Gregor Paul: The culture clash behind Auckland Rugby fallout

OPINION:

There's no doubt Gen Z and Millennials have been built with a different hard drive to Generation X.

Sometimes the two systems seem entirely incompatible – especially when the interface is high-performance rugby.

What Generation Xers consider a tough, ruthless taskmaster, some Gen Z and Millennials could class as a bully.

What, 20 years ago, would have been considered a robust, challenging workplace, could now be deemed a toxic environment by Gen Z and Millennials.

The mythical line – the one that determines the point to which a coach can take players – has shifted over the years and Auckland Rugby is seemingly in the midst of trying to work out where its boundaries now sit.

On one side of the line is a dedicated, hard-working, passionate coaching team and on the other is a mostly young, talented but underachieving playing group.

It's a potentially volatile mix and the fact that one coach has left with a year still to run on his contract and certain players who imagined they would be Auckland for life are openly chasing other offers, provides enough smoke to be sure there is a fire already burning.

The question is how to put it out and it's here where opinion will already be divided – presumably along fairly predictable generational lines.

The baby boomers and Xers will mostly feel the line has moved too far towards the players and it's a fair bet that in households across the city the words "soft", "entitled" and "precious" have been spoken by older family members in relation to the reported claims of discontent and fractured relationships between players and coaches laid bare in a recent review into Auckland Rugby.

That's because boomers and Xers are afflicted by this sense that they all had to sacrifice to succeed. They are wedded to the notion of having to pay dues.

For some reason, they believe they endured, that they cycled to school uphill into the wind both ways.

That they all climbed their respective employment ladders from the bottom rung. That they all bought a shack in the industrial wastelands as their first home.

These two generations see adversity as being imperative in any growth story and wear their tough love apprenticeships as a badge of honour.

They are convinced that conflict is the only way to develop resilience and humiliation is often the only way to learn. They don't crave, understand, or celebrate change and tend to interpret progression as societal erosion: as proof that the moral fabric of the nation is slowly being unpicked.

Dejected Auckland captain Angus Ta'avao after losing the Auckland v Tasman Mitre 10 Cup Premiership rugby final at Eden Park in Auckland last year. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

But the world in which the boomers and Xers want is long gone. The modern, professional player has vastly different expectations and thresholds to their peers of even 10 years ago.

We have now a generation of players who take feedback as criticism and criticism as criticism.

We have now a whole generation of players who enter professional set-ups, barely out of their teens, yet with firm beliefs and expectations that they have the right to be heard and a conviction that they will be valued and respected long before they have proved themselves on the field.

The attitudes and beliefs that exist in rugby, pervade across the employment spectrum.

Law firms, investment houses, accountancy groups and medics have all experienced the same shift among their new and youngest recruits, but somehow to the boomers and Xers it feels like professional rugby teams should have been off-limits to this cultural revolution.

High-performance rugby, by nature, is a tough place. It's meant to be an environment defined by struggle. A place where there is a daily battle to improve and a place where no one need apply a terminology to the feedback as long as it is unambiguous.

But a generation that has come through a collaborative education system, campaigned relentlessly for social change, inclusion and diversity can't suddenly be re-programmed by a boomer or Xer to accept that they should just shut up, endure and do what they are told all in the name of high performance.

Conflict between Generation Z players and Generation X coaches can't be seen as a battle of wills. So much of what used to be acceptable is anathema to the youth of today and they are a generation that can't be bullied, broken or bent to adopt an agenda in which they don't believe or can't relate.

Any coach who adopts a bullish, authoritarian, forthright style is effectively playing Russian Roulette with their career as the chances of meeting full-on resistance which ends in mutiny is high.

The modern player wants to work hard. The modern player cares deeply about the outcome, respects the authority of the coach.

But the modern player needs to feel respected, valued and included and that's really the only thing Auckland Rugby need to have in mind as they try to determine where to set their future boundaries.