will be another podcast. At the time, uh those concussions entered the era of feeling invincible as rugby players often do when they're at their peak. It forced me to face the question every professional athlete dreads is who am I when rugby is taken away? And I actually watched friends struggle with that transition. Some have not landed well as they deserved, but I was fortunate. I reckon those years of setbacks have given me a pretty thick skin. My degree and my degree in friendship circles outside of sport gave me somewhere solid to stand. And then one of my coaches actually changed the trajectory of my life. And that was discovering the craft of coaching. And that was Richard Cockerel, my coach at Leicester. He clearly saw something in me that I did not see in myself when I retired and battled for about six months with the concussion symptoms. He asked me to stay on as a coach. And I fell in love with the profession almost immediately. At first, I threw myself into the X's and O's, the skills and drills, the techniques, the tactics. I read as much as I could. I watched everything. I became obsessed with those details for a good couple of years. But after those couple of years, I realized something which just grabbed me a little bit and I just could see it so clearly. That the teams that were doing well weren't always the ones with the best drills or the cleverest plays. The difference between good and great sat somewhere else. For me, what I was seeing was that the real craft of coaching was not just the technical, it was the cultural. It was how people were treated, how standards were set, how honesty was handled, how belonging was built, how conflict was resolved, how leaders behaved when the lights were off and the cameras gone. That realization changed the direction of my career. And I became a rugby nomad. And for the next 16 years, I chased coaching experiences that would stretch me, particularly around the cultural aspect. I took roles in Japan, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. I toured through almost every major rugby nation, coached two national teams, worked in 15s and 7s in men's and women's programs, in environments that were resourced and established, and in ones that felt like startups. My four children were born on different continents. Our family dinner table has accent and stories from all over the world. I have succeeded and failed more times than I can count, often in languages I barely speak. Every environment has taught me something about what works and what does not when you are trying to build a team that can perform and stay human at the same time. I am by design a rugby nomad. Along the way, I have had, I have coached with, played under, or sat beside many of the best coaches in the world. And little by little, I found the truest version of myself as a coach. And I am still refining that picture. And then it's come to here, the coaching culture podcast. And these days, a big part of my work now is about capturing and sharing those experiences. Through the Coaching Culture Podcast, I sit down with some of the world's top coaches and leaders and talk about the parts of the game you don't see on a Saturday. The conversations are not just about lineouts or defensive systems, they are about how you handle pressure, how you keep perspective, how you tell the truth, how you care, and how you grow people. Now, I've had hundreds of hours of recordings with international head coaches, directors of rugby's, performance managers, and captains, and many of them have become friends. And the honesty they bring to those chats is absolute class. At some point it hit me, I was actually, I I I was, and I still am, in a really rare position that I've lived the game from D team to international coaching, and I have seen cultures that have worked and cultures that have broke people. And now I have access to the live wisdom of some of the very best rugby minds on earth. And it would be selfish of me not to share that. So what this book is really about, it is not a book about rugby strategy. Plays and systems change with trends, law tweaks and opposition. One season's innovation is the next season's normal. And the game looks very different in Tokyo than it does at Leicester or Cape Town or Dunedin. But the fundamentals are surprisingly similar. This book is about something deeper. This is a book about how to be a great coach through the lens of culture. At the heart of every success and every failure I have seen, whether in my own teams or the dozens of environments I've been with and studied, sits a small set of principles. They show up again and again in the stories from great coaches. They're not tricks, they're not motivational quotes for the change room war. They are simple human laws that can be applied at any team and any level. And they are rooted in psychology, behavioral science, and most importantly, in firsthand experiences. For me, I that's the bit that gets me when they're first hand experience from those that have done it. They come from coaches who have been sacked, rehired, doubted, praised, written off, and written back in. My job in this book is to bring those human laws to you in a clear, grounded way, wrapped up in real life stories. So how you use this book, you might be an international side, coaching an international side. You might be in charge of an under-12s team. You might be a teacher, a business leader, or simply someone who cares deeply about how groups of people work. Wherever you're coaching, the same questions really do matter. How do you grow people, not just players? How do you set standards without killing joy? How do you have how do you handle honesty and conflict? How do you build a culture that lasts longer than any one season? This book is my attempt to answer those questions. It pulls together my own journey, the coaches who have shaped me, and the wisdoms of the guests who have sat down with me over coffee and microphones. I feel privileged to be in this position to share their insight with you. Now, I hope the pages of this book give you tools, a few challenges, and a lot of encouragement. Most of all, I hope they help you keep the flame alive in the people you coach. If you haven't listened to the Coaching Culture Podcast yet, this is your invitation to do so. And that is the introduction to the book people. Now, it just reading that back, it just humbles me a little bit. Just to when you're when you write down those words about yourself and you and you put them out there, it's always a lovely bit of reflection. From there, we go on to do the first 15 um people. And Eddie Jones, Steve Hanson, Karen Crowley, Johan Ackerman, Paul Tito, Chris Webb, James O'Connor, Glenn Delaney, Franz Ludica, Conrad Smith, Richard Cockle, Ryan Martin, Wayne Smith, Scott Lawrence, and Mike Radick. Some of the very best in the world. And it's uh it's been a privilege to write. And you can get that if you want it on Amazon wherever you are in the world. Just plug in your usual local Amazon, and it's there. How to be a great coach, Ben Herring, lessons from the world's best coaches. That is all for today, people. I hope you have a wonderful day. And I will catch you next week.