How Rugby Coach Sam Vesty Prepares A Team For A Final

Pressure doesn’t have to create panic. Sometimes it can create your best performance, if you coach the week the right way. Today we reflect on two powerful lessons from Sam Vesty, head coach of Northampton Saints, shared in our new release How to Be a Great Coach: Lessons from the World’s Best Coaches, Volume 2. If you lead a team, coach athletes, or manage people in high-stakes moments, these ideas translate fast.

First, we unpack “joy and clarity” as a finals-week strategy. Sam’s goal is freedom, not fear: bring players back to the wide-eyed kid who fell in love with the game. From revealing the final team with childhood photos to asking a simple question (“What would your 10-year-old self want?”), the point is to shift attention away from the scoreboard and onto controllables like intent, effort, and playing with heads up. We also talk about keeping training normal and fun, addressing nerves early, then clearing mental clutter by introducing minimal new tactics.

Second, we dig into confident decision making and the line that stops people in their tracks: “Decisive and wrong is better than passive and right.” Sam explains why hesitation is the real enemy in rugby, how overcoaching can erode belief, and how psychological safety helps players learn faster. We finish with a practical lens for feedback: treat skill errors as learning and call out effort errors without crushing confidence.

If this helps you coach under pressure, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow coach, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s one thing you’ll change in your next big week?

For all your sports equipment and some of the most innovative rugby products going around, head to silverfernsports.com.

If you want to chat directly or explore options for your school or club, flick an email to ben@coachingculture.com.au
.

Great gear. Built for coaches.

Transcript

New Book And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Welcome to Reflections, the midweek episode of the Coaching Culture podcast. What a pleasure it is to be chatting to you today, midweek. And it's been a cool week because uh the second edition edition of the How to Be a Great Coach book is now out on Amazon. The book arrived uh yesterday, uh, my first copy, and I got a look at it, and it looks fantastic. So, How to Be a Great Coach, Lessons from the World's Best Coaches, Volume 2 is now out on Amazon.com. Wherever you are in the world, you can pick it up. And it's wonderful because it follows uh some of our amazing guests that we have on the podcast from people like John Mitchell, Sam Veste, Tony Brown, McCron, Aaron Smith, to name a few. And there's a fair few on there, and it's their philosophies and what makes them a great coach. And in particular, it really hammers down on the cultural side, how we get to be better versions of ourselves using the Fair Club of Rugby to be the uh driver of that. What I'd like to do today, in light of this book arriving at my doorstep, was give you a little bit of insight to one of the guests. And I've picked one semi-at random, but also because it is the uh Six Nations Finals coming up. And I thought I would go back to Sam Veste, who is head coach of Northampton. And when we talked on the podcast last, we talked about leading up to finals and what he was doing with the Northampton Saints last time. This was a while ago. And I just want to dive into two of the two of the lessons that he has, and I'll just read those from the from the book, those chapters in the book. They're just short, but here they are. Sam Veste, head coach of Northampton Saints from the book, How to Be a Great Coach. Lesson number one, joy and clarity. In the lead up to the final, Vesty's priority was ensuring players felt joy and freedom, rather than crippling pressure. To set the tone, he and his staff announced the team's well, the final team, in an unconventional way, by projecting photos of each player as youngsters. Laughter filled the room as teammates tried to guess who was who, but beneath the fun was a serious measure. A serious message. What would your 10-year-old self want? And that's what Vesti talked about uh in our chat. Vesti asked the squad that the answer was pretty simple, that the wide-eyed kid inside each player would want them to run out, give it everything, and enjoy the occasion, not to be paralyzed by fear. By reminding his athletes of their childhood love for the game, Vesti helped them approach the final with a clear mind and genuine excitement. And I thought that was a wonderful little trick, which a few teams have done actually prior to that episode. Uh had a number of coaches come in and say that that's been done. Vesti firmly believes that players perform best when they're free and fearless. Quote, we know we're at our best when we are playing free, playing rugby with our heads up, and a real free headspace with a real positive mindset, he explained. Big game pressure, he noted, can make players go into your shell, make you go a bit quiet. So he confronted that dynamic early in the week. The Northampton Saints collectively discussed how they wanted to feel after the final, win or lose. The focus was on effort and intent rather than the scoreboard. What would they be proud of when they looked back? Players talked about staying positive, not going quiet, and putting out the best version of ourselves out there, regardless of outcome. By shifting the attention to those controllable factors, Vesti cultivated calm, clarity in the group. And as he put it, quote, you've got to know you don't win it by thinking about winning it. You win it by thinking about performing. In other words, obsessing over the result only adds weight. Focusing on the process frees you up to play your best. Throughout finals week, Vesti balanced emotional buildup with normalcy. The team addressed the nerves and excitement early, sharing feelings and acknowledging the magnitude of the game, and then put it to bed to concentrate on rugby. Training sessions were kept familiar and fun. Vesti introduced minimal new tactics, favoring very minimal, less than a normal week, quote. Additions so players weren't overloaded mentally. They could enter the final confident in the plans they'd run many times before. The result was a squad that ran out on game day, energized yet composed. By tapping into the joy of the occasion and providing clear, uncluttered focus, Vesty proved that pressure moments don't have to produce panic. They can produce peak performance. So the takeaway to this is the joy breeds clarity. Pressure doesn't have to mean panic, it can be channeled into positive energy and focus. Love that. So that's a little lesson one. And each each guest has multiple lessons. So we'll go now. We'll give you another one. We'll give it to Sam Vesti lesson two. Coaching confident decision making. One of Vesti's mantras captures his philosophy succinctly. It's this quote, decisive and wrong is better than passive and right. Ooh. In the Saints environment, hesitation is the real enemy. Vesti would rather see a playmaker make an aggressive choice and err than play it safe and avoid decisions. Quote, I'd rather be decisive and wrong than right, he said plainly, emphasizing that it's the confidence to act, not the constant correctness that leads to winning rugby. Over time, a team full of decisive players will come out, quote, making way more decisive and good decisions than wrong ones, as they learn from the experience. The message liberates players from the fear of mistakes. Knowing their coach wants them to back themselves in the moment, they play faster and more instinctively. The only way to succeed in a dynamic sport like rugby. Building that level of confidence requires a very deliberate coaching approach. Vesti learned through experience that overcoaching can undermine the very decisiveness he's trying to foster. Quote, it's quite easy to over-coach people, he admitted, reflecting that many coaches instinctively want to fix every error. Early in his coaching career, Vesti would show players clips of every mistake, thinking constant correction would lead to improvement. Instead, he found that highlighting every wrong choice only made players start to second guess themselves. Quote, I was guilty of this, showing them every time they didn't make the right decision, he said, an approach that, quote, just erodes that confidence to make decisions, end quote. When players fear the post-game video session as much as the opponent, they play it safe. Vesti came to realize that his first job is building belief. Technical perfection can come later, but a player who lacks confidence will never reach that point. Nowadays, Vesti focuses on teaching broad principles and encouraging assertiveness rather than nitpicking each outcome. Are you going to the line? Are you square? Are you looking at the cues? If so, he trusts that sometimes the player will make good decisions and sometimes bad decisions and will live with that. By consistently sending the message that effort and intent matter more than any single result, he creates a psychologically safe space for players to try things. In that space, decision-making skills actually grow. Vesti's coaching philosophy is to develop highly skilled, confident decision makers, and he stresses that, quote, the confident bit is way, way, way the most important bit. If a player is confident and decisive, Vesti can always help refine the technique or decision-making details later. But without confidence, every right technique won't be executed under pressure. This approach has a tangible on-field effect. The Saints play an open attacking style because players aren't afraid to call the ambitious play or seize a half chance. They know a missedime pass or a blown overlap won't be met with a scolding as long as it was made in the right spirit. Vesti distinguishes between skill errors, inevitable mistakes that happen when pushing your limits, and effort errors, like a lapse in concentration or not working hard off the ball. Skill errors are treated as learning opportunities. Effort errors are the ones to be addressed. This clarity lets players embrace Vesty's mantra wholeheartedly. Vesti even jokes with his backs that they should be decisive and forget whether they're getting it right or wrong. We'll have a look at it afterwards. By removing the fear of immediate rebuk, rebuke, he freezes players to trust their instinct. Over time, the dividends of this approach are clear. Players not only make faster decisions but better ones. Once the Saints embraced a culture of clarity over perfection, they often found that the right decision started to emerge more naturally. As Vesti notes, quote, when you're playing at your best, it definitely has the word decisive and some form of clear in the description. By prioritizing confidence first, he eventually gets both confidence and high quality execution. The lesson for coaches is correct decisions come from confident decision makers. Build belief first and the rest will follow. Here's the little takeaway to finish. Build players who believe they can decide, not players who fear being wrong. Confidence and clarity trump perfectionism in pressure situations. That was the first two little lessons from Sam Veste reflecting on his Northampton Saints' final appearance at the end of last season. And it's very clear when you think about the way Sam does things and the way that team operates, that they are very much products of his awesome coaching style. That's it for today's episode of Reflections. If you want to get that book, it's on Amazon now, How to Be a Great Coach. Lessons from the World's Best Coaches, Volume 2. It's the blue one. On Amazon Worldwide, we'll come to your doorstep, delivered, probably in a day or two. Till next time, stay well.