Is the lockdown a massive inconvenience or a unique opportunity, asks the man who has turned around some troubled Kiwi sporting environments.

He’s been central to some high profile cultural rebuilds in the past couple of years, but a Kiwi mental skills guru admits there is no manual for how to tackle this latest challenge.

Performance coach Aaron Walsh was charged with turning round both the Football Ferns and women’s Black Sticks team cultures following the reviews into their troubled team environments and the departure of respective coaches Andreas Heraf and Mark Hager.

Now, fresh into his role as mental skills coach for the Chiefs Super Rugby club, he has been thrown a massive curve ball by the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world.

Walsh, who worked with the Warriors NRL club in 2017, has a wide-ranging sports portfolio. He was still working with Hockey New Zealand and New Zealand Football to steer their national women’s teams’ Olympic preparations (prior to the Games’ postponement), while he’s also just completed a second season with the Auckland Aces cricket side. Along with that, further abroad through his HP Group company, he has four Major League Baseball players as clients too.

But in recent months, the biggest focus for Tauranga-based Walsh has been in rugby, having replaced renowned mental skills expert David Galbraith at the Chiefs early this year.

Having just got to know all the players on an individual level, Walsh’s work was suddenly geared in a different direction, with Super Rugby suspended indefinitely on March 15 and then the country going into lockdown.

‘‘Obviously this has changed the trajectory for everyone,’’ Walsh told Stuff.

Instead of dealing with rugbyspecific performance pressures, Walsh has become a sounding board for players having to cope with huge uncertainty around their profession, and which has now also included pay freezes.

He has made himself part of the coaching staff’s weekly Zoom unit meetings with the players, and tries to send out two or three messages a day to various guys to see how they’re doing.

At the same time, it’s important he strikes a balance between offering support but also giving the men space and not thinking up issues that might not be there.

‘‘Not trying to push or create anything, but for them to have a real awareness that if they do run into things that are a bit challenging there is someone to have a chat to, who’s not going to select the team,’’ Walsh said of his role.

‘‘Not everybody will take up that offer, it might be just a few. But it’s just the assurance of knowing there is a resource available.

‘‘It’s more trying to acknowledge that those things are very very real, like it is for everybody in society right now.