And for almost the entire past decade, that team has been the Crusaders, leading everybody to want to know what they have done to enjoy so much success in Super Rugby.
The answer is relatively simple: they have found a way to develop players who understand the importance of self-responsibility, are personally accountable and equipped with the mental skills to deal with adversity and find a way through it.
This is essentially what has set the Crusaders apart over the past two decades – they have been quicker to realise that an evolving educational system combined with a shift to more protective parenting is producing young people with vastly different expectations and emotional toolkits to their peers of 20 years ago.
What the Crusaders have understood best is the modern player arrives in their environment without the same resilience as their predecessors, and therefore, they need help building the mechanisms to cope with adversity.
The championship-winning formula appears to be that the Crusaders have an innate ability to deduce how much help young players need to fulfil their potential without providing so much as to stunt their development.
There’s a juxtaposition that professional rugby is falling under greater scrutiny and therefore intensifying the pressure on the players, at a time when there continues to be a societal shift towards building softer, more supportive, less confrontational environments.
Super Rugby’s player base has emerged through a collaborative educational process that has afforded them the opportunity to lead their own learning, to set their own agenda and to some degree, drive their own standards.
It’s helped produce a generation that is kind, inclusive and determined to enforce change for equality and fairness.
It helped soften the attitudes and change the behaviours of Gen X parents who were exposed to more authoritarian regimes, which made growing up a trial of endurance, an almost Darwinian survival of the fittest.
But so too has there perhaps been an unintended or unrealised consequence to this change, which has been to decrease the exposure of young people to adversity and leave them without the skills or capacity to cope when things don’t go exactly to plan.
From driving kids to school, to settling them into their new halls when they start university, to creating assessment rather than exam-based testing systems, this erosion of a self-responsibility culture has been experienced in multiple ways.
Whereas players would come into Super Rugby 20 years ago with significant gaps in their physical and skill development to fill, but with ample experience that life is not fair, now they arrive in astonishing condition, but with limited to no ability to graft, reset and not catastrophise every small thing that doesn’t go their way.
And this is what makes Cotter’s arrival at the Blues more than a little fascinating.
He’s 62, well-travelled and a product of the less cuddly environments that used to pervade New Zealand, and there is rising hope that he will build the sort of environment that will deepen the players’ understanding of what resilience truly looks like.
The Blues have had all sorts of qualities in the past two decades, but the one thing they have never seemingly had is the same hard edges as the Crusaders and the ability to stay in the fight from February through to mid-July.
Never was this better evidenced than in the past two years, with the Crusaders toppling a previously dominant Blues team in the Eden Park final in 2022, and then last year destroying their old foe in the semifinal.
Perhaps previous Blues coaches have made the mistake of assuming their players are inherently resilient, something Cotter, it would seem, is unlikely to do.
In his time with the club so far, it’s apparent he’s trying to expose the players to situations that test their resolve. He’s shifting the boundaries of their individual comfort zones and trying to instil some mental toughness.
And if he can do that, the Blues will become a different proposition, because resilience is the missing piece.
