The 1983 Strategic Reset

The Low Point

In the 2001 publication Hooked On League: Royce Simmons¹, Royce tells the story of Darryl Brohman asking his advice, at the end of 1983, about an offer he’d received to move to Canterbury-Bankstown. Royce’s advice paints a clear picture of the state of the Penrith Panthers at that time:

… thanks for thinking of us but right now we’ve got five players on contract and you’re a free agent being chased by probably the best club in the world.

The reasoning behind Royce’s that advice is also telling:

I don’t think he wanted to leave us high and dry but we told him that we were high and dry whether he stayed or not.

Simmons’ view was that “things were looking bleak” for Penrith.

In fact, things were so bleak, even the independently run Panthers Supporters Club had dissolved at the end of 1983 and needed its own reset. The supporter’s club had two Panther diehard supporters — Cathy O’Kane and Berryl Moss who took on the task of whipping up wider support for the 1984 Season and beyond.

And Panthers had Roger Cowan who had finally been granted the governance structure he’d so long been advocating.

The Change

One of Cowan’s first steps under the new One Board, One CEO structure was to involve more people in finding solutions to serious problems. Problems like the performance of the rugby league team.

Royce had been weighing up whether to leave Penrith when he was invited to join the effort to find those solutions. He described that first step to a reset of football fortunes.

Prior to the start of the 1984 season Roger Cowan organised a series of seminars at Penrith Leagues Club — a ‘think-tank’ involving prominent Penrith business people, junior rugby league administrators, past and present players, and local community leaders. In one of the groups, Tim Sheens’ name came up as a possible coach.

It was an approach that mirrored what he had done with the licensed club in the early days of his tenure.

This symposium produced a range of strategies and goals, two of the goals had a significant impact on Panthers football performance.

The first, most immediate, goal was to secure Sheens for the coaching position — it was late in 1983, training for the 1984 season needed to begin soon yet Penrith had few players and no coach. This was a pressing need. And it was a challenging task given the fact Sheens had sold his real estate business and was preparing up to move his family to Queensland.

Royce worked in the background to get Sheens to stay, but says:

I’m sure Roger Cowan worked the hardest to convince Tim to take on the job.

[He] really went out of the way to chase hard and talk Tim out of going. The players played a supporting role in letting Tim know that we’d support him.

Tim signed on as the club’s first Manager-Coach.

Appointing a Manager-Coach was unusual in the rugby league world — although it was a pressing short-term need to appoint Sheens as coach, expanding the role was a strategic move.

The second goal was more long-term and strategic — to have 5 Penrith juniors selected for the Kangaroos — the Australian Rugby League team. A Five by Five Committee was established to take responsibility for developing initiatives to achieve this goal.

Don Feltis was a member of this Committee:

We talked about strategies and all the rugby league development issues … like making sure our best juniors were selected into representative squads; to set up development squads — age groups between the representative squads — like 13s, 15s and 17s and give them personalised coaching; panels to interview possible coaches and to have only the best coaches — and to have all our coaching techniques standardised so that all our juniors from 13s to 19s were getting similar tuition … under the guidance of Tim Sheens.

It was a great exercise and made a lot of difference to the future development of our club. … it made us all wake up and realise all the things we had to do to be successful. Roger had always been a dreamer … a visionary. He realised we had to lift our club up from the level we were performing at.

A Different Way of Thinking — from Goals to Outcomes

The stated goal of the Five-by-Five Committee was to have five home-grown players represent Australia within five years.

Looking back, this appears to have been an early example of a planning philosophy Roger Cowan would later apply much more broadly throughout the Panthers organisation. That philosophy centred around “outcomes thinking“.

This goal was an outcome – a description of a future that would be proof of a successful project. During the 90s at Panthers this would have been framed:

In November 1999 (5 Seasons away) the Australian Kangaroos have included five representatives from Panthers who were developed in the Penrith Junior Rugby League District.

Working backwards from that future enabled a more creative approach to uncovering the initiatives, programs and strategies that would have a positive effect on creating that future. Initiatives like those described by Don Feltis above.

The Five-by-Five goal was never intended as a prediction. It was a deliberately ambitious picture of what success would look like if the club fundamentally changed the way it developed players in their huge junior catchment area.

Quite quickly early indicators drove some optimism — the governance model reduced conflict, Cathy and Berryl re-launched the supporters’ club, Tim Sheens had players wanting to stay, and the team began making its way up the competition ladder.²

Continue: The 1983 Strategic Reset — Did It Work? examines whether the strategic changes introduced in late 1983 produced measurable improvements in the Panthers’ football performance over the following decade.

Hooked On League: Royce Simmons with Alan Whiticker published 2001. Chapter 19.
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The headline in the SMH clipping is dramatic but not accurate – Penrith had been in the top 5 before, a few times but only once before had they been there after at least 5 rounds of a season. ↩︎

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