Brian McDermott explains the difference between working with part-time players and “a kid who’s on 50, 60k”

Brian McDermott is Super League’s most successful coach.

The former Leeds boss guided the Rhinos to four Super League titles from 2011-17 and two Challenge Cups and is the most recent coach to mastermind the treble doing so in 2015.

However, since his Headingley departure mid-way through 2018, he has spent most of his time working in the lower tiers guiding Toronto to promotion in 2019 and is now aiming to achieve the same at Featherstone.

This has seen him work with a mixture of part-time and full-time talent and at Featherstone’s Press Day this week he was keen the emphasis the lengths part-time players go to in order to play at their very best.

“I do like the fact that guys like James Lockwood rock up full of dust, full of muck and we never have to cut anything from changing because of those guys. They just want to tear in,” McDermott said, “I ask a lot of questions of them when they train and he [Lockwood] is normally at the front when we’ve done the conditioning or the running and I like that. That’s the same mentality we saw when we were playing the Rhinos in a warm up game two weeks ago where he [Lockwood] shouldn’t have played because he pulled his back and in the game he wasn’t getting off the ground as easily but he toughed it out. That’s how you win big games.

“That’s a hard thing to coach into players and getting a kid whose on 50, 60K at the age of 18 who doesn’t know what work ethic is and doesn’t know how to deal with disappointment and runs to his agent, runs to his mum and dad, and runs to the owners and talks to them about the coach disparagingly. There’s too much of that, they’re not all like that there is some really good kids.

“I’m really enjoying it whether its nine o’clock in the morning or nine at night it doesn’t bother me.

“They’re smart, and how to win a Championship game is the same as Super League. The difference in the game is the size of the athletes.”