New West Harbour coach Todd Louden has gone back to basics at Concord ahead of the 2017 Shute Shield season in an attempt to rebuild the Pirates into a competitive force across all grades. The former Waratahs and Rebels assistant, who has previously coached Sydney Uni and Randwick, took over the top job after last season and is midway through a unique pre-season aimed at improving the skill level of all players. “We changed things up quite considerably actually. We didn’t do any conditioning pre-Christmas and just focussed on our skills. We worked on what we’re calling our tactical skills around certain elements and laws of the game so that we were all on the same page,” he said. “Then post Christmas we’ve worked on our conditioning but we’ve approached it quite differently as well. I was interested to read that the Waratahs are focussing on ‘rugby conditioning’ around the game because we are doing a very similar thing. We’ve also focussed more on power based tra