One of the world’s most revolutionary sports coaches is based in Leicestershire. This man has implemented methods that have changed the way elite sport is coached at every level. Is it Leicester City boss, Sven-Goran Eriksson or Leicester Tigers Director of Rugby, Richard Cockerill? No, this man’s name is Alan Pearson.

The chances are that you may not recognise him or have heard of his hugely successful company, but you will have seen his methods in action. Alan’s company, SAQ (Speed Agility Quickness) International are at the forefront of techniques that have been adopted by elite sports clubs and nations all over the globe.

The Melton-based business have worked with high profile companies like Nike and Castrol, some of the greatest sporting teams in the world, including the England rugby team and Bayern Munich football club and top sports stars, like Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Jordan.

So how did it all begin? Well as Alan admits, it’s a long story.

“I was born in Radford in Nottingham. My first sport was boxing and I was the Amateur Heavyweight Boxing Champion of three counties. I was brought up on boxing and soccer and didn’t even touch a rugby ball until I was 16. Rugby was great because it got rid of my aggression and helped me develop the fundamental skills I’d developed in boxing and in the streets.

“Within three months I was playing first grade for Nottingham Moderns and got picked up by a coach called Chalky White who wanted me to go to Leicester, but in those days Nottingham to Leicester was a long way. I was working class and had no money so I ended up having a short stint with Nottingham, which just wasn’t Leicester and I didn’t enjoy it.”

As well as playing rugby, Alan maintained an interest in sport and physical activity in his working life.

“At the same time I was Physical Training Instructor. My first job was at PT Instructor at a Psychiatric Hospital in Saxondale. That was a fantastic experience for me. There was hot and cold running nurses! I met my first wife there too.”

Then Alan’s rugby career got a little more serious as a move overseas beckoned.

“I got an offer to play rugby in Australia. My first port of call was Sydney, which was fascinating. I got a job at a sheet metal factory and had a three-game trial for Manley Rugby League. I found rugby league quite different and moved on to rugby union and then started travelling around the country. I played Aussie rules in Tasmania, rugby in Melbourne, at a club called the Kiwis and played in Adelaide. I also played rugby league in Alice Springs.

“We got an offer for work and rugby in Queensland and went there. I’ll never forget, we were driving through a place called Mount Isa, one of the mining communities in North Queensland, and I saw this big poster that said that the All Blacks were coming. Of course, one of my dreams was to play against the All Blacks and I just said, ‘I’m going to play in that game,’ and within six months, I’d played against the All Blacks for Queensland Country.

“I never played international rugby for Australia because I still had my British passport. It was a fantastic experience over there and I did end up playing in nine international fixtures. The set up in Australia with Queensland and the support for Queensland country was fantastic. I got to meet and play against some great players so it was a massive learning curve for me. It was a very sporting culture in Australia, it’s all about success and winning which I really took to.”

So how did a love for sport and playing for a number of top teams in Australia translate to a passion for coaching? Alan explained.

“I guess one of the turning points was an opportunity for my ex-wife. She was offered a very senior position in Perth. I went to Western Australia and I realised it wasn’t a hotbed of rugby like New South Wales was. So that affected my rugby career somewhat. I played for the state for four or five years, played for one of the greatest clubs on earth, Cottesloe, which is a fantastic place. You look out over the Indian Ocean as you play, which is amazing.

“I went to university and re-graduated. I did a lot of coaching but my expertise was neurological science. I became chief executive of MS (Multiple Sclerosis) and was on the Health Advisory network, advising the premier on health issues and helped write the disability services act. My expertise expanded, but it took a lot of hard work and studying. All that time, I was playing rugby.

“I captained Cotttesloe and became vice president, too. At that stage I’d been doing additional coaching courses. I’m a level 3 and 4 rugby coach. I’ve also got English certificates now. I’ve done some sports science about power, speed and lifting, etc. I wanted to arm myself because I really loved working in sport. Then I got disillusioned working with politicians – sometimes they can steal your watch and help you look for it, if you know what I mean.”

A return to England beckoned after Alan married his second wife, Sylvana, in 1992.

“I decided to come back to England for family reasons, as my dad was ill. I started working in Manchester in a hospital because of my medical background. Then I got headhunted to do some coaching at a small club called Heaton Moore in Stockport. Then Leeds Tykes approached me in 1992/93 and appointed me as their first Director of Rugby.”

Success at Leeds helped sow the seeds of the Speed, Agility and Quickness philosophy, as Alan explained.

“I put a new structure in and turned it around, and we finished in the top five that year after looking as though we’d get relegated. I brought in a few Aussie players to help out but the English players were fantastic and most of them really took to the way we coached.

“We didn’t have a big side and that’s where Speed, Agility, Quickness came in. I started looking at the importance of movement, speed, power and multi directional movement. Due to the player’s fantastic effort we organised a tour to Australia. We took Leeds via Malaysia, playing the national squad there, to Perth and the first ever international in Margaret River.”

Following the success of the tour, Alan was offered another big job, which went on to change his life.

“After the tour I stayed on for a bit of a holiday and to catch up with my kids. Then I got a phone call from Malaysia, asking me to become national coach because they were impressed with the style of rugby we’d played.

“Rightly or wrongly, I took the job. In some ways I wish I’d stayed at Leeds. It was one of those defining moments in my life. Leeds was such an amazing place and I’ve still got this pang that I didn’t do the right thing. So I was the national coach, but it was more about developing the sport for the whole of Malaysia.”

Alan explained how the principles he had implemented at Leeds helped him with the Malaysian national side.

“In the World Cup qualifying I changed the way we played. We had very small players and when they were playing a Western style of play against each other, they were fine, but when it came to playing Westerners, they were getting murdered. I had to sit down and explain that we’d have to play a game that was about offloading the ball, moving quickly with multi-directional movement and everything at a high tempo. That’s where the SAQ started really developing.

“For me to get the expertise on that, I went to America and met one of the founders of the concept of SAQ, called Randy Smyth. He had some ideas and started developing them, but it was very much one-dimensional. I looked at it and realised the principles needed to be more multi-directional and explained that some of the biggest sports in the world aren’t baseball, basketball and American football; they are football, rugby and cricket. In the sub-continent you’re talking billions of people that watch cricket; these are the true worldwide sports. I explained how they were missing a beat. The wash-up of it all was that I ended up owning and controlling SAQ worldwide.” (See below for a video showing some of the SAQ principles).

Alan persisted with SAQ, looking to progress the philosophy further after working with some of the biggest names in world sport, before choosing England as the location for his company.

“I saw the value of the programme where some people didn’t want to take it further. At the same time in America, I was courted by Nike and for nearly 12 years, I was a Nike consultant and met and worked with some of their top athletes, like Michael Jordan. I’ve also worked at Barcelona FC and Nike have been really good to me.

“For me, the place to run the programme was England because, invariably, we were playing and had invented most of the sports in the world, but we weren’t winning any of them. When I came back to England there were these really one-dimensional concepts. There was too much running in straight lines and a lack of development of movement.

“You just have to look at football and even now if you’re a big kid you get in the team and the small kids seem to get thrown to the side. It’s nonsense because that means that Pele, Maradona, George Best and Zola would never have played. You look at the current players too, like Iniesta, and see that those ideas are nonsensical. Power and speed doesn’t relate to how tall and big you are, its how you generate you’re power and how you move.”

But what brought SAQ to Melton? The chance to work with Leicester Tigers played a major part, as Alan explained.

“I set up initially in Manchester because of the Commonwealth Games, but it didn’t suit the business. I wanted to be central and Bob Dwyer at Leicester Tigers offered me a contract to do three days a week as one of the coaches to do Speed, Agility, Quickness, as he saw the benefit of it. Tigers were one of the first clubs to really introduce the concept of the programme and I was there for one and a half seasons and when Bob got sacked, I got sacked.

“Working with Leicester Tigers was a great introduction for me and at the same time I developed the programme from Melton Mowbray. I still had family in Nottingham so I came central to Melton. After all these years I’m still here. Melton’s a great spot and Leicestershire’s a great place to work from.”

Alan talked a little more about the idea behind the speed, agility, quickness programmes and how they first drew interest from top class sports clubs.

“The concepts of SAQ are more than just speed, agility, quickness, it’s actually a very integral part of movement and it’s bigger than just the elite. The goal for me was always to work at the top end and the initial interest was from Tommy Burns at Celtic. I did some work up there for a season where the team didn’t lose a game but drew too many. Tommy offered me a contract, but a day later he got the sack so that was that. Then I worked with Glasgow Rangers for a while, so the Scottish teams were the initial ones that showed an interest. A true gentlemen and the first man in England to use the SAQ in a big way was Ian Holloway when he was at Bristol Rovers. He was a major supporter and user of the SAQ concept. He just believed in it.

“Then it just mushroomed with Leicester Tigers and I got a contract with Bath and a guy called Dave Reddin, who was one of the trainers at Leicester and then went on to train England. Then we sponsored England Rugby and when England won the World Cup in 2003, every player had an individual SAQ programme. We’ve got video we show people of the England players doing their SAQ training.

“After that I went to France to work with their national team, then New South Wales in Australia as they wanted the programme, but the big market was soccer. I worked with Graham Taylor at Watford when they were in the Premiership, and West Ham and Sunderland. I trained Steve McClaren and all the coaches at Manchester United. I knew Steve from when he was at Derby County and I trained the staff there. We’ve worked at the Liverpool Academy, at Everton and a number of other teams. Soon we started getting interest from teams across Europe. I did some coaching work at Barcelona with Nike and also with teams in Croatia, so from the top end we started getting a lot of clubs interested in the concept.”

For more information visit the SAQ international website www.saqinternational.com

For the second part of Soar Magazine’s exclusive interview with Alan Pearson please click here.