Claim OwnershipCoaching Culture with Ben Herring
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Coaching Culture with Ben Herring is your weekly deep-dive into the often-overlooked “softer skills” of coaching—cultural innovation, communication, empathy, leadership, dealing with stress, and motivation. Each episode features candid conversations with the world’s top international rugby coaches, who share the personal stories and intangible insights behind their winning cultures, and too their biggest failures and learnings from them. This is where X’s and O’s meet heart and soul, empowering coaches at every level to foster authentic connections, inspire their teams, and elevate their own coaching craft. If you believe that the real gold in rugby lies beyond the scoreboard, Coaching Culture is the podcast for you.
159 Episodes
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The best coaching stories aren’t about the whiteboard, they’re about what happens years later when an old player stops traffic just to give you a hug. That’s where this conversation with John Plumtree goes fast: past trophies and into the parts of rugby coaching and leadership that actually last. Plum has coached at the highest levels with the Sharks, the Hurricanes, Ireland, and the All Blacks, and he brings a grounded view of culture that cuts through the usual slogans. We talk about the h...
A school with 2,100 students shouldn’t feel like a family, yet that’s exactly what we found at Grange School in Santiago, Chile. I’m joined by Francesco “Pancho” Pinha, former Chile captain, lifelong teacher, and the proud tradition keeper who helps explain why this program keeps producing an extraordinary share of Chile’s national team players and leaders. We talk about what “culture” looks like when it’s lived for decades: consistency over many years, coaches who care, and fundamentals don...
A state school winning at Twickenham sounds like a fairy tale until you hear how Northampton School for Boys actually built it. We sit down with Phil Beaumont and Simon Heffer, the leaders behind NSB rugby’s decade-long rise from six teams to 18 teams and hundreds of players, all in a non-selective, lottery-intake comprehensive where rugby is optional. What makes it work is not a single golden generation, it’s a repeatable system that keeps producing confident players and tight-knit squads ye...
Poor culture doesn’t just create problems you can see. It quietly steals the best parts of your team: the extra effort people would have given, the performance you expected from talented staff, and the potential that never gets a chance to emerge. We bring a high performance lens from elite sport into everyday leadership, because the same culture patterns show up in offices, businesses, and teams of every kind. We unpack three big costs. First, lost effort: when people do “just enough” becau...
A school can have great buildings, strong results, and a proud sports history and still miss the thing that actually makes young people thrive. We sit down with Andy Turner, principal of Tauranga Boys’ College in New Zealand, to unpack what he calls “invisible strength” and why school culture and team culture start with beliefs and values long before they show up as traditions, standards, or slogans. We get specific about boys’ education and leadership: the biggest message young men share is...
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