News that Katy Daley-Mclean has been appointed Performance Lead for Sale Sarks is important on several fronts.
First, the title: she acquires a new style of job, neither Head Coach nor Director of Rugby.
Second, she becomes only the fourth woman (after Giselle Mather, Jo Yapp and Susie Appleby) to lead a Premier 15s club for the 2021-22 season; a welcome addition.
Third, she will continue playing. This may well be her greatest challenge. There’s no doubting her outstanding career performance on the field, but it will require exceptional clarity of thought and deed to combine these two quite distinct roles. Till now all the Prem 15s head coaches had long since hung up their boots; there have been dual appointments as player/assistant coach, for example Rocky Clark and Tamara Taylor at Saracens, but this is on a different level altogether.
Fourth: only one other person has received an appointment alongside Daley-Mclean, Callum Yorke, who becomes Head of Operations, another unfamiliar title.
Sale Sharks achieved some of their aims in their debut season, assembling a more than useful squad from many sources and winning four games. But a think-tank has looked at the overall set-up and decided on a completely new path. Sid Sutton, Sharks’ CEO, has big ambitions for the club.
We can be sure that further (re-)appointments are in the pipe-line, specialist coaches are essential in the rarefied atmosphere of elite women’s rugby in England. If the bulk of the future support staff is to be new to the club, that will place it in a similar position to last year, when everything was new. Sutton will want to ensure some degree of continuity beyond the playing-field.
It will be fascinating to see how far these adjustments will help to raise Sharks’ position in the league. They are not the only ones to be having a big rethink.
