Team Fiji men’s rugby 7s players went through many story templates of the “Hero’s Journey” in their buildup to successfully defend the gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The “Hero’s Journey” involves a person or a team that goes on an adventure, learns a lesson, wins a victory and with that newfound knowledge, then returns home transformed.
National 7s head coach Gareth Baber said he tried to create the unique part of the journey around the players before the situation they found themselves in last year.
Baber said when that journey was sort of postponed, they decided to name it the “Hero’s Journey”.
“You can have a look on Google with some of those famous stories,” he said.
“It is biblical stories, parables, Hollywood movies, fictional books and a lot of them have the same process of the ‘Hero’s Journey’.
“It is used extensively in business as a method where you could take a group of people or an individual for a journey and we used that.
“Part of that is the whole process of not just seeing the outcome.
“I have always warned against this as sometimes you can become too outcome focused and think that it is all or nothing for just an Olympics.
“I also knew that the journey was going to be difficult at times, as players were going to question the motivation with the pain that they were going through and the sacrifices that they were making.
“So to keep the journey effective, measures were taken to show them where they have been and what point they were at by providing them videos reflecting on their progress.”
