How a gay rugby team taught Kiwi coach game’s true values
New Zealander Mitch Canning had been coaching rugby for two decades on both sides of the Tasman before he truly learned what the game was about.
He mixed a successful career as an investment banker and leadership consultant with coaching rugby first in Auckland and then Melbourne, including helping the Melbourne Rugby Club as the Australian state of Victoria tried to raise its standards in preparation of the arrival of the Melbourne Rebels in Super Rugby in 2012.
But the lesson that sticks with him was supplied by the Melbourne Chargers, the team he coached to an improbable win in the Bingham Cup – the biennial world championships of gay and inclusive rugby – in 2016.
‘‘ I taught them tactics and things around biomechanics, but what I learnt from those guys was something much more profound,’’ Canning said.
‘‘We were heading into the finals of the Bingham Cup and we had our team meeting in the morning and the topic the guys wanted to talk about was: We feel really good, and we honestly feel like we’re going to win this.
‘‘But we’ve been a team that has [previously] lost a lot, and by some quite big margins. And some of those teams have been gracious in victory and some of those teams have been terrible.
‘‘They’ve gone out of their way to demean us so if we do win. Can we brainstorm a set of behaviours to make sure that whoever we play against still feel really good about themselves afterwards?’’
The word ‘‘humbled’’ is overused in sport, but that is exactly how Canning felt at the players’
‘‘I taught them tactics but what I learnt from those guys was something much more profound.’’ Mitch Canning
selfless attitude.
For the record, the Chargers won the Bingham Cup in 2016 but, that moment really opened Canning’s eyes.
‘‘I’ve been coaching rugby for 20 years and I’ve never been involved in a side that showed empathy towards the opposition like that,’’ he said. ‘‘ It was a
remarkable workshop to be part of and I took a lot from that.’’
Yet, the LGBTQ community has not entirely been welcomed by rugby or by other sporting codes. New research shows that LGBTQ Kiwis are reluctant to come out, while casually homophobic language is rife on sporting fields, despite the fact that even many of those who use it are otherwise generally sympathetic to the LGBTQ community.
Canning, whose heterosexual son now prefers to play for the Chargers than ‘‘ traditional’’ teams, worries that sporting administrators still need to have the importance of diversity and inclusion spelt out to them, even while they wrestle with the tricky problem of participation and funding.
‘‘The thing that sport can learn from what these guys are doing with the Bingham Cup is that it’s an environment where the person comes first and the result comes later,’’ Canning said. ‘‘Any organisation that can do that, they grow. They grow really organically and they grow naturally.
‘‘If rugby clubs want to see what growth looks like, they need to look at the Bingham Cup. It started in 2002 with a handful of teams. I was there in Amsterdam [in 2018] and there were probably 75 teams from 68 countries, with about 2000 athletes there.
‘‘There’s no other rugby competition in the world that can boast those numbers.’’ rates