There’s a widely accepted notion that coaches of elite sporting teams are a “special breed”.

Not exactly unhinged, but with personality profiles that sit a little outside your standard psychometric chart.

Think about it for a minute. A “shareholder” meeting held every week. The team wins and your players performed well, but you – not them – lose a few on the trot, and the hard questions and finger pointing begins. “Is there a risk you’ve lost the dressing shed?

Gee, why wouldn’t you want to do that for 120 hours a week?

Throw into the current mix, working within a code of footy that’s heavily on the nose, and you’d think the torture was just about complete.

But for incoming Reds coach, Les Kiss, an “optimistic realist”, it all adds up to excitement and opportunity.

The weight of expectation, the pressure to achieve, even the current stench that lingers around professional rugby in Australia – that’s all part of the job’s glorious complexity.

“Coaching – I wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world,” he says. “I’m blessed to have been given the opportunity to do what I’m doing,”

Curiously in the eyes of most middle-aged Queensland sports fans, 59 year-old Kiss is still a “leagueie” – that’s how we all got to know him, playing on the wing for Queensland, and briefly Australia.

His introduction to rugby union was almost accidental – it came of all places in the rarefied air of the Snowy Mountains in the summer of 1995.

After dodgy knees had cut short his playing career with North Sydney (AKA the Bad News Bears) Kiss joined the club’s management team.

The Bears were on a pre-season camp up near Thredbo – so too were the ACT Brumbies. Brumbies coach Rod Macqueen had enlisted the services of another “leagueie”, noted hardman John Muggleton, to help with the team’s defence. Kiss knew Muggleton, the pair got talking, and it went from there.

Kiss had always loved the strategy of team sport, how all the moving parts fitted together. But that interest intensified while he was injured. Spending so much time on the sideline afforded him the opportunity to contemplate matters even more deeply.

Then he became exposed to Rugby – Geez, that offered a whole different layer of complexity – chess vs the draughts he’d been playing, coaching the 13man game at Norths.

And so his rugby coaching journey began – his old mate Frank Ponissi, a long time powerbroker at the Melbourne Storm, somehow hooked him up with Harry Viljoen, the coach of the Springboks. Two seasons in South Africa, back to Australia, over to Ireland, back to England – each leg of the odyssey providing another layer of knowledge, experience, and durability.

An avid student of people with an insatiable appetite for learning, Kiss never left a coaching post without first having syphoned the wisdom out of the big brains and lucid thinkers around him.

Head coaches, elite players, administrators, groundsmen, bus drivers – the source didn’t matter. He leaned in, listened and learned, each morsel a dab of paint on a canvas that contributed to a picture of success.

Bob Dwyer and Ewen McKenzie at the Waratahs, Joe Schmidt (the newly appointed Wallaby coach) in Ireland, even Peter “Squirter” McWhirter back in his formative days, playing league for Valleys. Repeat the simple skills until they become innate. Take the complex and make it simple. From an early age, he picked the brains of some of the best.

That’s not for a moment to suggest that Kiss didn’t have cerebral foundations of his own. Ever since he was a kid growing up in Bundaberg, he’d been naturally curious – people of that ilk tend to accumulate knowledge and wisdom unwittingly.

By little surprise, these traits, among others, made an immediate impression on the Queensland Rugby selection panel when in July 2023, they sat down to choose Brad Thorn’s successor as the Reds’ head coach.

Kiss had done his homework on every player in the squad. Reams and reams of detail, not in pursuit of perfection (“that’s a waste of time and energy”) or even consumable data, but instead, just to get to know and understand who he’d be working with. The better you know the players, the better you can relate to them – the coaching, the corralling, the motivating, all stems from there.

Conspicuously absent from his vernacular, the well worn cliches and platitudes.

Just when his audience thought they knew the end of a sentence, Kiss would veer off in a different direction.

“You can lead a horse to water…..but how good’s your water? Is it crystal clear? Do they really want to drink it?”

Kiss offered new and fresh perspectives.

“I’m not a change agent – my focus is simply building on the very strong cultural foundations that Thorny and his team have built,” Kiss explained over a coffee, in the week leading up to the opening Super Rugby match of the 2024 season – against the old foe, the NSW Waratahs at Suncorp on Saturday night.

“Unity of purpose and desire, collective effort for the greater good… I can talk all the bullshit I like, but the truth is I haven’t won a thing,” he admitted.

“The only thing that matters is now. Tradition I regard as important, but I don’t let it hijack me. Acknowledge what has passed, then move quickly to the future.

“The last thing young players want to hear are the words “back in my day”! Back in my day, we trained two nights a week and then went to the pub and had 10 beers. Are we going to get them to do that too? Of course not. By all means reflect, but don’t let it be an anchor. It’s our job to create a new tradition, our own tradition.”

Given the choice between two mantras – “win at all costs” and the more nuanced “better people make better rugby players”, Kiss defaults instantly to the latter.

The second, he believes, determines the first. “Mould together a group who wants to go to the same place together, and are prepared to drop their guard to get there – that’s when there’ll be progress,” he explains, clearly having thought long and hard about optimal team dynamics.

Underpinning the key platform, he continues, is caring deeply for the players. Not just in the context of a No 4 or a No 15, but as people. Living, breathing humans.

He remembers being told by an “old school” league coach, “Ya gotta keep ya distance. Ya can’t be mates with ‘em, because then ya won’t be able to deliver ‘em the hard news”.

“Bullshit! That’s just dodging the delivery of hard news,” he barks. “Delivering hard news is part of the job, but you deliver it in a way that helps the player learn and grow. You can’t be anything but 100% honest with them. ”I know you’re pissed off I didn’t pick you – I’d be disappointed if you weren’t. But here’s what I need you to do – this is your challenge” – all while staying ready for their opportunity.

Kiss openly acknowledges that the game in Australia in not in a great place.

He found watching parts of last year’s Rugby World Cup difficult, and that’s not just because he and wife Julie were living in a rented flat in New Farm, with no furniture, the TV lying unaccompanied on the floor.

The vision on the screen at times was just as uncomfortable. “I felt for the players,” he said. “They were trying their hearts, but it just wasn’t happening. Again that’s in the past. What’s far more important is now – the season ahead. And it all starts this week.”

That’s when Les Kiss will gain an early insight into just how clear, how fresh, how enticing the water in his horse trough is perceived to be.

*Round 1 – Super Rugby, Queensland Reds v NSW Waratahs. Suncorp Stadium, Kick-off 7.05pm, Saturday, February 24.