Biblical levels of rain may be pelting down on the tin roof of Fiji Rugby’s Lawaqa Park performance centre, the carpark flooded and the field a mud pit, but globe-trotting coach Richie Walker is in his element.
He is jotting notes on a whiteboard as he prepares his Fijiana team for the final of the Coral Coast Sevens, a local invitational tournament which has expanded over the years to feature the best of the best.
They’d go on to win the final for the second straight year, giving Walker and his side the ideal preparation for next two rounds of the HSBC SVNS Series, in Singapore and Perth, as he also plots a path to long-term sustainable and regular success.
The Sigatoka surroundings are a far cry from some of the previous places Walker has found himself. Coach of USA at the Rio Olympics, he’s also had stints in Japan and his native New Zealand, and was working with the PR Sevens league in the States before the Fiji job came up.
He concedes he’s long had a dream to coach the Black Ferns and has missed out on that opportunity in the past, but says being with the Fiji women’s side is the next best thing.
Walker relishes bringing both his international lens and his cultural sensibilities to a programme that he believes was in desperate need of change and fresh thinking.
The highs of the Tokyo Olympic bronze medal were followed by silver at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. But, from there, performances and results fell off a cliff culminating in the disastrous Paris Olympic campaign in which Fijiana finished last.
“They’d had the same staff all the way through and likewise, with the players, there’s a lot of young talent but we kept seeing the same players from Tokyo to Paris and then into the new cycle,” Walker says.
While Fiji made a surprise run to the final at HSBC SVNS Vancouver last season — “a week before I started” Walker laughs — now that he’s a year into the job he feels he can truly implement significant changes.
“We’ve had to make some tough calls around players and contracts because if we kept going the same way we did in Paris and straight after, then we’d finish the same way. A lot of girls who have been here for a long time never got selected … I started to select them and just talk to them a lot more, so they know they can trust me.”
Walker says that trust has been critical in creating the foundations for change.
“Some of it’s just been the old ways of Fiji Rugby and knowing we can’t train or talk to the girls the same way we do the boys, so that’s been a big shift.
“If you put your arm around them and care about them, they’ll do anything for you, but if you yell and scream, they’re not going to do it.”
Having reached the semis in Dubai already this season and produced a weekend of command performances at the Coral Coast tournament, Walker can see his players getting a taste for winning again.
New leaders Verenaisi Ditavutu, Ilisapeci Delaiwau and Adimereani Rogosau have stepped up massively and others are following, he reckons.
A big project for Walker over the next 18 months is talent identification and growing the pool of players in a country with limited resources and a far from traditional rugby structure.
“I tell all the staff at Fiji Rugby, ‘every time you drive past a village, I want you to film or take a photo if there’s a girl playing’, but there’s hardly ever any,” he says. “The boys grow up with a ball in their hand, playing in the village, but the girls don’t, so how can we change that?”
Walker plans to hold open invitation camps around the country and recently ran a talent identification camp in New Zealand, where some 11,000 children of Fijian descent are enrolled in school.
He’s a big advocate of the sevens and fifteens programmes working closely together in the women’s game. A handful of players have switched between both teams, most notably Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 captain Alfreda Fisher, who’ll make her sevens debut this weekend.
Fiji Rugby is currently interviewing to replace Ioan Cunningham as fifteens head coach, and is also recruiting a women’s high-performance manager to continue the strong work of Alana Thomas, and for an assistant to Walker.
Walker has also leaned on those around him, using legendary former captain Rusila Nagasau as a mentor and calling on the great Jerry Tuwai to assist at times in the coaching ranks.
Walker’s planning for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics is well advanced and he is keen to replicate what worked well for Fijiana in the lead up to the Tokyo Games, where they stunned Australia in the quarter-finals and almost tipped up New Zealand in the semis before beating Great Britain to bronze.
“Because of Covid, they had to stay together every day, so they got to know each other better and they just had to keep training,” he says. “It's tough for Fijians to be away from home, but we want to keep them together in Olympic year, so we want to create a family away from home and invite their loved ones in regularly.”
Walker has two more immediate goals — one for the team and one for himself. He wants a top-four finish in the league this season and to once again secure their place in tier one of HSBC SVNS for next season. Heading into this weekend’s tournament in Singapore, Fijiana sit sixth overall, but they are only six competition points behind third-placed Japan.
As for the personal one, Walker says he needs to learn the Fijian national anthem. His five-year-old daughter Kaia Moana is attending local school and she has the anthem down pat, happily pointing out this fact to dad.
Richie Walker intends to be ready the next time Fijianaget the chance to sing it.