Twenty years embedded in elite professional sport across four countries and multiple codes, now applied to individuals, departments and organisations who want their performance built by design rather than left to chance.
Simon has spent close to two decades shaping performance systems across international and professional rugby, Major League Baseball and international consulting. His career covers the full arc of high performance work, from building programmes with his own hands to leading multidisciplinary departments where his job is growing the people who deliver.
That arc matters. It means he has lived every seat in the room: the young practitioner with no resources, the department head with a full staff, the advisor guiding a programme from the outside. Whatever seat you are in, he has sat in it.
Simon is a New Zealander based between Perth and the United States, and works with clients worldwide in person and remotely. He writes at @st_performancecoach and on LinkedIn.
The foundation years, and the ones that shaped everything after. Tasman arrived as the newest union in the competition and, for a long stretch, the easiest to beat. Building a provincial programme with minimal support taught Simon that systems come before resources, and that clarity is the cheapest performance tool there is.
That build ended in the province's first ever title and promotion, taking a side that had been the competition's makeweight and turning it into a regular finalist. Nothing about it was inherited. It was constructed, season by season, by a small group with very little to work with.
Leading delivery inside one of New Zealand's most successful provincial environments, where his seasonal theming methodology began. The principle set here still holds: the group must own the theme because they helped build it.
Eight years inside the most successful club in Super Rugby history, the final four of them leading the performance department across four consecutive titles. Decentralised delivery through staff, department design and culture work at championship standard.
A full department built from nothing in a start-up league, then deliberately stepped back from as staff grew into it. Simon also operated as de facto assistant general manager, adding roster, operations and commercial perspective to the performance lens.
Multidisciplinary leadership across three programmes at once, aligning philosophy, staff development and resource allocation across an entire club pathway.
Leadership, strategy and staff growth across a Major League Baseball player development system, overseeing physical performance staff across seven affiliate locations. All leadership and no athlete-level delivery, by design.
National selection in this profession works differently to a job. You do not apply. You are chosen, usually by people who have watched you work for years, and the appointment says something a title cannot.
Simon was part of the Māori All Blacks performance staff across six matches between 2018 and 2020, and served ten matches with the New Zealand Under 20 side in 2012 and 2013.
The Māori All Blacks environment carries responsibilities that reach past preparation. The team represents whakapapa and a kaupapa considerably older than any fixture, and everyone inside it, staff included, is expected to understand what they are part of and to carry it properly. It remains one of the more significant environments he has worked in.
The work has never been confined to one code. Alongside rugby and baseball, Simon worked with Bowyn Morgan on cognitive training built around decision making under fatigue. Morgan was New Zealand's top ranked welterweight at the time, and the work also covered strength and mobility. In boxing an opening might appear once in ten rounds, so the ability to see it and act while exhausted is the whole game.
The exchange ran both ways. Morgan worked with Crusaders players returning from injury, using boxing based conditioning to rebuild them. That is usually how the best transfer happens, as a trade between practitioners.
Strip away the sport and the question underneath is constant. How does a person make a good decision, under fatigue, when it matters, and everything else is simply the context in which that question gets asked.
A hybrid advisory and delivery engagement building a full national performance framework for sevens and fifteens toward a home Olympics, with quarterly on-ground audit visits.
A two-year remote engagement with the General Manager of High Performance and national performance staff, proving that structured advisory support works across time zones.
Leadership oversight of a newly promoted head strength and conditioning coach in Japan, supporting integration across coaching and medical in one of the world's top club environments.
United States Rugby Players Association
Simon was appointed the association's first ever Director of High Performance, an advisory role created to bring performance expertise to the player side of the table. Where most high performance work serves the club, this work serves the athlete: standards of care across the league, welfare, career development and the conditions players are asked to perform in.
It is the clearest expression of the People First value in practice. The same rigour applied to preparing a squad, pointed instead at whether the people inside the system are being looked after well enough to sustain a career in it.
A record explains what somebody has done. It does not explain how they think, why they build environments the way they do, or what the mark on the door actually means. That is on the next page.
Whether you are an individual building your next chapter or an organisation building its environment, the first step is the same.
