The difference between being a victim of circumstance, and a tiger who roars into battle, lies in the way you recalibrate your thinking on and off the field of play.
By Tank Lanning
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”. Not mine, sadly; it’s a line from Semisonic’s Closing Time, and one in which I to find solace in times of darkness. Last year I lost both my Mum and my incredibly loyal pug, Coleman. So there was a fair amount of solace-seeking, with “new beginnings” being my light at the end of the tunnel.
New beginnings, of course, do not always have to emerge out of a place of darkness. They do not always require 180 degree turns, or even 90 degree turns.
I start each year with a booze-and-carb-free January. I see it as my “Recalibration” month – one that clears the mind and sets the scene for new challenges. A new challenge for me in 2019 is giving this rugby coaching lark a proper tonk. Hence my looking after the UCT forwards and the SACS scrum. Both incredibly exciting opportunities.
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I love rugby. It flows in my veins. Always has. I love the tight connection I get from being part of a group of people who need to suffer together in order to achieve a common goal. And suffer you do, be it via a brutal scrum and breakdown session, or via the sacrifices you make to commit the time needed to make it work.
But out of that comes a connection with like-minded people that only a sport like rugby can deliver. Game changing, one would hope, but more importantly, life changing.
It’s a complex sport, though. Made more so by the myriad of tweaks to the laws by the powers that be. It’s a sport made of several moving parts. Align these parts and your blank canvas will deliver a Picasso. Fail to align and that canvas will look more like a bulldog ate his porridge off it.
Hence the pre-season. Dreaded by most players, especially the rhinos up front, given that a primary objective is conditioning. But it’s the perfect opportunity to recalibrate as a group, introduce new players, set clear goals, align those parts, and most importantly, have some fun!
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A vital cog in the Ikeys pre-season is our three night camp. Away from the pressures of “normal” life, and away from our traditional training base on the Green Mile, this year it was held at Boschendal’s “Retreat” at the foot of the magnificent Franschoek mountains. A spectacular venue, tailor-made for what we wanted to achieve as a team.
The seven field sessions saw us focussing on the actual rugby – scrums, lineouts, kick-ins, kick receipts, rucks, mauls, defence, attack, kicking, starter plays, systems, shape, tackling, passing, breaking tackles, offloads, etc. But it’s away from the field where the real gold happens.
Breakfast, lunch and supper as a team. A triathlon in the mountains instead of ten 120m sprints. Whiteboard sessions to trigger discussion instead of one way coaching. Music quizzes. Auctioning off lost property. Video analysis of field sessions. Finding out that one of the tighthead props has a hamster called Vincent – named after Vincent Koch of course. Pure gold.
Key to our “New beginnings” this year were the sessions with our mental coach, or good old-fashioned “Kop dokter”, Ruan Botha, who got us to understand how and why we make decisions to better define our path going forward.
Dropping any sort of “victim” mentality was a key theme. So in closing, and in preparation for what I hope will be a sensational 2019, for you, I thought I would leave you with three key ingredients of our newly defined “Ikey Tiger” way for the season ahead.
The victim always waits for the right environment to do something special, while the Tiger understands that nothing special has ever been achieved in the right conditions.
The victim know his job, while the Tiger owns his.
The victim wants to rise to the occasion, while the Tiger sinks to the level of his training.
