Poachers or gamekeepers?
"It is a flawed method to entice and remunerate before they've really earned it."
Brendon Ratcliffe
If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the wrong place. After decades in the game, Napier Boys High rugby director Brendon Ratcliffe knows mixing teens, adulation, a lack of rules and money is a recipe for trouble.
‘‘I’ve seen the carnage from getting priorities out of kilter,’’ he says.
He’s having none of that at Napier, as it invests in a new programme it intends to roll out to other sports.
Napier will not import athletic rugby superstars from the Pacific Islands, or offer scholarships. Ratcliffe instead looks for an indefinable quality he calls ‘‘character’’.
‘‘There is no enticement, I am really philosophically opposed to enticement,’’ he says, talking more like a philosopher than a footballer.
‘‘It is a flawed method to entice and remunerate before they’ve really earned it. You can build a level of expectation in the athlete, which is beyond what they’ve earned.’’
It is tough for teens to cope with accolades and the social status that comes with them, the former Hawke’s Bay provincial coach says.
His key message is simple: ‘‘The better you carry yourself, the more you respect your family, the better you engage with people in all areas outside this patch of grass you play on, the better you will perform on it.’’
Napier looks for ‘‘people first, players second’’.
It looks for those with natural talent, with an ability to work hard, to learn, to remain grounded, to make sacrifices, to follow the rules set for them. The key is moulding mental attitude. If you want an example of such a player, think Richie McCaw.
‘‘When they learn to give more of themselves and carry themselves better off the field, they will play better on it,’’ Ratcliffe says.
After coaching at first-class level here and in England, Ratcliffe is clear on what builds good senior players – and makes bad ones.
As New Zealand Rugby director of player development, he masterminded the original NZR academy model, which is now the template for provincial and Super Rugby club academies.
‘‘I know the in and outs of these programmes and have seen the best and the worst of them,’’ he says.
He blames a clunky transition from amateur to professional rugby in the late 1990s for off-field incidents that have troubled the game since.
It was naive of rugby to expect players with scant life skills – he uses the harsh term ‘‘social vegetables’’ – plenty of money, and adulation from their early teens to roll through life untroubled.
And trouble there has been, and still is.
Since professional rugby arrived in 1995, elite players have regularly been exposed as behaving badly, with tales of booze, sex, party drugs, even violent assaults.
‘‘We were expecting a person to walk across a white line and become an extreme world-class achiever, while there’s elements of their life that are in tatters off the field,’’ he says.
So at Napier – mid-table in the strong North Island Super 8 competition last year – the starting point is to teach its 400 players across 17 sides to make good decisions off the field, as well as on it.
‘‘We will be constantly asking them ‘are you giving everything you can of yourself, on and off the field?’’’
What sets the best players apart is neither physique, nor speed, but character.
Players will understand their responsibility as ‘‘keepers of the NBHS jersey’’, he has told parents.
‘‘They will learn to commit and dedicate more of themselves than they ever knew they could to this mission… together.’’
They will learn, or they won’t play, is the subtext.
Asked whether the dogged anti-import stance could undermine the long-term career prospects of Napier players, Ratcliffe thinks not.
Anecdotal evidence shows schoollevel success is not a crucial precursor to an outstanding Super Rugby career. If anything, the opposite might be the case.