Arden David completes Premier coaching team
Former Jubilee Cup winning captain Arden David will join the Marist St Pats Premier coaching team for 2018 focusing on defence and mental skills. The club is very fortunate to have Arden in a position to work closely alongside Robbo, Bernie and Murray and with our players, building on the work he has been doing in the club in recent years.
For Arden, defence is a passion. He knows that championship success is built on defence and he is excited to implement some new ideas in 2018 based on the learning's of last season - when he took on a lead defensive coaching role midway through the season.
When asked about the keys to success, Arden notes these three areas:
1. Attitude - you have to get excited not having the ball, you have to be as hungry on defence as you are on attack. It's easy to pick out who doesn't want to come to the 'party' simply by their intent on defence.
2. Fundamentals - you're only as good as the effort you put into your individual work-ons. If you want to be a better tackler, or improve a weaker shoulder you have to tackle, its about repetition and working on the micro skills until mastery.
3. System - you can have the best system in the world but if the player doesn't want to be there and they can't tackle they will get found out. But if the first two ingredients are there and all player are working together in our defence system, that's when thing go really well.
'I am privileged to have many great coaches and some great defence minded coaches particularly Shaun Edwards at Wasps and Kevin Horan at MSP who prided themselves on defence being the heart of successful teams.'
On the mental skills side, this is an area Arden has been working on with our players over the past few seasons and will continue to do so this year. The sessions he holds with players focus on developing the skills they need to be successful on and off the field.
'Outside of this my role as Degree Leader and Senior Lecturer on the Youth Development is to prepare youth development workers with the knowledge and skills to help transform and shape the lives of young people towards positive outcomes.'
'Over the last two years the major themes to emerge are empowering players to realise they have the potential and as easy as it sounds you can't force a player to believe in themselves and see their potential and as much the coaches and I can tell them they have to believe it, see it and breathe it!'
'It takes time and depending where they are at we personalise our approach to get the best out of them not just as rugby players but to be great men and women outside of sport in their community. At the moment I'm closely working with NZ Rugby around a positive youth development approach and will be observing the Super Rugby induction day in a few weeks to get a sense of the what is working well and also how they can improve in a few areas.'
Earlier in the year we caught up with Arden and Victor Vito to talk about developing mental skills...
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