National Coaches Kathy Flores and Julie McCoy: Icons for Women’s Rugby
Monday Jul 21, 2008 in Magazine
By Katy Rank Lev
Kathy Flores knows what she wants. Take coffee, for example. The head coach of the US Women’s National 15s Team is a gourmand when it comes to beans, taking her own Peet’s Coffee on rugby trips so she and her coaching staff can start their day off with something strong and tasty. Perhaps taking care of small details like providing morning coffee is what has enabled Flores to be so successful in a rugby career spanning 30 years.
As a player, she helped lead the US to the first Women’s Rugby World Cup Championship in 1991 and starred for the Berkeley All Blues between 1994 and 1998. As a coach, the 53-year-old Flores led the All Blues to multiple club titles and helped turn the University of California at Berkeley women’s team into a perennial playoff contender. In 2001, Flores was named the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Coach of the Year, and in 2003—the year she became the US National Team coach—the International Rugby Board named her Personality of the Year. In ’03 and ’04, Flores coached three elite women’s teams almost simultaneously. It’s difficult to think of another woman who has had as much an impact on US women’s rugby as Kathy Flores.
But perhaps Julie McCoy comes close.
Nine years younger than Flores, the head coach of the US Women’s National 7s Team didn’t have as storied a playing career (“I was always one of those ‘bubble’ players,” she once said. “I had an A side mind, but B side athleticism.”), and doesn’t possess as long a coaching resume as her colleague and long-time friend. But once McCoy discovered rugby in the late ‘80s, she became a leader on the field, a student of the game, and rose quickly through the coaching ranks.
She coached all the West Territorial Union teams during the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, and when Flores became the National Team coach in ’03, one of her first moves was to recruit
McCoy as her defensive coordinator. By 2005, McCoy had not only developed a highly-praised footwork camp (see story, page 36), but had become the National 7s Team coach. She will lead the Eagles in the first Women’s 7s World Cup in Dubai next year, where the US will be one of the favorites to win the title.
Flores began her athletic career at Monmouth Regional High in New Jersey, where she excelled at field hockey, basketball and track. She was a two-sport athlete at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania (where she was born), starring at point guard in basketball and possessing a wicked arm for the javelin. In fact, Flores’ record javelin toss of 148 feet is still only 10 inches shy of the current school record. Twenty years after her 1977 graduation, the University inducted Flores into its Hall of Fame.
Flores earned a BS in physical education, but wasn’t sure what to do after graduation. A friend was studying at Florida State University and kept talking about this new sport, something akin to football. Flores became intrigued after the friend sent her photos which depicted a sport that was nothing like the flag football games Flores had played when she lived in Philadelphia. This was a game with contact, physicality, strategy. After Flores moved to Tallahassee, FL, to start graduate work at Florida State in something called “Movement Science,” she joined the women’s rugby team and became a No.8 and scrumhalf for the Seminoles.
“Kathy got into rugby when women players had to be self-taught,” says McCoy. “She read as much as she could about rugby and became a student of the game. Then she had to find a group of people she could play with and win.”
The 44-year-old McCoy followed a similar path to the rugby world. The Arkansas native never heard of rugby growing up and didn’t have a chance to play in college the way many women do today. After earning her M.D. at the University of Arkansas in 1989, she moved to New Orleans for a Neurology residency at Tulane University and came upon flyers promoting the New Orleans Halfmoons, a women’s rugby club.
McCoy didn’t know anyone in her new city and wanted a break from her long hours at the hospital, so she gave the Halfmoons a shot. She noticed that rugby attracted successful, achievement-oriented women and decided to incorporate the sport and its social scene around the 80-plus-hour weeks of her medical residency. She traded on-call duties so she’d have time to drive all over the country for weekend matches. In those days, before women’s rugby exploded, the Halfmoons would take five-hour drives to Florida to play the FSU Seminoles. That’s when Julie McCoy first crossed paths with Kathy Flores.
Despite enjoying the anatomy coursework at FSU, Flores opted not to finish her graduate studies in exercise physiology so she could devote more time to her new passion—rugby. She became a massage therapist, a career that would allow her to work with the human body but also provide her the freedom to go wherever rugby might take her. After helping lead the Seminoles to four National Club Championships (1979, ’80, ’84 and ’85), Flores toured Europe in 1986 with the fledgling US Women’s National Team. In 1987 she captained the squad against Canada, the first official US international game (where she scored her first and only National Team try in a 22-3 victory). Over the next four years, the US toured England and played Canada to prepare for something entirely new: a World Cup for women’s rugby.
Flores was honored to be a part of that first US World Cup team, even if they did have to wear girly wool skirts (provided by sponsor Land’s End) as their number ones. Flores chuckles when she recalls players like Tam Breckenridge and Tara Flanagan, known as the “locks from hell,” wearing those outfits. “It made us look like a team, I guess.” Flores says. “They gave us red acrylic warm-ups, too.” The newly formed band of players grew close in their hotel rooms, drying their cleats on radiators and discussing what it meant to represent their country as women rugby players.
Flores doesn’t dwell much on that first World Cup competition (she’s been involved as a player or coach in all four subsequent Cups), but she retains flashes of memories—wingers going hypothermic in the rainy Welsh weather as the Eagles beat the Netherlands; she and the other subs bringing hot tea into the shower room to warm the players’ fingers after the match.
Flores does remember being in Cardiff, Wales—her first time in an actual rugby stadium—and staring into her teammates’ eyes while New Zealand’s Black Ferns performed the Haka before the semifinal. “We circled up and just looked at each other and knew this was the real challenge for the Cup.”
Even in those days, the Black Ferns were setting the standard for women’s rugby, but the US produced a 7-0 upset victory and then beat England 19-6 in the final. The US team’s triumph at the first-ever Women’s Rugby World Cup solidified a life path for Flores. She knew what she had to do and that was coach the Women’s National Team.
The 1991 US Women’s World Cup team has always fascinated Jules McCoy. Not only was the squad filled with women she played with and against, but McCoy noted that the team was put together very quickly with players from across the country, many of whom were player-coaches, each with their own style. How, she wondered, did those women come together and win a World Cup? Determining the answer to that question would shape her coaching career.
After her residency in New Orleans, McCoy moved back to Arkansas. She found a women’s club team—the Ozark Ladies—and continued her massive multi-tasking; a busy neurological practice, five-plus-hour drives to weekend rugby matches and coaching duties. She also added motherhood to the mix.
McCoy loved teaching rugby strategy, but also wanted her players to care about one another; to create a family on and off the pitch. She became obsessed with team building and player development.
In 1997, McCoy captained the West select side in 15s and 7s and then decided to retire from playing. Actually, says McCoy, “You never retire. You just transition. There’s never a point in your life when you stop.”
McCoy had always been the person to plan the socials, schedule the matches, organize and run practices, line the fields and take care of all the details. “I became known as a doer,” says McCoy of her hunger to advance the women’s game, “and people will always let you do.”
Back in Arkansas, McCoy transitioned into a coaching machine, leading the Ozark Ladies, the West 15s team, the West U-23 team and the West 7s team. “I was coaching everything in those days,” she says. And she was successful. McCoy led her teams from the bottom of the bowl brackets to competing in the top tier.
After the second World Cup in 1994 (which the US lost to England in the finals, 38-23), Kathy Flores moved to the San Francisco Bay area and became a player-coach for the Berkeley All Blues, a powerful women’s club known for its dominating play. Over the next 11 years as the All Blues’ coach, Flores helped develop a Pacific Coast dynasty, winning 10 National Club Championships. The key to that success was incorporating more sophisticated strategy into the women’s game.
As a player, Flores was never the sort of No. 8 to keep her head down at the back of the scrum. She was very much a link between the forwards and backs, always looking a few plays ahead, creating opportunities.
“The physicality of rugby is great,” she says, “but strategy is where it’s at. How will you tie them in? How will you get behind that line of defense? How should we attack? I find it all so interesting.”
In the early days of the game, many women were playing to get the ball from the set piece and out to the backs. Flores wanted the All Blues to see holes in the field and put their teammates into those holes.
Instead of just telling players what went wrong and what to do, Flores started asking questions. “Why wasn’t that two-on-one successful? How will a different decision affect what happens on the next play?” Her goal was to get her players to make the smart decisions because once the game started, there was nothing Flores could do from the sidelines.
When Flores was a player-coach, she was able to execute change on the field. Now she had to rely on team leaders and her ability as a coach to prepare intelligent players. “The hardest part for any player who has become just a coach,” she says, “is sitting there watching the game unfold and knowing you have no physical influence on the game. It’s nerve wracking.” But former Eagles captain Jen Crouse says Flores creates an atmosphere in which players can flourish. “Kathy gives players the freedom to use their judgment on the field and make decisions with more than one right answer,” relates Crouse.
At the end of 2002, after 25 years in the game, leading the All Blues to seven National Club titles and finding success with the Pacific Coast territorial side, Flores finally realized her dream. She was appointed coach of the Women’s National Team after the US squad’s disappointing 7th place finish at the 2002 World Cup in Barcelona, Spain. (Flores got the chance to see that World Cup up close, having won the trip as a grand prize in a raffle.)
Flores had built her life around rugby, developing a portable professional career she could take with her wherever rugby moved, and she had fostered lifelong friendships within the sport. She could build a coaching staff of intense former players who shared her passion for the strategic aspects of rugby and her choice for a defensive coordinator was Julie McCoy.
Flores and McCoy had been talking strategy at rugby socials for years and Flores valued McCoy’s ability to develop a defensive plan that worked within the overall team vision. McCoy admired Flores’ hunger to develop intelligent, independent-minded players. Both were zealously dedicated to coaching, so much so that when McCoy joined the National Team staff, she gave up her other coaching responsibilities to concentrate on becoming the best assistant possible under Flores. It was an ideal combination; the partnership of two strong rugby warriors who were on a mission to improve the US women’s game.
“Julie has a very good analytical mind,” observes Flores. “She was perfect for developing and summarizing our defensive strategies on the 15s team.” But in 2005, when Women’s National coach Emil Signes decided to “transition” out of coaching, McCoy applied for the position and soon found herself in charge of the 7s Eagles.
“I wanted to create a coaching environment where I’m not the authority; the players are,” says McCoy, echoing Flores’ sentiment about the coach being uninvolved once the game begins. McCoy wanted her new team to aspire to be like that first World Cup squad; students of the game who would “train their butts off.”
Those early Eagles were self-taught and self-coached; the type of self-reliant “doers” McCoy liked to be around. “I wasn’t there in ‘91; I only heard stories,” she says. “I wanted to figure out how to develop that atmosphere again.” McCoy decided the secret to 7s victory wasn’t to be found in special drills or secret plays, but in developing a group of women who loved rugby and played for one another.
Based on the performance of her team over the past four seasons, McCoy’s formula is working. In November 2005, the 7s Eagles captured the North America West Indies Rugby Association Tournament with a 5-0 record. They placed second at the 2007 USA 7s Tournament in San Diego, but took the title this February with a 5-0 record (and beat South Africa, 17-12, in an exhibition match in PETCO Park).
After finishing third at the Hong Kong 7s in 2006 and ’07, McCoy’s team won Hong Kong this March with a 6-0 record and followed that with a 7-1 record and third place finish at the Amsterdam 7s, with all their wins being shutouts. While her motivational technique before Amsterdam—ending all her emails to the players with the note, “We just won Amsterdam 7s,”—didn’t lead to a tournament title, McCoy is always trying to instill a sense of what it feels like to be champions.
“The feedback Jules gives to the players is awesome,” says wing Jen Starkey, one of the team’s most prolific try scorers. “She’ll call us individually and talk for an hour, just going over what we did in a game and what we need to work on. At that high level you don’t always get that kind of attention.
“Jules has completely changed me as a player,” Starkey continues. “I used to be someone who just kind of showed up and played and got by with my natural ability. After one of her footwork camps, I really improved; got stronger, faster and smarter.”
“Julie is doing a great job with the 7s team,” says Flores. “She has made 7s a very high profile aspect of rugby.”
Flores coaches the team with the bigger profile and her first big test as coach of the National 15s Team came at the 2006 World Cup in Edmonton. While the team finished 5th with a 4-1 record, they were in a tough pool with Australia and Ireland and had to face eventual Cup runner-up England in their first round match. Considering they rebounded from an 18-0 shutout to win their next four games, it was a vast improvement over the team’s 2002 performance.
Since then, Flores has been working to build a fundamentally strong team that will perform even better in the upcoming Nations Cup this August (see “Quick Taps,” page 20) and in the 2010 World Cup. She resigned from coaching the All Blues after the fall 2007 season so she could focus exclusively on the National Team and runs her camps like an intense chess master. Her drills are game-like situations that teach the Eagles to read and anticipate patterns of play rather than specific plays.
Her players absorb Flores’ intensity. Co-captain Kristin Zdanczewicz feels that the Eagles play not just for each other, but also for their coach. “I play hard because I don’t want to let her down,” Zdanczewicz says. “It’s like when your parents have expectations of you. If we don’t win, I feel like I let her down.”
Kathy Flores and Julie McCoy haven’t indicated how long they will continue coaching, but even if they decide not to coach beyond this year, they will have left an indelible mark on the sport. During the last two decades, many of the country’s best women players have learned the game from these two women warriors of rugby coaching and some will likely become coaches themselves.
Is there any doubt that rugby strategy according to Flores and McCoy will be taught and executed on rugby pitches for decades to come?
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