What happens when you bring together players based in multiple different countries, give them 72 hours to become a team, and ask them to compete at The World’s Best 10s in Hong Kong? You find out a great deal about values, trust, and what high performance actually means under pressure.
There’s a well-worn idea in team sport that you need time to build something real. Shared history. Enough training sessions to develop instinct. The accumulated trust that comes from making mistakes together in low-stakes environments before the stakes actually matter. It’s a reasonable idea. It’s also, in the world of invitational rugby, almost entirely impossible.
The Hong Kong 10s doesn’t give you that luxury. You have a window — days, not weeks — to pull a group of individuals into something cohesive enough to compete. At Shogun RFC, that’s not a problem to be solved. It’s the whole point. And this year, I think we got close to cracking it once again.
But Shogun has always been about more than results. It’s about giving players opportunities they might not find elsewhere — a stage, a jersey, a chance to compete at a serious tournament alongside talented people who share their values. And it’s about creating something that lasts well beyond the final whistle: memories that people carry with them for the rest of their lives. That combination of genuine competitive intent and genuine human investment is, I think, what makes this club worth being part of.
Selection: values before geography
Our squad for Hong Kong drew players living in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Fiji. On paper, that’s a logistical headache. In practice, it’s one of the great privileges of rugby — a sport with a genuinely global culture that travels well across borders, and where shared values cut through the noise of different backgrounds faster than almost anything else.
The selection philosophy wasn’t simply “find the best available players in those regions.” It was: find people who already understand what we’re trying to do, who carry the right instincts around effort and attitude, and who will add to the environment rather than simply perform in it. There’s a difference, and it matters enormously in a short-form tournament. For some players, this is also a genuine platform — an opportunity to compete in a well-organised, high-quality tournament that might not otherwise be on their horizon. We take that responsibility seriously.
“We weren’t just selecting athletes. We were selecting culture carriers — people who would hold standards from the moment they arrived.”
That philosophy was driven by four men whose combined experience in World Rugby runs deep: Barry Gallagher, Milton Froggatt, Terry Sands, and Jimmy Maher. Between them, they have networks that span every major rugby-playing nation, and more importantly, they know what good looks like. Not just technically — culturally. The players we brought together weren’t strangers to each other in the way that matters most: they arrived already understanding the unwritten rules of the game, and of the team.
Shaping the environment deliberately
Rapid team building isn’t accidental. It requires deliberate architecture — careful choices about how time is structured, what shared experiences are created, and who is responsible for which parts of the environment. You don’t stumble into trust. You design the conditions for it.
One of the things I’ve learned across years of working in high performance environments — military, sport, consultancy — is that environment shapes behaviour more powerfully than instruction. Tell people what to do and you get compliance. Build an environment where the right behaviours are natural and reinforced, and you get something altogether more robust: genuine culture.
The team behind the team this year understood that, and delivered it.
Drew Weaver, and our kit sponsor Tessen, made sure the players looked the part from the moment they put the shirt on. That’s not vanity — it’s identity. The moment you hand a player well-presented, professional kit, you signal something about what this team is and what it expects. Standards are set in the small things, long before a ball is kicked.
Boris Pineless and Lucy Howard handled medical and performance with the rigour you’d expect at any professional set-up. Keeping players on the field across a multi-game tournament, managing load, treating niggles before they become issues — it’s unglamorous work that sits almost invisibly behind everything else. Until it isn’t there, at which point you notice exactly how much it mattered.
Nick Wakley and Jimmy Maher drove the coaching, and the quality of the preparation showed. The system was clear, the structures were communicated quickly and simply, and the players bought in. In a 10s environment where decision-making under fatigue is everything, having genuine clarity around shape and role is non-negotiable. They delivered it.
And then there’s the broader environment — the spaces between the rugby that are often where the real team building happens. Fahad Adil, Milton Frogatt, Barry, Gallacher and club founder Terry Sands worked to make sure that time was used well: that players were supported, socially connected, and in the right headspace. Connections were built over meals, in transit, in the moments before sleep and after training. None of it was accidental.
Learning reviews: accountability built into the rhythm
In a tournament format, you don’t have the luxury of a training week between games to address what isn’t working. You have a recovery window — sometimes a matter of hours — and whatever you do with it will either sharpen or blunt your edge going into the next fixture. That makes post-match review not an optional extra but an operational necessity.
After each game at the Hong Kong 10s, we ran a structured learning review. Not a debrief in the loosest sense of the word — not a conversation that drifts between highlights and excuses — but a disciplined process with a clear purpose: to extract what happened, understand why, and carry the right lessons into the next match.
The individual accountability piece deserves particular attention, because it’s the part that most environments handle poorly. Individual performance review — when it’s honest — creates discomfort. That discomfort is the point. It’s the mechanism through which standards are held, and the signal to every other player that performance is taken seriously regardless of reputation or seniority.
But accountability without psychological safety is just blame. The way feedback is given matters as much as the content of the feedback itself. In a team assembled rapidly from across the rugby world, you’re working with people who have different experiences of criticism, different cultural norms around directness, and different levels of vulnerability in environments they haven’t fully settled into yet. The review process had to be honest enough to be useful, and safe enough to be heard.
“Feedback lands when the relationship is strong enough to carry it. In a short-form tournament, you have to build that relationship before you need it — not at the moment you need to give hard news.”
This is where the environmental work done before and between games paid dividends. Players who feel valued, who understand the purpose of the team, and who have already built some degree of genuine connection with the people around them, are far more receptive to honest feedback than players who feel evaluated but not invested in. The coaching staff and management understood this, and structured the reviews accordingly — direct, specific, and grounded in respect for every individual in the room.
The result was a group that genuinely improved across the tournament. Not just tactically — though that was visible — but in terms of collective ownership. By the time we reached the semi-final, we had a team that understood its own performance, could discuss it honestly, and was genuinely committed to getting better together. In days, not months. That’s the return on doing the review process properly.
Execution: a narrow semi-final and a hard lesson
The tournament itself vindicated the approach. Shogun played well — cohesively, with energy and purpose — and reached the semi-finals. We played the eventual tournament winners, YCAC, and came up short in a narrow, competitive match.
The result stung. It always does when you know how close you came. But context matters here: YCAC were the better team and worthy winner but they operate at a different financial level. They pay players. In a sport still built largely on the amateur ethos at this level of competition, that creates a genuine structural imbalance — between sides for whom rugby is a passion project, and those for whom it is a paid commitment. That’s not a complaint. It’s simply a reality worth naming honestly, because it shapes how you evaluate your own performance and what you take forward.
The honest assessment: on that day, against that exceptional opposition, we were competitive. A team assembled over days, held together by values and quality human beings, went toe-to-toe with a professionally resourced squad and asked them a serious question. There’s real merit in that, even in the loss.
More than results: opportunities and memories that last
Somewhere in the conversation about selection, systems, and semi-finals, it’s easy to lose sight of what Shogun RFC is actually for. Results matter — we’re competitive people and we want to win — but they’re not the whole story, and they never have been.
For some of the players who pulled on that shirt in Hong Kong, this was a door opening. An opportunity to compete at a quality tournament that their geography or circumstances might otherwise have put beyond reach. Rugby has always been good at this — at creating pathways, at giving people a stage — but it doesn’t happen automatically. It requires people in positions of influence to make deliberate choices to reach out, to invest in players who might be overlooked, and to build structures that are genuinely accessible rather than just theoretically open.
Barry, Milton, Terry, and Jimmy bring their networks to bear on this every time. Players get calls they weren’t expecting, offers they weren’t sure they deserved, chances to show what they’re capable of in an environment that takes them seriously. That’s a significant thing. For some, it changes the trajectory of their rugby career. For others, it simply gives them a week they’ll never forget.
That’s not incidental to what Shogun does. It’s central to it. A high performance team is not just a mechanism for producing results. At its best, it’s a community of people who have been through something meaningful together — who have been challenged, supported, and seen at their best and worst by people who gave a damn. The rugby is the vehicle. The relationships are the point.
The high performance framework, honestly applied
Step back from the rugby entirely and what high performance, in any genuinely pressured environment, rests on is a small number of things done well: clarity of purpose & values, quality of people selected against those values, an environment designed to bring out the best of those people, support structures that allow individuals to perform without friction, and a learning culture that makes every game — win or lose — a source of genuine improvement. Tactics and systems sit on top of that foundation. Without it, they’re built on sand.
“The most important decisions in high performance are made before anyone takes the field. They’re made in selection, in environment design, and in who you choose to trust with the culture.”
Shogun’s model — geographically dispersed, compressed timeframes, values-led — is an interesting test case for exactly this. We don’t have months of pre-season. We don’t have daily sessions. We have a window, and within it we have to build something real. The fact that we can do that, and do it well enough to reach a semi-final against a professionally funded side, says something about the people involved and the approach we’ve developed together.
There’s more to build. There always is. But Hong Kong 2026 was a chapter worth writing about — and one that makes the next chapter worth looking forward to.
Shogun RFC is run entirely on donations and sponsorship and so wishes to thank RGH Global, Epitome, Tessen, MCM Partners, Hartfield Consultants, Mourant, Carnegies, Engage, Nova Films and all our other supporters for everything they do for the club. It isn’t possible without you.
Shogun RFC are supporting the MND Association as part of the 30th anniversary year – to donate to this incredible charity please click here – https://www.justgiving.com/page/shogunrfc-mndassociation
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