The ‘super important’ All Blacks and Wallabies factor that convinced Joe Schmidt working with Ulster was his best next move
Joe Schmidt after his final Wallabies match in July and, inset, with Rory Best when in charge of Ireland
Joe Schmidt has just completed the first week of his new job at Ulster after stepping down last month as Wallabies head coach. The New Zealander had long flagged that he would be leaving the Australian role he took up in early 2024 as successor to Eddie Jones.
It was April 2025 when Les Kiss, Schmidt’s former Ireland assistant, was chosen by Rugby Australia to take charge of the Wallabies following the completion of the Southern Series block of fixtures in the new Nations Championship.
The Wallabies won just one of their three July matches, beating Italy in Perth after losing to Ireland in Sydney and France in Brisbane. That left Schmidt signing off with a record of just 12 wins in 32 Test matches, but despite going into the books with the worst losing percentage in Australian history since the game turned professional, his services were in demand.
Only 11 days after the Wallabies defeated the Azzurri 57-10, Schmidt was unveiled in Ireland as Ulster’s new coach development advisor in a part-time consultancy capacity, and the relationship has started with a three-week visit to Belfast that began with the ex-Leinster boss attending senior team training last Monday.
“It feels very familiar…”
He has since attended various pathway training sessions and matches, getting to meet numerous new people who will be looking to him for inspiration and guidance, but it was his previous relationships with some of the personnel in Ulster which convinced him that taking up their offer was his best next move after leaving Australia.
Schmidt had worked with Ulster head coach Richie Murphy at Leinster and Ireland, had coached the province’s general manager, ex-Ireland skipper Rory Best, for six years at Test level, and had also long known development and transition coach Dan Soper, a fellow Kiwi.
These connections helped to get the deal with the United Rugby Championship club over the line. “Yeah, it was super important,” Schmidt told Ulster Rugby YouTube at the end of his first week in Belfast. “I ended up coaching the Wallabies because of the respect I had for their high-performance manager (Peter Horne). I’d worked with him before (at World Rugby).
“Ended up working with the All Blacks because of a prior friendship with Ian Foster. Those things, a lot of rugby, a lot of sport, a lot of life is around connections, and you build a trust with people and respect for people, and so it was easy enough to say to Rory that I’d be keen to help out but I’m still trying to find out how best I do that.
“It feels very familiar. I’ve spent a lot of time up here, having lived, albeit in Dublin, in Ireland for 10 years, and I know a lot of the people already. Obviously, I’ve known Daniel Soper for a long time and I’m working closely with him, and I coached with Richie Murphy for 10 years.
“So yeah, there’s a lot of familiarity, and then there’s also a fair bit of new stuff with the younger age groups and the people coaching those. I haven’t met nearly as many of those people.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Rory,” he added. “We worked together for six years and even before that, when I was coaching Leinster, I got to know Rory reasonably well just in the fixtures that we had and the chats around the game, and obviously he was Ireland captain for four years during the time that I was coaching.
“So, that respect and that little part of me that is connected to Ireland, if Rory thought that I could help, I thought I could find out in this window how much or what we could do to help and then work from there.
“And while I still am coaching, say students, for example, and some coaches are observing that and then we’re having a chat about delivery or content or feedback or feeding forward some ideas to them about how they might go about it.
“It’s funny. I’ve been doing it professionally for 25 years, but I don’t have any answers. I just have lots of experience and ideas and some of that might be useful.”
After the next fortnight brings to an end Schmidt’s initial visit to Ulster, whose 2025/26 campaign resulted in a heavy Challenge Cup final defeat and ninth place in the URC, the plan is for the New Zealander to return in November and April for further hands-on involvement but he will also be tutoring online when based overseas.
“It’s not a full-time role. That was part of the appeal, to be honest. I’ve been very full-time for just about 25 years as a professional coach and have been sort of trying to peel that back a little bit and get more time with the family.
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“I’m not on deck the whole time but I have already done a fair bit online, so that will continue between my visits. I’ve got two more weeks here beyond this week, and then I’m back for the whole of November and back for April next year, and in between times we’ll be online and back and forth a little bit.
“It’s a little bit investigative at the moment just trying to find out what the current pathway is for coaches, how they’re supported, how they’re identified, and what we can do to make sure we identify the right people and give them the right support and a degree of challenge as well because I don’t think you really grow as a coach unless there are challenges and you’ve got to try to work your way through them.
“We all need guidance. The better the guidance we get and the broader the growth mindset is in those players and in those coaches, we will get a better chance to be as competitive as we can be.
“With that support, with that investment of time and probably ideas, hopefully we can help those coaches to help their players to the best of their ability and beyond it a bit to stretch themselves a little bit.”
READ MORE: Wallabies: Why the Joe Schmidt tenure was a ‘failure’ and the statement that ‘doesn’t wash’
