The 55-year-old returned to Dunedin two weeks ago and begins as the new head coach for the Dunedin Swim Coaching Board on Monday.
Having spent two decades in Britain and Ireland, he is readjusting to being back home.
Indeed, it is a case of coming full circle, having served his apprenticeship under coaching great Duncan Laing.
Now back with a wealth of experience — which included coaching at the elite level in Britain — he wants to see Dunedin swimming thrive once more.
However, he is not jumping straight into that and is looking to get a feel for the environment before making any great changes.He had been coming to sessions over the past two weeks and would ease into the role, not wanting to change too much too soon.
"It’s about me seeing where we are, what we’re doing and how can we make it better," he said.
"Any strengths that we have, let’s keep them. Any weaknesses we have, let’s make them better.
"Even in the last two weeks there’s been things on first glance I thought we could do better, but then after another week of it I’ve gone ‘actually we’re pretty good at certain things’.
"So I think I’ve got to be careful not to jump in too quickly."
That meant his vision was relatively vague at the moment, although he had plenty of ideas of where he wanted to take the programme.He felt putting an emphasis on creating good people was important and learning to fit swimming around things such as school exams for swimmers.
Likewise, creating a high-performance environment, putting an emphasis on the entire community.
That included not just the coaches and swimmers, but also the clubs, Moana Pool and other aquatic sports.
He said bringing everyone together in that manner would be a focus to begin with.
"In a way, the technical part of the sport is the easy part. It’s the bringing everyone together and finding out how you can work together [that can be harder].
"That’s probably the most important thing to do in the first instance.
"I don’t want to say the biggest challenge, because I don’t know if it should be that big a challenge.
"I think people are ready to move on.
"People refer to the Mr Laing days, which is great, and we can have a version of that again, a contemporary version of the Mr Laing days.
"But we have to work together. As big a man as Duncan was in stature and every way, he had a lot of people help him to do the things he did."
