Good to get a personal note from Simon Cron today.
"While it’s disappointing for the team, coaches and players that we aren’t still playing in the Super Rugby finals, you would have heard the saying from our leaders and coaches “it’s not the house we are in, but the house we are building”.
What does that mean? It certainly doesn’t mean losing is OK. What it does mean is that we are transitioning our playing group, and organisation, from where it has been to where it needs to go. It is an inconvenient fact that the Western Force men’s team haven’t made finals in the history of Super Rugby. Changing this will take time. It involves layering our systems and structures, growing our people to get to world class. In making these changes will come with some pain. However, our goal is to build it properly to create long term growth and success for the future.
As part of the 2023 season, we made the decision to build a good program that develops the best players in Australia. We are now beginning to see positive results of this through recruitment. This will continue to evolve over the next 12 to 24 months.
We continue to progress our squad list forward and we know this process takes time to grow. We will soon have Wallabies recognition for some of our top performers. We showed we can play some great rugby, namely the wins over the Reds, Drua and Crusaders, but we know we need more consistency. Again, that’s part of the journey!
With the players that are here, we have a great bunch of young men who are getting better by the day. They look to grow physically and mentally every day and are keen to learn. A big growth area has been individual accountability, which was seen throughout the year, alongside the focus on driving internal team accountability this has been a marked change in our environment.
From here we work on the critical fixes we have identified in our reviews and from the season. We are adding in an advanced “mental skills” aspect of player development to support our playing group and management to continue to build our consistency and resilience.
Finally, I want to say I’ve loved seeing our great Members after games here in Perth and also at our away games. There is a real passion for the team from our Sea of Blue and everyone in our organisation is focused on driving the team from good to great."
Simon Cron
Western Force Head Coach
