How you make people feel is what counts

I can’t find it now, but I read a tweet the other day from one of the “philosopher coaches” that I follow on Twitter that paraphrased a Maya Angelou quote:

““People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The tweeter was saying that those you coached won’t remember wins and losses, they’ll remember the impact you as a coach made in their lives.

I was prompted to look it up after attending the memorial service for Norman McFarland at St John’s College earlier this week.

McFarland, who passed away at the age of 79 was a highly successful school rugby coach, first at King Edward VII school, and later at other schools and clubs. There would have been many factors that led to his success, but the one that stood out was his innovation. He reinvented the game, and he did it because, those days, you coached the material that you were presented – no shopping to fill gaps – and he made up for deficiencies in size and natural ability by out-thinking his opponents.

So, famously, his teams employed three-man scrums and two-man lineouts, negating the size disadvantage that they were at, and they beat teams that were clearly physically superior to them. There is a story, retold at the memorial service, that the International Rugby Board actually changed the laws of the game because of his tactics. I suspect that that’s apocryphal, but I was a Union referee those days and I do recall that we would spend a lot of time at our monthly law discussion meetings trying to figure out what was legal and what wasn’t and how to referee his teams.

Eventually those practices were outlawed, as part of wider law changes made in the name of player safety, but by then Norman had already moved on and was developing other new ways to get an edge, usually with success.

The family tributes at the service were deeply moving, but there were two eulogies by non-family members that said, to me, that Norman McFarland was the kind of coach and person that Maya Angelou was talking about.

One was by a star rugby player, a member of one of the most successful teams the school ever had. He never spoke about that at all. Instead, he remembered that, when he was skinny little kid in the prep school, Norman spoke to him. He knew his name, and he was pleased to hear that he would be coming to the high school the next year.

The other wasn’t sporting at all. He remembered how, as a junior at the school, he tried out for basketball, but had no interest or ability and sat on the bench most of the time. McFarland, the coach, spotted him and engaged him in a conversation on books and reading – an area that he did have a passion for. It was, the speaker said, an extraordinary perceptive action.

I met Norman in 1978 when I started coaching rugby at a rival school. He was a fearsome opponent and our teams simply never beat his. I moved on to other things and somehow my path crossed his every now and then. What I remember was that he was always friendly and very often kind to me.

He was a jogger, everyone knows that, and he used to pound the streets around St John’s College where he worked. I lived in nearby Bellevue East and for a time I also ran around the suburbs. We’d meet quite often on the sidewalks and he’d say thing like: “you are looking strong today” and “I can see that weight falling off you.” I was running to try to slim down, so you can imagine how that made me feel.

And when I became a journalist and went on a bit of a crusade against uneducational and dishonest practices in school sport he would tell me, whenever I saw him, that he agreed with something I wrote and he congratulated me. Again, imagine how I felt.

That’s what I’ll remember about Norman McFarland. He was the doyen of rugby coaches, I read and still have his book on it, and I watched his teams play breath-taking rugby. But like those I listened to last Tuesday, it’s the way he made me feel that made the deepest impact.