Interview with Head Coach - Sam Larner

Sam Larner (@SamLStandsUp) joined Old Bedians as Head Coach in September 2021.
The 29 year-old has been playing rugby since the age of six with his first rugby club Illingworth Rugby League before switching codes to Old Brodleians RUFC.

Sam began his coaching career in 2012, he co-hosts the performance analysis podcast "Running the Numbers", writes for Rugby World Magazine and Rugby World Cup and last year launched the YouTube series Whiteboard Rugby to explain what happens in our great sport.

We sit down with Sam to get to know more about his career to date, the coaching ethos he has brought to the club and his proudest moment with Bedians.

When and Why did you join the club?
I joined Bedians in September 2020. I'd moved back up to live in Yorkshire during the Pandemic, after being down in London and then Sussex since 2010, and I was looking for a coaching opportunity. I posted something on Twitter seeing if there were any interested teams and James (Hennigan) got in contact. I committed to coaching to the end of 2021 with the expectation that I would be moving back down south, but I'm now here until the end of the season at least and will be staying up in the area.

Can you give us a brief potted history of your playing and coaching career?
I have played rugby for 23 years now. I started off playing rugby league in Halifax and then moved onto union shortly after. I was a scrum-half and winger in my youth and then moved to London for University. I didn't fancy the idea of Uni rugby and so joined local club Wanstead on the London/Essex border. I was there for around seven years. I loved my time playing at Wanstead and played fly-half as we pushed for promotion. Thanks to being a uni student without much else to do, I also helped out coaching the colts. Unfortunately, I got injured and began focusing solely on coaching our U16s and then colts for two seasons. After that, I moved down to Sussex and coached Ditchling before getting back into playing. My last game for them was a victory over Hove just a week before the lockdowns began.

What’s been your proudest moment with Bedians to date?
We order in pizzas for training sessions after both teams have won at the weekend. Those are my proudest moments. We are one club and seeing both teams celebrating each other's success is a great reward for all the hard work the lads put in on a Wednesday and at the weekend.

Many people in the rugby world will know you from your performance analysis work, just how important is the analysis side of the game and what approach have you been taking to Bedians?
Analysis is absolutely crucial whatever your level. If we don't know what's wrong, we can't fix it. Although we might think we have an intuition for what happened during a game, research shows we only remember around 70% of a match and even then, we have biases which impact how we remember it. At Bedians I collect data for how we do on our entries into the opposition 22 and how they do when they get to ours. It's simple stuff that any team can collect but it really helps us to improve our play in the most important areas of the pitch.

What coaching ethos and style of play have you brought to the club?
As a coach, you have two simple jobs; make sure people improve and make sure they keep coming back. It can be tempting to follow the coaches we see on telly and shout and bawl, but at this level, people can just go elsewhere if they don't like the environment. I also want to see players improving and reaching their potential. I have been delighted, this season, to see so many players step up from the twos and contribute excellently to our ones.

In terms of playing style, I reckon I have watched about 20 hours of Bedians' rugby this season in matches. That is a lot of rugby to watch if it's boring. Our big aim in attack is to be entertaining. We have high skill levels but relatively small size so we need to be an entertaining team. In defence we just want to have pride in stopping teams from getting over any white lines. Not just stopping them from getting over our try line but also stopping them from escaping their own 22 or their own half. Our defence has been one of our best attributes this year.

What message would you give to someone looking to join a new club like Bedians who hasn't played in a while or is new to the sport?
Come and join us for a session on a Wednesday. We take our rugby seriously but, as a unit, we want all our players to improve. The great thing about coming back to rugby or starting for the first time is that you will improve really quickly. We also put no pressure on you to play. If you want to get stuck in straight away, there will be a spot, but if you want to take a few weeks and build up your confidence, then that is fine as well. Finally, I have been blown away by how welcoming the club is. Whether you are brand new or firmly in the vet's camp, you'll definitely enjoy the social side.

Who is your inspiration and why?
I've been lucky to have a had a few inspirational coaches over my time playing. At Wanstead, Jeremy Walmsley was the first person who actually made rugby training fun and he was always a great leader. I've had some really good teachers in school and university who really pushed the idea that you should always want to improve at everything you do and that's something I've tried to keep doing. Finally, Mike Prendergast (Attack Coach at Racing 92) and Steff Bennett (Analyst at Cardiff) have both been incredibly supportive over the last couple of years. It is always surprising to me how different elite sports environments are to what you might expect. The ideas of enjoyment, fun, and togetherness are often more obvious there than they are at lower level clubs where the stakes are so much lower.

Which sports star did you admire when you’re younger?
I was a huge Dwayne Peel fan when I was young. He was Welsh and played in my position and so I was instantly drawn to him. Plus, he seemed pretty short on TV which, as someone pretty short, was comforting. It turns out he's actually considerably taller than me. I remember watching a video where he explained that he passed 100 times off each hand everyday. That work ethic was something that I always embraced when it came to rugby, less so with work.

What are your aspirations for the club?
We did a survey earlier in the season to understand why people come and play rugby at Old Bedians. It is tempting as a coach to assume that everyone feels the same way about the sport that you do, but that's not the case. People get lots of different things out of the sport, as the survey showed. For example, almost everyone was really clear about wanting to get better at rugby but the other benefits were more varied and included things like fitness and enjoying spending time with mates. When you think about it, that is pretty obvious. Players, quite rightly, prioritise things like weddings or family holidays over matches and we're very relaxed about that. We also tailor our training to make sure players are moving and are getting that fitness benefit. We also open the clubhouse on a Wednesday after training so that our players can have a drink together.

That doesn't mean we don't take our rugby seriously; for 90 minutes on a Wednesday and 80 on a Saturday that is our sole focus. You can see that in our successful season so far for our twos and a dual league and cup push by our ones. But, at the end of the season, when we are measuring how successful the year has been, we will be factoring not just on pitch performance but off pitch as well. In short, we want to win rugby matches and progress up the leagues and we will keep doing that until it negatively impacts the culture we have created off it.

Finally, what makes Bedians so special?
I have never been part of a club which is this welcoming and also has this many quality players who have no egos. We have Internationally capped players, players who have previously played at very good levels, and very talented rising stars but nobody is above receiving feedback. We don't have any cliques and we have a free flow of players moving between our ones and twos, a sign of a healthy club. I certainly can't take any credit for this, it's clearly been ingrained for a long time and won't be changing any time soon. Finally, rugby gets a bad wrap for being very 'laddy' at times. I've certainly played at clubs where this was the case. Bedians don't have any of that, so if you're fed up with the atmosphere at your current club, you'd definitely enjoy ours.