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Profile of a master coach
Toby Booth
Toby Booth has become one of the UK’s most successful rugby coaches through a combination of great instincts, deep understanding of the game and, above all, clarity of vision. He has worked at London Irish, Bath and Harlequins in the English Premiership, reaching two Premiership finals and two European Challenge Cup finals.
Toby has also designed and overseen programmes that have produced over 20 new international players, many of whom originated in the respective club academies.
M2M2 Insights
Most recently, we have seen him as the head coach of Ospreys, where he took a side languishing at the bottom of the Welsh table to achieve the best Welsh results in the United Rugby Championship (URC). In four years under Booth, the Ospreys won the Welsh Shield twice and reached the last eight of the European Champions Cup, having been given only a 2% chance of doing so.
He left the Ospreys at the end of 2024 and says with typical understatement: “I left them in a better place than I found them.”
At the heart of his approach and motivation are some core values he consistently refers to: “For me, it’s all about paying it forward,” he says. “That’s the essence of coaching.”
“Seeing failure as an opportunity to get better” is at the heart of what drives him.
“To appreciate winning, you have to have lost,” he says.
The Osprey's Stadium
William Harvey
"i don't want to do that"
Finding his way in rugby
Born and brought up in Kent, Toby went to Folkestone’s William Harvey Grammar School, where he excelled at football and won the sports cup.
“I love to compete,” he says.
His father was initially in the Merchant Navy and then became a trawlerman before a move into marine steel construction. His contacts led to holiday jobs for Toby in trawler fishing, which he says was important even if only as it taught him "I don’t want to do that".
Although the Harvey was a soccer-playing school, Toby started playing rugby under the influence of his woodwork teacher, who was the third team captain at Folkestone Rugby Club. He had his first experience of a real coach when he joined Folkestone Under-17s and went on tour to California with the team.
However, like many sports-mad teenagers, his commitment to mastering sport came at the expense of academic success, and he missed out on the ‘O’ Level grades he had prized. His experience of that disappointment was crucial to his outlook, and he still talks today about how it defined his future.
“My parents sacrificed a lot to get my sister and me to grammar school, and I wanted to be the best,” he says. “I felt such failure on behalf of my family as well as myself. I had to go backward to go forward to overcome this.”
He decided to qualify for a trade, took his father’s advice, and qualified in the technical discipline of electrician.
Throughout this time, he focused on rugby, leaving Folkestone for Blackheath, where he became a junior international and later captained the club. He still speaks with great enthusiasm about playing in the Middlesex 7s in the mid-1990s.
Finding a positive mindset
Early in his professional coaching career, he met elite coach and mentor Kevin Bowring, who provoked a change of outlook that transformed his life.
“I was all about proving how good I was, fuelled by my academic failings and having not played senior international rugby. Kevin changed my mindset from proving myself to everyone else, to showing myself how good I could be.”
As a result, at the age of 23, Toby successfully applied to St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, where he obtained a BSc in sports science, lectured and was ultimately awarded an Honorary MSc 23 years later.
During his time at St Mary’s, he worked with John Ronane to reshape the college’s socially based rugby team with an elite attitude that brought great success, including reaching two BUSA finals and the quarter-final of the student European Cup. No mean feat from a cohort of just over 2,000 students.
In 2002, he joined London Irish and began to join up player development and coaching in a way that has become his signature. As an England assistant academy manager at London Irish, he recruited the academy’s first players, several of whom subsequently played for both London Irish and England.
During 2006/7 he was seconded to England Saxons, who played in the Churchill Cup in the USA and Canada in 2006 and beat New Zealand at Twickenham to win the 2007 competition.
In 2008, he became head coach of London Irish, who finished third in the league and reached the Guinness Premiership Final in his first season.
He split the following eight years between roles at Bath, who reached both the European Challenge Cup and Premiership Final during his tenure, and Harlequins, before joining Ospreys as head coach at the end of the 2019/20 season.
Around the same time as joining Ospreys, he began a consultancy business and started working with M2M2, delivering a plenary session on team coaching to senior NATO leaders attending our High Performing Teams event in 2019. This consultancy business has been his focus since leaving Ospreys, and he is accredited as a mindset coach and in personality profiling, with particular strength in applying the Gazing ‘Red2Blue’ methodology.
Toby receives his Honary MSc
In 2002 Toby joined London Irish
The crucial role of mentoring
Throughout his career, Toby acknowledges the vital influence mentors have had on him, from his father and teachers to key figures in the world of rugby. He is also committed to helping mentees of his own.
He cites Simon Amor, former England Rugby attack and 7’s coach and now executive director for Hong Kong and China rugby, whom he coached as a player at St Mary’s. He also highlights his help to Ant Watson, Johnathon Joseph, Adam Beard, and Jac Morgan on their journeys from academy to club and international level, culminating in their selection for the British Lions.
Alongside these high-profile success stories, he also recalls an unnamed young player who appeared to be heading off the rails but fulfilled his potential and built a strong playing career, becoming an international player under Toby’s guidance.
Encouraging mastery
The concept of ‘mastery’ peppers Toby’s conversation. When we meet for this profile, it's the first thing he talks about:
“Mastery is no longer fashionable. It never was. But a short attention span isn’t the answer. So many modern people try to shortcut things that can’t be treated like that. To be really good at something and maximise your talent, you have to be fully engaged and present all the time.”
As we talk, he expands on this theme:
“Success requires discipline,” he says. “Whatever natural talent you have, you get to a junction where you hone and practice, whether it’s physical, a skill or even your mentality. You need your own equivalent of 10,000 hours of meaningful work, often diverse practice1 to make you more rounded and complete.”
He focuses on the skill ladder, stating the importance of mastery at every level, from the low-level basics up to the difficult. “It’s layered,” he says.
"Fully engaged and present at all time”
The characteristics of a master coach
Toby’s philosophy and practice of coaching rely as much on soft skills and capabilities as they do on hard technical knowledge.
Alongside “a thirst and drive to be good”, he says the keys to mastery are “subject understanding and good instincts. The theory comes later.”
“I have good instincts,” he says. “And good coaches have good feel and know which clubs to pull out of the bag. But you also need knowledge.”
He reflects on his promotion to assistant coach in 2005, when he was coaching international players without having an international background himself. “So, my knowledge had to be exceptional,” he says.
Coaching mastery requires a massive width of knowledge as well as depth. ‘T-shaped’ knowledge, as he calls it.
“The theory comes later,” he says, accepting that his tendency towards a theoretical approach is based on his insatiable want to be good, accepted and knowledgeable about it.
He also gives priority to human factors in developing players, for example, giving empathy greater weighting in evaluating potential and ability.
“It goes back to Bloom’s taxonomy,” he says. “You should try to create 4,5,6 players, who can think for themselves, not just 1,2,3s.”
Coaching rugby, and beyond
Toby Booth’s life and career have been steeped in the world of rugby union, about which he talks with great passion.
“What I love about rugby is what it gives back to you. The camaraderie of a team sport, and also contact sports, brings respect for the physical price people pay and the danger they face. Like boxing.”
But in coaching terms, he sees the advent of the professional era as having created massive challenges.
“The sport simply wasn’t ready – coaching had been done by dads. As a coach, I had to be good enough to adapt to a style based on what I saw in the moment rather than a teaching plan.”
First on his list of priorities in this new world was “You have to have vision.”
“We’re in the entertainment business,” he says. “In pro rugby, the game has to look a particular way, and that shapes my coaching philosophy.
He continues, “If I want the game to look like this, I need specific capabilities. I need to recruit established players, develop young players, and build the necessary capabilities. And that works in all sports, not just in rugby.
“I love to watch cricket and admired the West Indies for their brand of play. Or how the Bodyline series created a clear identity of what the team was doing.”
He adds: “People try to mimic these visions but do it without the right capability or depth of understanding. David Moyes may have tried to be Alex Ferguson, but it didn’t work out.
"You need a clear identity”
"Recruit, establish, develop and build”
Putting a vision into practice
To be successful in implementing visions of this kind, he says, you need three things, which he lists:
“Clarity, Intensity, Accuracy, which equate to the Helicopter View, Microscopic view, and Satellite view.” This CIA technique is a cornerstone of his coaching practice –something he gleaned and tailored from working with Gazing Performance.
In service of this, he constantly pioneers coaching techniques – the performance playground, for example, where he involves players in designing their own practice.
“Even so,” he says, “mastery is still important, even though there are so many more things vying for people’s attention.
”He likens his role to that of a producer, disguising mastery to attract attention, creating a vision for each player that the coach joins together as a team.
“It’s like taking a bunch of balloons across an open space. You have to steer, inflate, deflate, and fix punctures.”
The illusion of choice
Finally, he says with a smile, as a coach, you must be a master of the Illusion of choice, which he always explains with reference to how he has dealt with his children at bedtime.
“When would you like to brush your teeth?” he asks them. “Before or after your story?”
Thus, giving them a choice that obscures the fact that the one thing they will do is brush their teeth.
"When would you like to brush your teeth”
1 Popularised by Malcom Gladwell in ‘Outliers’ (2008), based on 1993 research by Anders Ericsson