“We want our players to be adaptable. As staff members, we should also be as adaptable.”
Across a thirteen-year career at the highest level of professional rugby, Steve Cooper — founder and director of Apex Performance and Champions Cup winner with Bordeaux — has worked with forty different coaches. Only two of those lasted more than four years.
In a recent Setanta webinar, Coaching Adaptability – Managing Change in Performance Environments, Steve drew on that experience to outline a framework for any practitioner navigating the reality of constant change in elite sport.
Why Adaptability?
Looking at head coach tenures across rugby union, football, basketball, and American football, the average time in a role sits at around two and a half years. Steve shared an anecdote from a coaching conference that captures the reality bluntly.
“The speaker asked everybody to stand up. He asked everybody to sit down who’d been sacked. Everybody who was left standing, he told them that basically they just haven’t been sacked yet. That is the rate of change in modern sport.”
And the churn isn’t always a consequence of failure.
“There might be a great performance, a team at the lower half of the table and their manager gets picked by a team in the top half. Or in rugby, you might be doing a great job and go and work for the national team. So there’s a high chance that if you’re going to spend four to five years in a club, you’re going to get a couple of rotations in coaches.”
Understand Your Coaches and How They See the Game
“One of the first things I would always do if a coach comes in or a big change happens is spend as much time with them as you possibly can. Get to know them, get to understand what they want to see, get to understand how they operate. Make sure you’re asking them questions on the way they want to play.”
During his time in the Top 14, Steve worked across three coaching regimes, each with a different philosophy. The lesson was consistent across all three.
“I can have my opinion on how rugby should be played. But understanding what those coaches want, making sure the information we’re giving them is pertinent to what they want to see, and not just a generic rugby stat, that’s where the real value is.”
That understanding has to extend across the full stakeholder landscape. Directors, medical staff, sports scientists, and commercial teams all have different needs.
“The message is not the same for a director, a head coach, and a player. The level of detail you put into that message is not the same. Being able to have a holistic view and understand that the delivery of the message, although the message is the same, is different for each of those people.”
Pre-Mortem Thinking
“Instead of doing a post-mortem and trying to understand what went wrong, try to preempt what could go wrong.”
Steve applied pre-mortem thinking practically when working with a non-native English-speaking coach in France. Rather than reviewing what didn’t land after a meeting, they would work through potential pinch points beforehand, where the language might create confusion, where a visual might not land, where delivery might slow.
The same mindset shaped how he rebuilt his reporting systems after being caught underprepared during a coaching transition.
“I found a way to build my reports and build the feedback in a manner that was simple to find, simple to reproduce, and simple to put in a form that could be for a stakeholder, a director of the club, or a new manager coming in. What might they want to see? What detail will they need? That might not be perfect, but you’ll be a hell of a step of the way forward.”
Build a System That Expects Disruption
When a head coach leaves mid-season and an interim steps in, Steve described the situation as a three-way tension.
“You get stuck in a sort of three-way battle between making sure everything you’ve already done is not wasted, making sure the interim coach is serviced, but also preparing for a new coach to come in. Having those pillars and a good process is absolutely massive.”
Beyond coaching transitions, he pointed to the shifting generational profile of squads as a structural challenge that demands ongoing adaptation. With Gen Z players now forming a growing proportion of professional rosters, the age gap between those players and head coaches could sit at 25 to 30 years. The gap in cultural reference points and communication styles is significant.
“Gen Zs respond better to gamified elements and interactive tech. On-screen focus is down to under 50 seconds. Being able to adapt your message, and making sure players who learn by watching can understand it as well as those who learn by listening, that’s the challenge.”
Control the Controllable
Steve described spending an hour and a half preparing what he and a coach felt was the ideal meeting, only for the coach to return fifteen minutes before it started asking to change everything, having picked up new insight from players that morning.
“Being able to understand that message, being able to visualise it, being able to remain calm under pressure, controlling the controllables, is massively important.”
The outcome wasn’t a perfect presentation, but it was an impactful one.
“We didn’t get everything changed, but we got the key messages changed, and those key messages we got across to the players, and everybody came away happy.”
That distinction sits at the centre of his approach to high-pressure moments.
“I think we’re in an over-consumption period, particularly in sporting environments, where a lot of the time we think more is better. I question whether more is better. Sometimes I think we could have a better impact if we asked ourselves seriously — is what I’m doing having an impact on either our performance or the development of a player?”
Relationships First
Asked what a young practitioner entering the profession should prioritise, Steve’s answer was straightforward.
“I would put on one side your relationships, on one side your technical knowledge. I think they should be 80% relationships and 20% technical knowledge. The technical knowledge is important and it will accelerate when you get into an environment. But the relationships piece, getting to know people, understanding people, creating opportunities for yourself, is arguably more important.”
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