Todd Louden is back again as coach at Sydney Uni and is confident he can utilise past experiences at the club to help push the Students back into Shute Shield contention in the years ahead. 

Louden last coached at University Oval in 2013 and returns to take on a role as Head of Coaching, which will see him split his time before coaching first grade and mentoring other coaches at the club.  

“This is my third time coaching at the club and it’s funny, some of the things in place are things I implemented in my first stint coaching at Uni in the 2000s,” Louden told Rugby News. 

“The attitude of the playing group, being mostly students, is unreal. They have this thirst for knowledge, which is really handy as a coach.”

Sydney Uni lost five of their last seven matches in 2023 and missed the playoffs less than a year after winning the 2022 Shute Shield premiership. 

“Technically every decade or so, a club like Uni needs to renew its playing group with older more experienced players moving on and I think that happened last year,” Louden explained. 

“They’ve always been a young group but I think they were probably two years overdue for that renewal and they managed to get some really good results before that.”

Fortunately, the coach believes he and his assistants already have a blueprint for success to refer to. 

“As a coaching group, we understand what needs to be done because we did it with a similar group 10 or so years ago at Uni,” he continued. 

“We’ve got to accelerate the development of a lot of our young players and we need to tweak the rugby program in certain ways so that we can get that mass acceleration. 

“How does that translate in terms of results for next year? It’s probably too early to tell but we’ve got our head down working hard on that at the moment.”

Sydney Uni’s Director of Rugby Nick Ryan completed a thorough review of Uni’s 2023 season which helped Louden develop his plans for the next 12 months. 

“I think we’ll have a rejuvenated style of play next year,” the coach said. 

“If you look at last season, a lot of teams started to play a game style that was very similar to a Sydney Uni style over the years. 

“It’s up to us now to evolve that style and take the next step. That’s not to say that we’ll go away from what has made Sydney Uni so strong over the years because our DNA will never change.

“But there are some aspects of our game and our game model that needs to evolve and modernise.

“Overall, second grade won a premiership last year and first grade colts fell just short in the grand final and those two sides should always form the nucleus of your next crop of players. 

“We’ve got a lot of very talented, very hungry players who have had success last year and we want to develop those players and the players around them to accelerate the development of the playing group as a whole.”

Louden recently coached both West Harbour and Southern Districts in the Shute Shield and said he’d learnt not to pay too much attention to other clubs at this point of the year in the midst of ‘silly season’. 

Despite that, he said he expected another extremely tight competition again in 2024. 

“Now that we’re outside of a World Cup year, I think the recruitment will settle down a little bit in comparison to last year. 

“Some teams will have more cohesion early, others will develop it later in the year when their rep players return. 

“I haven’t looked too closely at the other clubs but looking at last season from afar, it was another great competition where anyone could beat anyone on their day and I think that will continue next year again.”