"Titch jnr, Gordon's little shadow" - Sean Horan doesn't mind what moniker he's slugged with, if it helps set the newly created New Zealand women's sevens programme up for Olympic gold in 2016.
Ousted as Bay of Plenty Steamers head coach last year, Horan was on the job yesterday as Tietjens put 40 players through a typically gruelling hitout, with speed testing over 40m at the TECT Arena backing up a beep test just hours after the hopefuls arrived at Mount Maunganui on Tuesday. Today is a series of games before the squad is cut to a contracted 15 tomorrow.
Horan is making no apologies for piggybacking on the structures Tietjens already has in place as he takes charge of developing the women's game ahead of its Olympic debut in Rio.
Fresh SPARC investment in sevens saw Horan, 39, hired as fulltime women's sevens coach, backed by 14 regional resource coaches to spot and develop talent.
"As far as tactical appreciation of sevens there's no better guy to learn off that Titch - he's the best sevens coach in the world, has been at it for 18 years fulltime, which means 18 years of knowledge to tap into," Horan said. "I'm lucky because we had a good rapport, helping make a huge learning avenue that bit easier."
Horan went to the national tournament two weeks ago in Queenstown, observing Tietjens' talent ID skills at work and also getting a handle on building a sevens campaign from the ground up as Tietjens cherrypicked a fresh squad of 40 to trial.
Despite the international success of the Black Ferns, women's rugby in New Zealand has been allowed to drift for the past five years with little-to-no sevens planning and a national provincial (XV) championship a shadow of what it was a decade ago.
Horan wants to kickstart the game again but said not all the players identified over the next couple of years would necessarily come from a rugby background.
"We starting with a blank canvas, which brings its own challenges, but even at the Bay sevens at Mt Maunganui a few weeks back the talent among the six women's teams was huge, and some of the better ones were playing other sports.
"When Australia won the World Cup in Dubai (in 2009), 2-3 of their key players were out of the [world champion] Aussie touch team. I don't see anything wrong with that because players will want to be part of the exposure that 2016 is going to get, and the fact rugby is going to be part of that is a huge carrot."
As part of the sevens development programme, NZRU high performance staff will travel to 14 provincial unions this year finding talented female athletes to be part of the Go4gold programme, with 14 sevens resource coaches hired to be Horan's ears and eyes.
"Their role is to ID the talent and nurture that via skills camps. We're always looking for that gold nugget that could come straight into our [high performance] structure, perhaps that 16-year-old talent who in two or three years would be fantastic for the national women's team. We'll adopt a lot of the testing systems already in place but with both programmes running parallel and women's sevens being resourced properly for the first time it shows the importance the NZRU are putting on it."
With former All Blacks fullback Christian Cullen looking on Tietjens punished the triallists but unearthed one post-Christmas gem as Taranaki's Kylem O'Donnell blitzed the beep test, with his score - 15.6 - the highest Tietjens had ever seen. With 13 considered a good score in the multi-stage fitness test designed to evaluate players' VO2 max (maximum oxygen uptake), Tietjens was staggered when O'Donnell, the older brother of Chiefs' and former New Zealand sevens player Declan O'Donnell, kept going, long after everyone else had dropped out.
"It was huge, unprecedented in all my time with sevens. Caleb Ralph nearly hit 15 once and Roger Randle also right up there but 15.6 is staggering."