‘Be brave’ on contact training load to reap benefits, Quins coach Nick Evans urges fellow coaches
This article is written by Progressive Rugby
Harlequins attack coach Nick Evans has encouraged teams to be brave and look at training to see where they can make changes to improve player availability.
Evans, who has won the premiership as a player and a coach with Quins, was speaking at World Rugby’s Medical conference .
And the fly-half, who won 16 caps for the All Blacks, revealed what he believed played a major part in Harlequins’ extraordinary 2020/21 Premiership victory which saw them beating Exeter Chiefs 40-38 in the final after languishing in seventh place four months earlier.
“We found ourselves in a unique position in mid-season. The head coach had left and a group of us had the opportunity to be quite brave,” Evans told attendees.
“We decided to use the mouthguards to monitor how we look at load management. The season before our player availability was in the low 70s (%) with some of our best players missing, and we knew we needed to improve that.
“First and foremost, it was an education piece and we gathered the senior player group and devised a traffic light system for all the drills and explained we’d be taking a bespoke individual approach to player load to look after the players more.
“We told the boys we wanted them wearing the instrumented mouthguards and GPS units in training and during the match and we had a 99% buy in.
“It was fascinating. We quickly discovered that loads were higher than we believed. So if we take a game as 100% load, we found that players were getting through 70% on a Monday, about 100% on a Tuesday and above 100% on a Thursday.
“An example would be Will Evans who was regularly around 100% so his training became bespoke in terms of exposure to contact and he would get extra recovery.
“We made sure each player had a plan across the week. It was about going into Saturday as the best we could be. Fast forward to when we won the Premiership and we had a 92% player availability.”
Evans said the approach didn’t come without challenges but was widely accepted by the players.
“One challenge was making sure the drills were accurately tested (for the traffic light system) and we did get some of the senior players asking for more contact,” Evans said.
“It was a case of having to protect them a bit, and it often came off the back of a game where they hadn’t been happy with the contact performance.
“As coaches we had to ensure we didn’t have a kneejerk reaction to a performance like that and come the next Saturday we weren’t seeing any drop in standards.”
In response to a submitted question, Evans said that the Premiership win had seen other coaches sit up and take notice of Quins’ training methods.
“Doing more contact when you haven’t been your best is an easy trap to fall into as a coach, but that exposure can lead to challenges down the line.
“Be brave, we have benefitted from taking this step.”
“The season before our player availability was in the low 70s (%) with some of our best players missing, and we knew we needed to improve that. When we won the Premiership it was 92%.”