LIFE IN THE new Super Rugby Americas competition involves a hell of a lot of travel. Sligo man Simon Coulter is starting to get worried about the speed at which his passport is filling up.
Coulter is the head of performance for the Cobras, Brazil’s professional club team, and their recent travel has looked like this: Fly to Uruguay, back to Brazil, up to the US, back to Brazil, and on to Argentina, where he was when we spoke this week.
They were due to head back to Brazil briefly after their clash with the Dogos XV, then fly out to Paraguay, return home, go back to Argentina, then head for Chile before two home games to wrap up the regular season. The air miles are off the charts.
“I’m not joking here but if we get into the semi-finals, I’m not sure I’ll be able to go because I have no pages left in my passport from all the stamps,” says Coulter on a video call from the city of Córdoba in central Argentina.
“I have to go to the embassy and see if they can stick in a few pages.”
These days, having joined the Brazilian set-up in January, the sprawling São Paulo is Coulter’s base. It’s Brazil’s most populous city and Brasil Rugby is set up there.
It’s fair to say it’s a long way from the village of Skreen in Sligo.
“São Paulo is a bit different to Sligo, 23 million people different!” says Coulter with a smile.
“It’s the real concrete jungle of the Americas, not New York. It’s massive. When you take off at night from the airport, the lights just don’t end.
“It’s a busy place, not the place to go and see out your days in a relaxed way. It’s non-stop going. It was raining the other day and it took us three hours to get to the airport because the traffic built up. You could drive from Sligo to Dublin Airport in less time than that.”
37-year-old Coulter isn’t the only Sligo RFC representative in São Paulo. He played for the club throughout his youth and also in the AIL when he wasn’t away travelling, so he enjoys having a few others who have played at Hamilton Park.
Brazil’s technical director is Josh Reeves, a native of New Zealand who married a Brazilian, moved over with her and became eligible to play out-half for Os Tupis.
Coulter first met Reeves in Uruguay in 2019 – we’ll come back to that – and ended up helping Sligo to sign him as their player/coach in 2021. Reeves then brought a few Brazilian players over to feature for the All-Ireland League club.
A few months ago, 22-year-old Sligo man Donnacha Byrne signed for the Cobras, having been released from Connacht’s academy. The ex-Ireland U20s back row has been doing well, battling with the local stars for minutes at blindside flanker and number eight.
Coulter says the Cobras have been speaking to another Sligo man about possibly coming over, while he’s keen to build a player-exchange relationship with Division 1B club Old Wesley too.
“My father will f**king kill me but my uncle is involved in Old Wesley, so that’s the connection,” he explains.
Coulter is also keen to get a strength and conditioning intern involved in Brazil, pointing out that there is lots of talent in that area back in Ireland.
Coulter himself has a big decision to make soon. His current gig runs until the end of Super Rugby Americas in June and then he’ll head home for a couple of months to catch up with family and friends. Reeves wants him to return as the permanent head of performance and the sheer rugby potential in Brazil is tempting for Coulter.
“There’s loads of low-hanging fruit here – big, talented, fast guys. But I will 100% have to be harder on them because what’s lacking is professionalism,” he says.
“For example, I was sitting at the Starbucks in the airport yesterday and one of the props comes up and gets a full-cream, extra-large coffee, then another guy comes up and gets a bag of Doritos. On the plane, one of the wingers gets a can of Coke. Shit like that, they just don’t realise and that’s one small area.”
He points to players having scope to put more time into their ‘extras’ working on core skills before and after training.
“In Leinster or Connacht or wherever, you take that stuff for granted because those boys went through academy systems where all that stuff is implemented over years. They know exactly what they need to do, but these Brazilian boys don’t have that. They’re good players but they’re raw.”
So how did the Sligo man end up with Brazil?
Coulter has always had a wanderlust. When he was younger, he lived in and played rugby in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Holland. He did a business degree but realised it wasn’t for him, so went back to study S&C with the esteemed Setanta College in Thurles.
By the time his degree there was finishing up in 2018, Coulter had saved a bit of money and weighed up whether to do a Master’s or just get out in the world to build experience.
“An easy decision” meant he was soon over in the US on an internship with their men’s 7s team at a time they were becoming a major force on the World Series with stars like Perry Baker and Carlin Isles. That five-month stint led to something similar with the Cheetahs of South Africa in 2019 when they were in the Pro14. Coulter enjoyed working under Franco Smith, now the Glasgow head coach.
Next came an intriguing call from Setanta. The highly-regarded Craig White had been onto them looking for someone to join the Uruguay national team for their pre-season ahead of the 2019 World Cup.
“Obviously they contacted me first because I was probably the only lunatic who would move to Uruguay,” jokes Coulter.
Off he went to Montevideo, where life was tough.
“It was mid-winter and we were living in the stadium, me and Ben Pollard who had just finished up as the head of sports science for English rugby. He was doing the same as me, going over there to work for free, just to work with Craig Whyte, basically, the guru of rugby S&C.
“We were living in a freezing cold room with no hot water, it was tough going. They were these rooms in the stadium and it turned out they had been prison rooms at one stage. It was freezing, you were sleeping in your clothes but you kept going because the Uruguayans were great guys.”
He likens the Uruguayan team, los Teros, to a local parish GAA team. They’re tight-knit. At team meetings, players would be in tears.
White – who built his reputation working with Ireland, Wasps, and the Lions, among others – was a superb mentor for Coulter and his other assistants, including Irishman Dean Lester.
By way of example of how the influential White helped to prepare los Teros for their stunning shock win over Fiji at the World Cup, Coulter explains how he would get players to lie in the gym with their feet up on boxes as they recovered from intense fitness hits.
“We’d do that after hard sessions and in the first few weeks it would all be peace, no worries, in the gym with the feet up and concentrating on your breathing, nearly falling asleep,” says Coulter.
“Then he started asking us S&Cs to walk around, make some noise, drop plates, see if the players could focus through that. Then he started playing the Fijian haka, the Cibi, in the background and the players had to stay completely in their zone, completely calm.
“The whole process was to prepare them for the haka. Most of them had never been to a World Cup and these massive islanders were going to be doing the haka in front of them. The nerves could have been gone. Lots of people don’t think about things like that.”
Coulter wasn’t in Japan with the team but he watched on in joy from Rio de Janeiro, where he was travelling after his time with the Uruguayans.
White had connected Coulter with Chile’s head coach, Pablo Lemoine, who brought the Irishman on board to help run the Chileans’ rugby 7s programme.
There was some funding for 7s due to it being an Olympic sport and the Chileans eventually had a big result at the 2022 World Cup where they beat Scotland. Coulter also got involved with the 15s team and was involved as they worked towards qualification for this year’s World Cup, as well as launching the professional Selknam club side, who also compete in Super Rugby Americas.
The Covid pandemic hit the world soon after Coulter arrived in Chile, though, meaning he had a long stint back in Ireland before things got up and running again, while he says he found the environment very difficult at times.
“Chile is an extremely hard place to work,” says Coulter. “I’ve lost years of my life working there. It’s not as organised and structured as we would be [in Ireland].
“There was also a stage where I didn’t get paid for eight months.”
He did have some memorable experiences, including meeting one of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes in the 1970s, an accident that was detailed in the 1993 film ‘Alive’.
Last year, Coulter bumped into fellow Irishman Andy Skehan, the St Michael’s College director of rugby who was consulting with the Brazilians at that stage – another Irish connection to Os Tupis.
Coulter had first met Brazil boss Reeves when the former was over in Uruguay and had organised a friendly game involving players from around South America. The pair of them hit it off immediately and stayed in close contact in the years that followed.
Reeves had been onto Coulter for a long time about joining the Brazilian set-up and Coulter made the move a few months ago, having initially looked for a job with a World 7s Series team.
Given the Brazilians’ relative lack of resources, his role already extends beyond S&C.
“I’m doing things here that I’d be years waiting to do at home,” explains Coulter. “You become senior very fast.
“I had no interest in tipping away in one of the academies in Ireland for three or four years, hoping someone either gets fired or leaves so I can move up the ladder.
“When you come to a place like this, you have to do so much more. You can’t just hone in on one thing, you have to be much more all over the process. You have to know rugby in Tier 2 or 3 countries, in my opinion. They might not have a skills coach, so you might end up correcting guys on their pass. If you were an S&C in Leinster and started telling Johnny Sexton he needs to work on his left-to-right pass, someone would tell you to get the f**k out of there. I like the way you’re not boxed in here.”
He’s excited about the potential of Super Rugby Americas, with lots of chat about expansion in the coming years.
Right now, there’s a Georgian team, the Black Lions, based out of Uruguay playing friendlies against the other clubs from the competition as they prepare for the World Cup.
The Georgians seemingly hope to be formally involved in Super Rugby Americans from next year, as does a team based in Panama. The Argentinians want more teams, as do the US. So the scope for growth is huge. There has even been talk of Spain and Portugal getting involved.
Coulter’s not sure he wants to live in a city as massive as São Paulo forever, though, and you get the sense that his itch to see the world hasn’t been totally scratched.
“I don’t know,” he says when asked what his dream job is. “It’s not to be the head of performance of Irish rugby, even though you might think that. Maybe I’ll say differently in a year’s time!
“I really like the challenge of being somewhere different and unique. If someone told me tomorrow they wanted me to be head of S&C in Fiji, I’d be straight there, living on the islands.”
