Home Truths

Craig Bellamy has presided over one of professional sports’ great dynasties. Since Bellamy took the reigns at the Melbourne Storm in 2003, the team have made sixteen preliminary finals (last four), lost five Grand Finals, and won five* Grand Finals.

Perhaps most impressive is the culture that has been created to facilitate sustained success that now spans into a third generation of players.

In 2013, Bellamy wrote a book called Home Truths where he shed some light into how they created (at least the first half of) their famed winning streak. When coaches write books mid-career, they don’t tend to give too much away, but there are still craft lessons galore that I wanted to share with you.

Since each chapter is a broad theme, here is the best idea in each chapter:

#1 Life

• “The big thing for me is loyalty. If you asked me how I would like the people in my life to describe me, I would like them to think that I am loyal.”

#2 Leadership

• “If you watch a team often enough, and they haven’t got good leadership, you can see that on the field. They are inconsistent from week to week. They are inconsistent in games, during certain periods. When they are under pressure, you can see that no one is taking the game by the scruff of the neck and saying ‘hey, this is what we need to do now’. All clubs go through tough periods throughout a year, and tough periods in a game. That’s when your leaders say ‘this is what we must do now’ and then they go and lead that process.”

#3 Character

• “Football clubs have an obligation to teach their players how to be respectful, and how to be a person of integrity. When a person makes a stand on a matter of principle – that is strength of character.”

#4 Adversity

• “With individuals, the guys who take a bit of taming to get into the team framework are the ones who suffer the most when they are injured. To them, being part of the success when the team wins is more important than just being part of the team. They need that spotlight for their ego. They enjoy the adulation more than the others, and they struggle with injuries more than the others.”

#5 Discipline

• “The late Jack Gibson, rugby league’s ‘Coach of the Century’, had a great line that puts it a different way: ‘You can’t be a dickhead all week and play good on Sunday.’ You might get away with it for a week, but if you don’t want to train hard, don’t expect to play well on Sunday. That sums it up.”

#6 Courage and Toughness

• “Courage is when you are in a situation where you might get hurt. In those times, courage probably comes from the heart, because the head is saying ‘get out of the road’. It comes from the heart. I reckon that’s what courage is. Mental toughness, on the other hand, is all about making sure you are doing all those physically hard things when you are really tired on your try-line and you know you have defended the last three or four sets. You are under pressure to make sure you keep tackling, to make sure you keep moving up. You know you’re stuffed, but you know you have to get up there again, and if someone runs at you, he has to be tackled. It’s being able to do it under the blowtorch like that.”

#7 Teamwork

• “You hear this cliché all the time: There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’. But I disagree. The first thing I will say about teamwork is that I reckon you need to be an individual. You have to think about yourself. There has to be ego involved. The first thought has to be ‘this is what I’ve got to do’. Then, the second part is the team, because ‘if I do this really well then it’s going to help the team’. You cannot just think team all the time.”

#8 Success and Failure

• “I’ve improved at being able to question myself and critically analyse our performances even when we’re going through a winning patch. Sometimes you can be fooled into thinking ‘yeah, we’re going okay’, and you do not look at yourself as thoroughly as you should. You have to check yourself when the results are going your way as well, not just when they are going against you.”

#9 Humility

“If you have some substance about you, you will treat everyone with respect because it doesn’t make a difference who they are or what they have done. You treat others how you would like to be treated. You talk to them how you would like to be spoken to. Give them the time you would like to be given. That’s the point. Whatever a person has done, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t matter. You’re exactly the same: we’re all people. I mention this every now and then but we don’t hone a message about treating people properly because that is an underlying expectation we have at the Storm.”

#10 Professionalism

• “We would like to think the standards we set are pretty high, but that people are looking to go beyond that as well. My message to the guys at the Storm is ‘just because they’re our standards doesn’t mean you can’t aim higher than that’. Without a doubt you can. It comes back to being the best you can be; not the best in the world, or in this team, or even in this room. If you don’t do the other things in your life when you are not under the eye of the coaching staff, or your boss, it will catch you out.”

#11 Management

“I have heard Wayne Bennett say that ‘man management’ is 90 per cent of the job as a professional football coach. To my way of thinking, it’s not quite that much, but it’s certainly a really important part of an NRL coach’s role. I maintain the belief that doing my homework on the opposition players and letting my players know the dangers that are going to come when the opposition has the footy are really important parts of my responsibilities. But certainly man management is equally imperative.”

#12 Emotion

• “I think anybody who has seen TV footage of our coaching box during a game would appreciate the emotional rollercoaster I go through at times. I am not like that all the time, I can assure you. But as an NRL coach, a lot of emotions run through your head at different times, and it is unavoidable in my view. Anger, frustration, disappointment, confusion, disbelief, satisfaction, elation, relief . . . it’s all that and more.”

#13 Responsibility

• “Everyone in the chain has got a job to do. Some have bigger jobs than others, but it’s really important my players know what their role is – whether it be in this play, in that defensive structure or whatever. That is my job, and it is the same principle with the staff. Once they know what they are responsible for and what their little parcel is, they should feel responsible for that and it should build a small sense of pride: ‘That bit is mine.’ Then, they become accountable to their teammates because if they don’t get that part right, their teammate next to them cannot get their part right.”

#14 Mateship

• “Your good mates will stick up for you when you are going through some tough times, that’s a given. I’ve seen some textbook examples of blind friendship in my time, when a guy has done the wrong thing but his mate will still stick up for him. I respect that.”