Hockey’s Transformers: Shane McLeod

HOCKEY’S TRANSFORMERS: SHANE MCLEOD

Player. Coach. Nurturer of Orange Groves.

Shane McLeod coached the Belgium Men’s Team from #15 in the world to #1. From Silver at the 2016 Rio Olympics to Gold at the 2018 Men’s Hockey World Cup he maintained The Red Lions’ dominance clinching the 2019 European Championships, the 2020 FIH Pro League and taking gold at Tokyo2020. Here, the humble New Zealand-born coach tells us his David and Goliath story; why coaching is a calling, why images can change minds and matches, why the magic happens between the extremes of winning and losing; and why it is better to grow an orange grove than to squeeze the orange dry.

You started your hockey career as a player. What pulled you into the game and kept you there for so long?

It all started with my aunt who was the manager of the New Zealand women’s team for 14 years. She took me under her wing, taking me to games and I sort of learnt the sport without officially playing it at the start. It wasn’t until I was 11 that I played my first hockey match but by that stage I had watched so much hockey, I knew all the rules and I had a really good feel for the game. That gave me quite a bit of success as a youngster.

I played all through high school and made the New Zealand age group sides before breaking into the Black Sticks. At around the same time I was given a playing contract in France and I caught the travel bug. Alongside my love of the game I developed a love for different cultures, people, places. Travelling between France and New Zealand ultimately cut my international career as a player short, but it started to open other doors into what became my coaching career.

Can you describe your journey from hockey player to international coach?

When I was playing in France, I was approached by a Belgium club to join them as a player/coach focusing on both high performance and youth development. That was the transition moment for me. I did 7-8 years there before returning home in 2007 to coach the New Zealand men’s team for the Beijing and London Olympics. I began coaching Belgium in 2015 and it’s been quite a ride.

But coaching for me was always a calling. It doesn’t really feel like a profession. I had always wanted to teach, I studied at teachers’ college and coaching allowed me to combine those skills and a love of sport. It is incredibly rewarding and I have always felt the pull of that. I think this has helped me to navigate my way through different cultures and teams and make the transition from player to coach. The fact that I was still playing when I started coaching also helped. I was always the player who helped to get things organised, I always wanted to have a good training session so I would help with the planning. Coaching was an intuitive step for me.

Did you envisage your coaching career going as far as it has?

As much as coaching came naturally to me, what was surprising to me was how far I got as a coach. It was never really my ambition to coach the world’s best team or to become number one until relatively recently. It was always about doing the best you can with the quality of the team you have. One of my coaching beliefs is that success is a by-product of doing a whole lot of things well. If you just focus on the winning and losing, it is too binary. Most of the development happens between the extreme highs of winning and losing.

You’ve been involved in hockey for 50 years, over 20 of those as a top-level coach. How has it evolved over that time?

One of the biggest changes has been the transition from grass to turf and what has always impressed me about the game is that it is always evolving. We have never been too proud to say that we’re not the finished product. We haven’t been afraid to experiment as players and administrators and to change the rules to keep the game moving forward.

One of the great things I have seen in Europe is smaller squares of turf going down and the encouragement of free-play. Young players are being given the freedom to emulate what their heroes are doing on the pitch which creates a vibrant and inspiring environment at the club level that is just growing and growing. Initiatives like this also enhance the accessibility of the game.

What skills does the modern game require of the top players and how do you see hockey skills evolving in the future?

With the advent of turf, and a consistently flat surface, the game has become more aerial adopting more features from the indoor game. The 3D skills that have resulted have taken the ball off the ground much more and it has added a speed and a power component to our game that was just not there 30 years ago. You see it in the type of athletes there are now – it has moved from a speed endurance sport to a power and agility one.

The next evolution is mastery of the aerial game. The top teams have the ability to move the ball so effortlessly around the field. The ball speed is high; that ability to stop and receive a ball in motion is astonishing and they don’t even slow down to do it. Everything is played at top pace. I think at some point in time, the 5-meter radius rule for aerial balls may just go because the players are just so incredibly skilful that the presence of danger is almost eliminated.

You coached Belgium Men’s Team to World Cup victory in 2018 and Olympic Gold in Tokyo two years later. What innovations did it take to achieve and maintain that success?

There have been two key factors for our success at Belgium. One is the introduction of a development initiative called the ‘Be Gold Programme’ which is focused on up-skilling the youth and challenging athletes at all age levels to create more rounded players. There has been a huge amount of investment into this which has had a big impact.

When the players come out the top of this system, there has been a dedicated focus at the elite coaching end to raise their expectations. Part of my job has been to give them the confidence and the reassurance that they have the ability to go further.

So, we have done a lot of work on the culture of the team; what makes a team?; how will we judge success?; how do we want to be seen by the world? For me, this cultural piece was crucial in taking the Belgium team beyond what they’d been able to do before.

It has been a process. Learning how to give and receive feedback is as important as knowing how to give and receive a pass. We systematically tried to build a team that had resilience, that was able to take their skills and turn those skills into the best in the world.

How did you tackle the cultural challenges within the team?

Belgium is a fascinating country – in fact it is almost like two countries because of the dual language. One of the particular challenges we faced was how to bridge the cultural divide between the Flemish and French-speaking sides of the squad. I didn’t speak either language so was able to neutralise and observe. I realised that in adapting the language we adopted as a team according to the opposition we could turn a potential weakness into a strength. So, if we were up against France all our tactical talk would be in Flemish, and if we were up against Holland, we’d converse in French and they wouldn’t know what was going on.

“You can squeeze an orange and really get a lot of juice out. A dictator coach gets results in this way but they are very short lived. I like to grow an orange grove.”

Belgium is a small hockey country. How did you overcome this challenge?

As a small country, surrounded by big hockey nations we had a David and Goliath challenge. Changing the expectation of being able to win those big games was a great project. One of the things we did was create a 3D playbook – which we called our Olympic Room. We put poster-sized photos of each member of the squad in dominant positions against the big nations - Germany, Australia, Holland – which the players would see every day. Being bombarded with images of their dominance against the countries that had always held such mystique really started to change their mindset. We demystified those nations and the players started to believe they could beat them.

I also believe in the power of telling the story of growth as it is happening rather than after it has happened. If you do this, it builds momentum and belief within the team and becomes self-perpetuating. Not only did it change the way we talked about ourselves but also the course of how our competition talked about us. We went from being the ‘easy beats’ to ‘a hard day at the office’. Our competition started to do our advertising for us.

Why do you think your coaching philosophy worked and is it the future?

Belgium is surrounded by a couple of big nations – it’s the little brother of Germany and Holland - and I grew up in New Zealand which is much softer and more humble than the very confident Australians next door. So, there was an easy connection there. But I believe my coaching approach is universal. The world around us is changing compared to when I started playing and I believe that it is a good way to coach going forward regardless of the team. I coach how I would like to be coached and I think all players like that. You can squeeze an orange and really get a lot of juice out. A dictator coach gets results in this way but they are very short lived. I like to grow an orange grove. To produce more oranges that you nurture. I give the athletes much more ownership than we’ve seen in the past. The moment you have to stop driving an athlete because they are driving themselves, that’s when you have a successful programme.

What drew you back to Belgium as assistant coach earlier this year and how have you approached your new role within the team?

It goes back to the orange grove. It has always been a team effort and by observing from another layer back, I am still making an impact whilst giving space to the new head coach and his squad. They are an incredibly respectful group of players and because of the culture we have created, we can do this.

Alongside your hockey commitments you have moved into motivational speaking. What inspired you to do this and what lessons have you taken from the pitch into the board room?

I have always been incredibly nervous speaking to large groups of people and the best way to get over that was to expose myself to it. Now I really quite enjoy it because there is such a close alignment between high-performance sport and business. I am in the business of working with people and getting the best out of them, of creating successful cultures, which is as relevant to companies as it is to hockey. The story of what we did with the Red Lions is an inspiring one and companies like the parallel. The Belgium narrative of going from #15 in the world to #1 is aspirational for businesses and abstract enough to be non-threatening. They are not comparing themselves to competitors but to the world of sport and anything they take-away from that conversation is an ‘addition’ that could give them a competitive edge.