Tom Harrison

Before he’d even turned 30, with no Premiership playing experience to his name, Tom Harrison was charged with giving Dan Cole and the Leicester forwards help with their scrummaging. Just two seasons later, he is coaching England at a Rugby World Cup.

It’s just gone seven on a dim April morning at Oval Park, the training ground of Leicester Tigers in the town of Oadby. Tom Harrison, the team’s interim scrum coach, is clambering out of his car. “What are you doing in?” asks head coach Steve Borthwick as they cross paths in the car park, puzzled at his assistant’s early arrival. Their fixture that evening, a Challenge Cup semi-final against Ulster, isn’t kicking off for at least twelve hours, but Tom explains he’s come in early to help one of the props with his injury rehab. 

As Tom heads inside, he only manages a few more steps, when Borthwick calls after him. “Tommy, do you want that job?” 

The job is full-time scrum coach, a role he’d been hoping for since starting on a temporary basis at the beginning of the campaign. Tom can’t reply “yes” fast enough. “Alright,” responds his boss, “we’ll get it sorted.”

For the then-29-year-old, it was a life-changing moment. A huge vote of confidence for a young coach at a title-challenging Premiership side, coaching an area so often considered the sole domain of gnarled, seasoned front-row warriors.

On top of these challenges, Tom had no Premiership playing experience and his only top-flight coaching to speak of had been the previous six months at the then ten-time league champions. 

Recounting this story another two years on, now with a Premiership victory of his own under his belt and as the scrum coach of an England side deep into World Cup preparations, not even the planes that soar up and away from Heathrow, over the Twickenham bowl as we speak, could match the trajectory of Tom’s past few years. “You have a sense of pride,” he says. “You’re representing your country, you’re representing the people you work with, you’re representing your family. That’s the biggest overwhelming thing. 

“You have that moment, but then you go, ‘okay, let’s get the job done’. If we get the job done, how do we get better for next week? If we don’t get the job done, how do we get better for next week?”

Anyone would forgive Tom for dwelling for a moment on the emotions and the sentiment of the coming fixture, but his focus is on his role in helping develop an England side trying to find its identity. It’s a distinctly ‘Borthwickian’ attitude, a mantra rolled out like clockwork since his tenure at Tigers began, but this approach is one Steve and Tom share rather than one he’s adopted from his boss.

“I have dyslexia, it allows me to think slightly differently,” reveals Tom. “I see that as a benefit now but not when I was a kid. Mr Morris, my English teacher at school, I remember once he marked my book and there was a red line through everything, no feedback just a red line. I remember going home almost crying to my mum, but it turned out it was a shallow tick just in a red pen. For me as a coach, I look at that and think about how we go around saying ‘good’, but why was that good? How do you do that? How do you allow a person to understand why something is good? That’s the lesson I learned from that.

“Think back to any coaching session when you were a kid, if you got better you would want to stay, because you’re improving, and you feel your coaches are investing in you,” he continues. “So, we’ve got a job as coaches to make sure we are invested in people to get them better; one, because it increases performance, and two, because it creates a better environment for players.”

England’s performances have been largely disappointing in the Borthwick era but listen to anyone from his champion Leicester side and they will tell you the environment he and his coaches created, one characterised by tactical precision and clarity of purpose, was key to their rise from the ashes. The arrival of Richard Wigglesworth, Aled Walters and Tom has completed the coaching team reunion at Twickenham, which with any luck will be the final pieces in the puzzle to recreate the culture that drove their domestic success.

And how does Tom fit into that coaching jigsaw? “I sometimes describe my role as the stage manager to a performance,” he responds. “The performance is coaching, and then it’s my job to make sure it runs smoothly. I’ll assist Kev [Sinfield] with tackle technique and defence; if Wig is coaching then I’ll have a co-coaching role to assist him; when Steve comes in to do the lineout, I’ll assist him with whatever he needs. So as much as my specialist area that I’m judged upon is the performance of the scrum, my role is to help the coaches coach as best they can.” In the same way as England have opted for utility players in their World Cup squad, it seems Steve has also enlisted a Swiss-army-knife of a coach.

It’s been an intense eight weeks since he first came into camp, “But I’ve loved it,” assures Tom. “You’ve got a job where you get to work with some of the best players in the world and you’re doing something you absolutely love. You’re helping people try to achieve things that maybe they didn’t know were possible, and you’re driving towards that every single day. So, I love it.” Outwardly he may be focused on the job at hand, but it’s safe to say Tom is relishing every moment. 

For Somerset-born Tom, the route to becoming England scrum coach certainly hasn’t been the traditional, linear approach of many of his colleagues. The rest of the core coaching team, Steve Borthwick, Kevin Sinfield and Richard Wigglesworth, each have hundreds of top-level appearances and international caps to speak of, transitioning into coaching as their playing days drew to a close. In Tom’s case, it all came a whole lot earlier in life; in a journey that’s taken him from the Gloucestershire countryside to the warmth of Occitanie, from the south Devon coast to the industrial north-east, a young prop who set out with the dream of playing Premiership rugby, but quickly realised his true purpose rested in a different role. 

“I first coached when I was playing in France [for FC Auch Gers in Pro D2],” he explains. “They told me they wanted me to learn French and coach some kids. I started coaching but that was unsuccessful. I couldn’t speak any French.” 

Like many a good rugby story, Tom’s begins deep in the heartlands of southern France. The love affair with coaching needed a few years yet to fully blossom but living an hour’s drive west of Toulouse in the small ancient town of Auch, overlooking the Gers Valley, his was a unique rugby beginning. “I was at Hartpury University, and I’d just played for England Counties,” he explains. “There was another player I went to university with who was there [at Auch], and they were looking for a young prop to come and be in their squad. Auch is a small farming town, the shops are shut on match day. It’s dead, everyone goes to the ground. I think there’s probably a million and one French villages just like it.”

If moving abroad was not enough of a learning experience for a young Tom, it was at Auch that his eyes were fully opened to the importance of the scrum. “They were well known for producing props who scrummage because, at its heart, scrummaging is eight guys working together really hard, and that’s what a small town is. In the game of rugby it’s not just a restart point but a momentum swinger, and there’s an ability to build pressure through the scrum. 

“Before Auch, all I knew was university rugby,” he continues, “and there the philosophy of play is a lot more about moving the ball, the scrum being just a restart to the game.  Especially for Hartpury, when you’re playing in the national leagues against fully grown men and you’re just eighteen or nineteen, the scrum comes under a bit of heat. The idea there is get the ball in, get the ball out. In France, it was a lot more about building pressure, winning penalties.” 

In this “no scrum, no win” environment, his passion for scrummaging was fully ignited. “You can’t be a prop if you don’t love scrummaging,” he says. “If you don’t love scrummaging, I’ll find a way to make you love scrummaging.” And he’s not just talking about his players, but his wife too. “I got back after Saturday [England’s 20-9 defeat to Wales in Cardiff] and she’s going ‘so and so is x, so and so was y’. And I just laughed to myself because she’s able to watch the scrum and understand it. It’s our job, that’s what we say, not just mine.”

Tom’s stint in France proved to be foundational to coaching of the scrum and still informs his understanding of the key skills needed to be successful. “You’ve got to have the ability to problem-solve. Either you’ve been taught something or, a stronger way of problem-solving is you’ve had a past experience, so some of the older guys in the squad are helping with that. 

“[The scrum] is becoming hugely important. If you think of the weekend against Wales, three scrum penalties in the first half, that’s nine points directly from the scrum. Second half, there’s a five-minute ball-in-play passage, they win a scrum penalty, have a lineout and end up scoring off it. If they don’t win that scrum penalty, they end up kicking you the ball, but instead momentum has just swung.

“Northampton Saints scrum a different way to Leicester. For them the scrum builds pressure because they’ve got a platform to play off, where Leicester might scrummage for a penalty, that allows them to add pressure by moving the ball down the pitch. There’s no right or wrong, it’s what suits what you’ve got.

“I’ve seen games where you have the ascendency then suddenly you lose a scrum penalty, the backs go quiet, the energy drains out the team, and it all comes from one tiny mistake, one foot adjustment has swung the game.”

In the modern game the scrum is being given more focus than ever; it is increasingly technical, and games are being won and lost in this battle within the war. With this in mind, how does Tom think an old-school front row such as the fabled Leicester ABC club would fare in a scrum of today? “It wouldn’t be the scrummaging [where they’d struggle]; it would be what comes after. Front rows and second rows today have got to scrummage hard and then we’re expecting the hooker to do what a seven does, a second row to do what your number eight or six does. Physically they’ve got to be the hardest positions to play. But I’m sure the ABC club would find a way with the dark arts,” he laughs.

After his year in France, it was time for Tom to head home and pursue the dream of playing in the Premiership. He signed for then Championship club Plymouth, but took a slight detour. “I did three months in New Zealand playing for the Tauranga Raptors in the Bay of Plenty,” reveals Tom. “They were just a local team, but I was brought over as cover for their props, including Kane Hames who went on to be capped by the All Blacks that year. The props had been selected for the Bay of Plenty, so they would miss the last three games of the season, the semi-final and the final. I was told my job was to start the final. I went, I trained, played a few games, won the final, had a night out and flew home the next day.”

After a whirlwind adventure on the other side of the world, Tom was straight off the plane and into pre-season at Plymouth, where he spent two seasons playing in the second tier. He picked up a coaching role at Marjon University, helping set up their rugby programme, and it was while balancing the two that he began to realise that perhaps his future might lie away from the playing field. 

“I was a full-time rugby player, but I wasn’t a professional rugby player in terms of my behaviours,” he explains. “Being professional is about being really committed and accountable for your actions on and off the pitch. So I’d go in, I’d train hard and do what was asked of me, but when I’d go home, I’d just be living my life, trying to live a normal life. But it’s not a normal life if you really want to be a professional in what you do. Your dream is to play in the Premiership, but it wasn’t until after that I understood that. I wasn’t obsessive with it, whereas now as a coach I’m a lot more obsessive with how I want to get better.”

His next move was up north to Darlington Mowden Park, now as a player-coach but with his dreams of playing higher still intact. “I was following a guy who’d also played at Plymouth, and he went to Darlington and in one year he got picked up and ended up playing for Harlequins. I went up there thinking I was going to do the same, I had been playing ahead of him at Plymouth. But then you get there, and you don’t get that opportunity.

“I started coaching more when I was there, and then a mate of mine helped me get down to Stourbridge to play and coach. At that point, as a coach I’m saying x, y and z but I couldn’t do x, y and z as well as I was asking players to do it. I realised that they aren’t going to listen if you can’t do it. That was when I made the decision really [to focus on coaching].”

The brutal truth came from his wife. “She said to me: ‘You realise you’re a better coach than you are player?’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’ And she said: ‘When you speak about coaching this energy comes out of you. I’ve watched you play enough to know you’re not actually going to make it, but I knew if I told you, you weren’t going to listen to me’.”

Coaching soon filled up almost every hour of Tom’s diary. Taking on a full-time role at Loughborough College during the day, Monday nights were spent with the Leicester academy pathway, Tuesdays and Thursdays were with Stourbridge as well as match days on a Saturday. A year later he joined the Leicester academy full time to set up the AASE (Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence) programme, a certain George Martin part of his first cohort, but continued to coach far and wide. “I coached my way up through the academy and while I was doing that I was working at Cambridge, Loughborough and Nottingham. Even up until last year I’d coach the first team on a Tuesday, then I’d drive up to coach our senior academy at Loughborough, get back in the car and drive up to Nottingham and coach our other senior academy guys. 

“If you’re not busy you become bored, but there are hard times where you’re driving home and realising it’s been twenty hours door to door. You’re parking the car laughing. I’m grateful for the support network of my wife, my family and her family to allow me to do what I do. People say players and coaches make sacrifices, but we don’t, we make decisions. It’s the loved ones around us that make sacrifices.”

The hours Tom has dedicated to enhancing his coaching skills puts his relative youth into perspective. For many people’s money Tom seems too inexperienced to be a coach for England (after all, this is a guy whose first memories of watching England are the 2003 World Cup), but that depends what currency you’re dealing in. If fifty international caps, years in the coaching box or at the very least a recognisable name are what you’re looking for, then certainly you will feel short-changed. But for Tom, that doesn’t tell the full story. “People say oh, you’re a young coach. I am a young coach, but if you actually added up the hours of coaching I’ve done a lifetime, at different ages and stages. I’ve still got a long, long way to go.” 

He certainly has a point; even Borthwick himself would struggle to claim as many hours coaching as Tom has racked up over the last decade. Either way, it’s been a sharp learning curve for the 32-year-old. “At Leicester I went from coaching under-18s to then, you’re in a room with Tom Youngs and Dan Cole and you’re working with them. You’re going ‘okay, here we go’. They were phenomenal in the way they bought into what I wanted to do, made improvements, suggestions and helped drive that Leicester scrum back to being a formidable force. I was very fortunate that the tools I was working with were sharp, but I couldn’t thank them enough for the way they applied themselves.”

Tom is careful to word that he’s working with his forwards rather than frame himself as the man in charge. Perhaps the age and experience of the likes of Cole, Joe Marler and Jamie George naturally shapes that more egalitarian relationship, however it is a partnership that blossomed at Leicester, so why not at England? “It is their performance at the weekend, but what they put out will represent me,” he says. “There will be a time and a place for me to say ‘we’re doing x, y and z’, but we have to get there together. Any brilliant thing is a collaboration of many ideas coming together; you have to come together and have a shared model.” 

With the manner of his ascendence to the international stage and the furrowed brows of his sceptics, self-doubt is inevitable. However, Tom wouldn’t want it any other way. “I think everyone in the world has felt it. People are worried about how they are judged. I work on a basis of just being so good that people can’t ignore you. You definitely have moments where you’re thinking if you’re doing the right thing, but someone once told me if you don’t doubt if you’re good enough to coach international rugby, you are going to fail, because it makes you stop questioning things. If you think you know everything, you’ve got a short shelf-life.” 

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Ben McDade

This extract was taken from issue 23 of Rugby.
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