The Hollywoodbets Sharks have become known in recent times as a kind of Manchester City of South African rugby and the Vodacom URC by being a team that buys in top established players and feeding the senior team that way but the plan is for that to change.
The Sharks have created a Junior High Performance Centre at their Kings Park headquarters that is a step towards director of rugby Neil Powell’s goal of changing the strategy of “filling our senior team from the top to filling the senior team from the bottom”.
An easy way to explain what Powell means by that is to refer back to the successes the Sharks enjoyed from 2007, when they topped the Super 14 log before losing a close final to the Bulls in agonising fashion (no-one who was there will forget that Bryan Habana try) but then went on to significant Currie Cup triumphs in 2008 and 2010 and played another Super Rugby final in 2012.
Those years saw a significant growth in the reach of the Sharks’ brand through the exploits of players who became top Springboks, players like the Du Plessis brothers, Bismarck and Jannie, Ruan Pienaar and Frans Steyn.
Yes, there was one significant memorable import of an established player, France’s Frederik Michalak, but if you call out the names of the players who excelled for the Sharks in those years they mostly came in from the bottom, meaning the youth systems.
It so happened that most of them came from the Free State schooling system but World Cup winning wing JP Pietersen, now a significant and influential part of the Sharks’ coaching operation, came from the Cape.
He was only 19 when the then coach Dick Muir blooded him in 2006. He won rugby’s greatest prize in France not much more than a year later.
Waylon Murray who also became a Springbok was home grown (Westville) and his centre partner Brad Barritt, who ended up doing well for England, was with him on that youth conveyor belt and had been schooled at Kearsney College.
AGGRESSIVE RECRUITMENT OF YOUNG TALENT IS NOW THE NORM
We live in a different era now and the whole rugby system is significantly more professional than it was then. As well as trying to capture home grown talent, Powell and the recruitment team that works with Michael Horak has to be aggressive in luring the best available talent from the schooling systems in other provinces.
If you look online at the bio of the impressive young rising star Hanro Jacobs (25 is young for a prop), it states that he came from “the Springbok factory, Paarl Gimnasium”.
The elite contracted junior squad of 20 is later supplemented in the provincial age-group competitions that are such an important part of a young player’s development by 15 players who do well at the Sharks’ commercially orientated Academy.
That is necessary to make up the numbers but also a useful way of incentivising the Academy players and ensuring that particularly home grown youngsters don’t fall through the net.
Powell recalls that the commercial Academy, where players coming out of school who dream of being professional rugby players mostly pay to be there or are there on bursaries, used to be likened to a creche, but that perception is being changed.
“We are changing the perception of the commercial academy. It used to be known as a creche in the sense that players just got provided for but nothing else,” he said.
“We are trying to make that also as high performance as possible in terms of the rugby program we provide. Hopefully that will change the perception, particularly in KZN, as we want to attract local talent to that academy, to provide an opportunity for them.”
A ONE STOP SHOP FOR JUNIOR PLAYERS
For the plan to feed the senior team from the youth levels to work, the systems at the youth levels have to be highly professionalised and operated on high performance principles.
And that’s where the Junior High Performance Centre comes in and will hopefully play a significant role in the alignment between junior and senior levels at the Sharks going forward.
“Essentially the Junior HPC is just a building. It is a one stop shop for junior players. In the past they used to go to get physio and other treatments elsewhere and it was the same if they wanted to speak to the coaches,” says Powell.
“Now we are housing all of that within the Junior HPC building, and it also satisfies all the gym requirements for the players. We have put new weights into the gym, we have redesigned it and have put branding on the walls to give it a more professional and high performance feel. The coaches offices are there, the team room is there.
“We feel it shows our intent and how important our junior development is, how we have changed our strategy to fill our senior team from the bottom rather than from the top.
"Of course there will still be times when established players from outside will be bought in, but what we want to do is start instilling the Sharks’ culture in the young players and start their path from there.
“The Junior HPC will remain just a building if we don’t take on a high performance culture. The building itself is not a high performance centre but what we do inside it with the people makes it a HPC. It is crucial to be high performance in attitude.”
The overarching aim is to leave no stone unturned in ensuring that the young players get all the help they get in the years they spend in the Sharks’ junior ranks so that by the time they turn 21 they are both fully equipped from a core skill level aspect for senior rugby as well as have had enough exposure to good coaching that there are no excuses if they don’t make the cut.
COMING OF AGE IS DECISION TIME FOR YOUNG PLAYERS
By cut is meant the cut-off that Powell and the Sharks have placed when it comes to deciding whether a player will graduate to the senior team or whether he should consider a life outside of rugby or head to another region where he might make the grade.
“For me the high performance or junior system should be so well run and so well organised so that when a junior player gets to 21 we can make a decision whether they stand a chance of getting to the senior team or not,” said Powell.
“We use their readiness to play in the Currie Cup and then how they go there as an indication. Nick Hatton was a good example. He was still under-21 when we made him the captain of the Currie Cup squad last year.
"He did fantastically well and he is now part of the URC squad. It is great to see those guys coming through and the aim is for that to become a trend for us.”
ALIGNMENT FACILITATES SEAMLESS TRANSITION
What is also intended to become a trend is the seamless transition that is needed between the junior and senior ranks that can be facilitated by proper alignment of coaching philosophies between junior and senior levels and a common understanding of what is needed from a Sharks player.
“For me when it comes to coaching the junior systems what needs to come through is not systems coaching, as in only coaching defensive systems and maps etc, what we need to do is really develop a player.
"Of course whenever our under-21 team plays we want that team to win, but winning isn’t what is all important at that level. What is important is individual development.
“We need to develop the player at junior level to the point that when they get into the URC squad the senior coach shouldn’t need to coach ball presentation or tackle technique or the skills required to create opportunities as a playmaker etc.
"That is all stuff that should be coached at junior level so that it is second nature when they turn 21 and are ready to go out of the junior structures and go into the senior structures.
“But being schooled into a high performance environment also isn’t just about what a player does on the field. It is also about professional lifestyle off field, nutrition, the sleeping patterns, when they can drink and when not, and the conditioning side of it too such as gym work and fitness work.
“We also coach the juniors based on the kind of skills we need in our senior set up, according to our game model so we can play our game when those youngsters are introduced to the senior team.
"If our game is going to include more contestable kicks we obviously need to develop the backline players, and particularly the back three, more in terms of the aerial skills.
“It’s actually creating a lot more alignment. We encourage the junior coaches to sit with the senior coaches and have conversations around the game and how they see it and where we want to go as a collective. I think we are fairly aligned.
"We are not completely aligned because there’s always individual opinion, but we are 80 per cent aligned.
“This intentional alignment is not only on field but also the culture we want to instill into the youngsters. The junior coaches must know that the culture they install is the same culture that we have in the senior player and the environment in the senior squad must also be the Junior HPC environment.”
POWELL IS MORE HANDS ON WITH JUNIORS THAN OTHER DORs
The Director of Rugby (DOR) position that Powell holds at the Sharks has always differed from club to club or province to province, usually according to the interpretation of whoever it is that appoints them to that position, and when Powell talks about the project with the passion that he does it is easy to discern the line he is on at the Durban franchise/union.
“The beauty of the position I am in is that I am not physically busy with coaching,” he explained.
“There are different high performance managers, different types of director of rugby. Jake White is physically involved with the senior team at the Bulls so he might not get to visit the junior set up often enough to know those players.
"Whereas I am fairly loose in terms of that. As I am not coaching with the senior team and can spend time with the junior teams.”