Jason Ryan on quitting work to become a coach: 'We rolled the dice'

Next month Jason Ryan will coach the All Blacks forwards at the World Cup, but as he tells Scotty Stevenson, one of his first coaching steps was just as daunting.

Jason Ryan is on a watt bike. It is 9.55am. If you don’t know what a watt bike is, best you keep it that way. It is torture! It is pain! It is stationary! He is 29 kilometres into the planned 30-kilometre ride, and he’s asking (politely) for another five minutes before he calls back. In fairness to him, my phone call was five minutes early. Jason Ryan runs a tight schedule.

Jason Ryan is in a car. It is 10am. Where he is driving to is unclear, but he is moving. The scenery is changing, as much as the Christchurch scenery ever changes. It is now exactly the time he has in his diary for this conversation and by God he is going to stick to time. Time is money! Time is of the essence! Time is the great revelator! Jason Ryan has become accustomed to the value of time.

There’s something else the All Blacks forwards coach has become accustomed to, in the 13 months since he was promoted from the Crusaders. Pressure. Time and pressure - the formula for diamonds. A fitting metaphor perhaps for the coach who cut his representative teeth while selling mining equipment in Buller, and cracked into coaching on the West Coast. That is coal country! Hiking country! Carbon AND footprints!

“What the hell are you doing on a watt bike?”

“You can’t get comfy around here mate.”

He says that to his players now. The All Blacks forwards. An assortment of quads and pecs and hairstyles with a combined weight of two tonnes and, for what it’s worth, a combined height of 30 metres. He says it all the time, with an additional admonition.

“You can’t get comfy around here, or you’ll end up in a tracksuit.”

Jason Ryan is in a house. It is 10.05am. One assumes it is his house. He has knocked something over and is apologising. It is a minor inconvenience. An unnecessary distraction. You don’t want distractions when you are coaching the All Blacks. Stick to your knitting! Do your job! Don’t read the papers! When he was appointed to the role in July last year, there was nothing good to read in the papers. Not if you were New Zealand Rugby and the All Blacks. Ireland had won the series in New Zealand and the fans, frothing at the mouth and furious, demanded heads. They got a couple. Forwards coach John Plumtree’s was one.

“I was in Fiji at the time, alone in a hotel room, when Fozzie [All Blacks head coach, Ian Foster] called to offer me the job. I remember pacing around the room, strangely unable to feel the emotion the occasion warranted.”

If you know Jason Ryan, if you have ever seen him in his natural environment, watched him interact with his players and peers, you will understand why that moment felt so strangely devoid of feeling. He couldn’t share it with the people he loved. Most importantly, right then, he couldn’t share it with his rock. He couldn’t share that moment in time and space with wife Cath.

Jason Ryan is emotional. It is 10.09am. We are talking about family and, more specifically, about the level of support anyone in a job like his needs just to do the job. When the subject turns to Cath, the dam bursts. Yes, the obvious love and affection are there, genuine and honest and all things wholesome, but this release has its genesis in something so much more meaningful. These are not just tears of love, they are tears of gratitude.

“Cath has just been awesome. She has seen it all, she has challenged it all, and she has been at the table with me since we rolled the dice.”

The big bet, the rolling of the dice as Ryan puts it, involved quitting his job to take up a four-month contract with the Canterbury team, then coached by Scott Robertson. Robertson had seen Ryan work with the Crusaders Knights, the club’s development side, and loved what he saw, but was throwing in the towel on a flexible, stable, salaried job to chase a pipe dream really a wager Ryan could afford to make?

“I remember even Canterbury CEO Hamish Riach telling me I shouldn’t quit my job for the role, but Dad just said, ‘back yourself’. I listened to Dad, but I can’t lie, those early days trying to make this work were absolute shit and really, really tough on the family.

“I couldn’t have done it without the support of Cath and I couldn’t have done it without surrounding myself with people who challenged me. Ultimately, though, I had to take the leap, and I haven’t looked back.”

Listening to Ryan talking about this it becomes obvious why he felt so alone in Fiji when the call from Foster came. He did get to call Cath, and that call was closely followed by another to Dad, Bernie. But he still had to endure another night on his own in Fiji and one more in Auckland before he could get back to his people. The layover in the City of Sails did have one upside. It was a chance to catch up with former All Black Dan Carter for dinner, and for some advice.

“To be honest, DC [Carter] absolutely squared me up. He was happy for me, sure, but he said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘You’re only at the start line in this team. The pressure will never go away, and you have got to lean into it and accept that this is the uncomfortable place where you live now.

“It was such an important thing to hear before I got into the work, and I was grateful for that.”

Two days after being offered the job, Jason made it back to Christchurch and back to his family. That Sunday afternoon he was on the sideline for the Christchurch club final. He had played for Sydenham, a club colloquially known as ‘The Bus Drivers’ on 180 occasions, but on this day, it was his son Ollie with the boots on. Ryan and Cath watched as The Bus Drivers won the title. All was good in the world.

Well, almost. There was another conversation to be had, with someone who mattered a great deal to the new All Blacks forwards coach.

If the partnership with Cath, one that weathered the many early storms that came with such an abrupt and edgy professional pivot, seems as eternal as these things get, the partnership that developed between Ryan and Scott Robertson felt much the same way. The pair took time to find their groove and calculate their individual contributions to the greater sum of the component parts and then proceeded to win titles at will with Canterbury and the Crusaders.

When New Zealand Rugby advertised the All Blacks coaching role following the Rugby World Cup in 2019, there was zero doubt Jason Ryan would be on Scott Robertson’s ticket. He says the conversation between them about giving the job a shot was about as short as a conversation gets, essentially “In?” followed by “Yes.” Scott Robertson’s bid failed, with Ian Foster appointed to the role, an appointment that led to an internecine debate over the validity of that decision, exacerbated by a collapse in results for the national side. By 2022, New Zealand Rugby were under enormous pressure to make change. It seemed almost inevitable they would turn back to Robertson. Instead, after the Ireland series, Foster jettisoned Plumtree and Brad Mooar, and made the play for Robertson’s right-hand man.

“I do hope that people understand how hard that time was for everyone involved. For John, for Brad, for Fozzie, and for Razor [Robertson] too. For me it was an exciting moment to answer a call for help from the national side, but I needed to sit eye to eye with Razor and talk about it with him.

“We had worked together for a long time and we both talk about trust and sincerity a lot, so knowing we both had aspirations to coach with the All Blacks but it was – at the time - just me getting a shot, well that was a tough spot to be in.

“I can tell you this though, we talked about it, had a coffee, had a cuddle and, when we left each other, I had no doubt in my mind that he was excited for me and that he wanted me to do well, and the team to do well. And that’s testament to his character.”

Jason Ryan is thinking about the last thirteen months. It’s 10.27am. He’s assessing the then and the now, the before and the after. He’s living in the moment. Shifts have been made! Work has been rewarded! Broadly reasonable satisfaction abounds! The All Blacks are 4-0 this year, confidence levels are rising among the pub leaner prophets, the bookmakers are dropping odds, protecting their asses. The All Blacks team for the World Cup was announced by Richie McCaw and no-one was outraged. These are all positive signs, and that probably feels a world away from what Ryan walked into in August last year.

Ryan walked into the All Blacks and had one session with the forwards before the team headed to South Africa for their Rugby Championship tests against the Springboks. He laughs about it now, but it was no laughing matter when the All Blacks lost their first test in South Africa – his first as a coach in the side – bringing the number of consecutive losses to three. What happened the following week at Ellis Park still stands out for him as a watershed moment for this iteration of the All Blacks, but it was his message to the team before the game that stands out.

“I called the pack in after the warm-up and all I said was go out there and show you care about each other and this team.”

The All Blacks won 35-23. After the match Beauden Barrett handed him the Freedom Cup and he took a big slug from the glass jug. There, in that changing room under the emptying stands of Ellis Park, he saw how much the team cared.

Care. It’s a word he uses often. He says players won’t know how much you know until they know how much you care. He cares enough to tell his players that he doesn’t know everything. He cares enough to tell them what they need to hear, and sometimes what they don’t want to hear. He cares about the player who is yet to debut as much as the player who’s run out there one hundred times and counting. He knows details are important – both the addition of them and the subtraction – but they are not as important as the care.

Among the many things he has savoured most so far in this job, three things stand out: The emotion when a player is capped for the first time, and the moments like that one at Ellis Park, when the team is alone after a championship victory, before the changing room doors are opened and the world outside invades that sacred space. The third is more personal, still.

“When I see a player getting better, and I can think that I may have played a small part in that improvement. That’s why I coach.”

And now he is standing in the wings, waiting to play his part in a rugby world cup. He was the part time coach who took a punt on his own ability, and who has taken those he loves along for the ride. He says he has been coaching professionally for years, he just wasn’t paid for it for a long time. He’s earning his money now.

Time is money.

Jason Ryan is wrapping up the conversation. It’s 10.36am. The planning never stops in the All Blacks. Everyone is moving all the time. He needs to move. And probably shower. Soon they’ll all be back on the road, the All Blacks, a team representing a nation, a team without a home. There are improvements to make, as there always is. The next two months are not going to be easy. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s thriving on the start line, living with the pressure, leaning in.

“There’s only reason we’re going to France,” he says. “And that’s to win it.”

The Scotty Stevenson Interview is a regular feature you can find on 1news.co.nz each Saturday.