Greg Nicol

Coach Profile

The men’s Black Sticks team won’t be going to the tattoo parlour at the Paris Olympics this year.

Head coach Greg Nicol says the team’s goal isn’t to attend the Olympics; they’re going there to be competitive and win games.

“I think too many teams and athletes go to the Olympic Games, and it is just about getting to the Olympics and getting the tattoo type of thing,” he laughs, referencing athletes receiving the Olympic rings as a tattoo.

“Whereas I think this group of players are a bit more aspirational, and that’s really pleasing for me.”

Nicol was appointed head coach of the Black Sticks men’s team in December 2021 and led the team to the quarterfinals of the Hockey World Cup last year.

Despite being his first Olympics as the head coach, Nicol is no stranger to the Olympic Games. He represented South Africa at the 1996 and 2004 Summer Olympics, and worked in various coaching roles for the New Zealand men’s and women’s teams in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

When Nicol finished playing international hockey in 2004, he was already interested in transitioning to the coaching side of the sport.

“As a player, I wasn’t technically outstanding, and so the tactical side of my game had to be razor-sharp to compete or to make up for some technical deficiencies,” he explains.

He coached in Europe for a few years before being invited to New Zealand in 2007.

“Everyone thinks, Oh, you played international hockey;, therefore,, you can coach it’, and that’s definitely not the case,” Nicol says.

“I set myself up in Europe with some clubs and went about the next few years trying to figure out what sort of coach I was going to be and understand myself a little bit better in the context of coaching.”

The biggest lesson Nicol faced when coaching in New Zealand was learning the Kiwi culture and how Kiwis tick.

“At the end of the day, hockey is the context but coaching’s all about people, and influencing and getting the best out of people,” he says.

“Some of the pitfalls that certain coaches can make is they think that there’s one size fits all,” the South-African born says.

“The nice thing for me is that I was involved in both an academy and the national programmes so could use the two environments to learn as much as I can about the Kiwi culture and what makes Kiwis tick.”

Nicol started his coaching journey in Aotearoa with the men’s team, as well as running an academy in Hawke’s Bay, and then worked with the women’s team, developing a wide range of knowledge and skills across teams.

He also worked at Central Hockey as a high-performance director.

“That was probably very useful for me to understand the bigger picture around programming and planning and all the stuff that happens behind the scenes, rather than just the on-field coaching side of things,” Nicol says.

Before starting as the head coach of the men’s team, Nicol was appointed Hockey New Zealand’s athlete pathway manager, a newly created role.

“The process started at talent identification, and we had a whole model around actually identifying what talent looked like at various ages and stages,” explains Nicol.

“And then within that, once players are identified, putting a performance development programme together to ensure that they realise their talent and potential and hopefully get them to the point where it puts them on the front foot to be selected for the international programme.”

Nicol appreciated the holistic approach they took, something he believes is very important.

“We didn’t just look at what people did with their hockey stick; we were looking at a lot of personal attributes and characteristics. Obviously the physical and mental side of things is very relevant,” Nicol explains. “The ability to play hockey is just the entry ticket.”

Nicol was well prepared for the step up from various assistant roles to the head coach role but still had things to learn.

“Probably the thing that I’ve learnt the most is how valuable assistant coaches and support staff are, and how much the head coach needs to have their back and them to have his back throughout a campaign,” he says.

“Maybe as an assistant coach, I didn’t appreciate that as much as I do now that I’m the head coach. It truly is a team effort from a staffing point of view.

“There’s no way I can do it all on my own. I need to embrace the skills and value that each of the staff members brings to the table.”

When Nicol took over the head coach role, he began by identifying what was working well for the team, but also where the men’s game was at globally, and where it potentially would be going.

“The key thing for us was that we wanted to play a brand of hockey that was a little more attacking and had a little more flair to it than possibly what they had been playing,” he says.

“The top teams in the world are showing that in order to win tournaments, you need to be looking at scoring on average between four and five goals a game. We weren’t at that space when I took over, and that’s the goal that we’re continually chasing.

“Obviously, we still want to make sure that we’re stopping goals, but primarily put ourselves in the context of playing a brand of hockey that allows us to score goals.”

A big thing for Nicol is mindset – playing to win rather than playing not to lose.

“They fundamentally are the same thing, but they require very different mindsets,” he says. “Probably the biggest shift is being around the confidence of the players, to be able to have a go and back their natural talent and the skills that they have developed.”

Nicol was part of the High-Performance Sport New Zealand’s Coach Accelerator Programme, a three-year venture
which spans sporting codes to develop coaches through workshops and mentoring.

“That gave me my first taste of maximising other sporting codes and having mentors and other people that you can tap into, so I’ve been very lucky to have that in play for a while now,” he says.

“I try and cross-code as much as I can. We invite other coaches from other codes to come in and observe our environment and give us feedback, and I certainly try to get to as many other environments as I can as well.”

Alex McKenzie led the programme and continues to provide guidance and influence Nicol, helping him figure out what sort of coach he wanted to be in the early days.

And how would his players describe Nicol as a coach? “Competitive, demanding, and hopefully that I care,” he says.

“Someone who provides the perfect balance of challenge and support so that the player and the team can be the best version of themselves that they can be.

“That’s sort of the philosophy driving me, and sometimes you challenge a bit more than you should, and sometimes you’re a bit soft. So if you can push and pull each way and get that balance right when the timing’s right, that’s the art of coaching really.”

Nicol’s advice to any coaches is to take time to understand yourself, and what type of coach you want to be.

“Make sure that that’s about you and you’re not trying to be another coach,” he says. “Fundamentally you need to be about yourself, and be the best coach that you can be, you’ve got to be yourself…it means that you’re going to be authentic.”