Understanding long-term player development

Let me take you back to Ireland in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and to the sport where I have existed for quarter of a century – rugby union.

And also to the Emirates Stadium in North London, 2024.

A gentleman named Liam Hennessy instilled a system in Ireland two decades ago where long-term athletic development was a staged pathway. Nothing new here, I hear you say. However, it was given such priority and placed high enough up the agenda within the corridors of power that it made people’s ears twitch in competing nations. I was working in Wales, and the narrative at the time was: ‘What are these Irish up to?’ 

And yet, as all of us who work in sport know, the distractions of the day-to-day rollercoaster of meetings, monitoring, preparation, execution, session planning, feedback, playing and training made us all concentrate on our own here and now and forget about what our competitors were up to.

Big mistake.

The Irish model of long-term player development

Fast forward 15 years and I’m working in Wasps with one of Liam Hennessy’s proteges Gordon Brett, and each time I hear him speak about some of our promising youngsters (step forward soon-to-be British Lion Elliot Daly and England stalwarts Will Stuart and Jack Willis), I have to take time to lift my jaw back off the floor at the ignorance in my own practices.

As a performance lead at Cardiff and having overseen the development and fast-tracking of over 50 internationals myself I considered myself somewhat of a LTAD guru, based on the players that come through. But I suddenly realised that there was a group of people in the Emerald Isle who had been strategising in a fourth dimension while we were measuring force platform data thinking we were clever and ahead of the curve.

Now we were all familiar – if not fully engaged quite yet along the entire pathway – with seeing players developed according to capability as well as age, with stage-appropriate standards and practices applied along the way, but following criteria and checking off boxes was only the start. What I was hearing was that for the last decade in Ireland, this was not only a resource and provision exercise. It wasn’t just about an allocated ratio of physios per player, or the monitoring of loads or competencies achieved, or about strategic group thinking and aligned behaviour.

It was education as well as allocation. They were emphasising the importance of training age before the intervention of a measurable competitive environment – in other words development comes first, right up until the final stages where competition takes over. There was a large weight placed on conditioning and S&C earlier (teaching fundamentals), but placing holistic and behavioural domains front and centre.

The Irish model taught a player on how to behave in and around training. It emphasised coachability of the player and understanding of learning style. It prioritised self-reliance in preparation and behaviour (hello, all players waiting for the coach to warm you up). It created education on aspects performance-adjacent. There was an acknowledgment of, and alignment to, standards both positional and age-appropriate (no generic targets here for under-18s to hit). Here was, and (sadly for the competition) is, a system also understanding of the patience required to progress. The end result of this has been a generation of sports people graduating from one level age grade to the next, and through the academies with extra layers of skills, understanding and competencies in readiness to be tested again.

The Irish were stealing a march on the rest of us by researching and measuring their own practices so well, and so often, that they were finding out relationships and correlations in their practices that others would take years to even realise existed. By the time the competition had seen the need to adapt their training, the Irish were four years ahead having already realised it then and modified. Here is one for you – they have already realised, and are putting into practice, a concept that most S&C coaches and physios will still argue over in a decade thereby torpedoing any chance of learning from its truth: players with a higher workload in their late teens and early 20s have a greater capacity to endure a career in professional sport.

Put your tomatoes down, and please don’t put me in the stock at midday: I’m merely reporting it. Ireland are creating so many top-level professional rugby union players whose performances bely their age that everyone is looking to attribute other reasons for their success. The private school system, some say. The Irish governmental tax breaks, say others. The concentration of rugby talent around Dublin, another popular one. Correct application of a perfectly aligned system is the newest reason on the block. The truth is, they are all correct, but they don’t explain how so many competent, conditioned, skilled, injury-resilient, tactically aware, mature players are being churned out by Ireland before the age of 22.