McMillan's coaching philosophy is 'player empowerment and trying to promote people to the next level'

CULTURE: Munster Head Coach Clayton McMillan is key on building a culture and deep connection between team and community. Pic: ©INPHO/Nick Elliott

For a man who shies away from being nailed down to a coaching philosophy, new Munster head coach Clayton McMillan has very definite ideas about the necessity for a strongly identifiable culture within the province.

To the New Zealander’s mind, a team’s performance cannot be successful without a strong culture behind it and the 51-year-old believes that comes through building deep connections, not only within his squad but also between his players and the community they play in, and for.

Six weeks into a three-year contract which brought him to Ireland as URC title-winning head coach Graham Rowntree’s permanent successor after guiding the Chiefs to three successive Super Rugby finals, McMillan met the media for the first time at Munster’s High Performance Centre in Limerick on Tuesday and set out a stall that has already, anecdotally at least, impressed staff and players alike.

One of his opening gambits during a 30-minute session was his belief that Munster’s famed Red Army was not just the supporters who follow their heroes through thick and thin.

“I don't see it being them and us; I see us all being part of that army,” McMillan said, and later added: “I'm a big believer in the culture piece.

“I think culture comes before performance. We're in a combative sport and you want to build deep connections so that when those moments come in the game, you jump out of the trenches, and you want to be certain that people are going to follow you.

“That doesn't come without putting the time into building your team culture and doing things away from the rugby field that help build those deep connections.

“And you can do that in a number of ways, right? There's some fun activities you can do. You can do it through hard work in different ways and I'm sure you've seen some videos where we've been doing hill walking and we've been doing swimming and there's a lot of people that found that extremely tough, the swimming part.

“We've been doing boxing, we've been challenging the players mentally and physically in lots of different ways and through that accumulated grind, I think you just get tighter as a rugby team and we won't know if that's actually the case until we really get put under heat, but there's nothing that I've seen that would suggest that we won't jump out of the trenches together.” 

As for a coaching philosophy, the former No.8 said he was all about “player empowerment and trying to promote people to the next level”.

“The high-performance piece, and something I'm happy to share, is that I believe leaders create culture. Culture is driven by behaviours and behaviours determine outcomes.

“What you see on Saturday is the easy part. That's just the performance. Everything that goes into the performance is largely driven by what you do day to day. We're driving hard standards and behaviours that will keep us in good stead when we're under the blow torch on game day. That has to be driven by myself.

“To be fair, these blokes want to be better. They don't have any problems around understanding what's important to us, if we come in every day and try to be the best version that they can.” 

How good that best version can be remains to be seen with the new URC season still three weeks away but McMillan, referencing the summer departures of Peter O’Mahony, Conor Murray, Dave Kilcoyne and Stephen Archer, said: "I don't think we're the finished product but if the perspiration and mental aspiration is there then we're in pretty good stead.

"We've lost some significant experience but I'm really encouraged that our guys see real opportunity to step forward from the shadows and into the light to showcase the ability that they have.

"So I've been really encouraged, that's been really solidified after the performance that we had against Gloucester (last Friday). We didn't end up winning the game but we have been very methodical about how we've gone about our pre-season and it's the same this week as it was last week, we had big training days Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, full travel day Thursday, played Friday.

"The boys understood that we were going to go into that game a little bit cooked or feeling tired, but it's an evil necessity at this time of the year when we're playing on a Friday and it's all set up to hopefully get us the best possible start in the first rounds of the URC.”