IN THE conventional world, coaches cut their teeth at a lower level, prove themselves when they move on to leading clubs and then the best get picked to go on to work with the international team.

In Scotland, we like to do things differently, which is why there is a list of coaches who have started their full-time coaching roles with the national side before heading backwards into club rugby, Duncan Hodge being the latest name on it, just above Gregor Townsend, the head coach at Glasgow Warriors.

Not that it is an easy move to make.

For Hodge, who started as a specialist coach on the fringes of the national team and worked his way up to attack coach through to last year’s World Cup, the problem was that he came off the intensity and pressure of the global stage straight into a new club with new coaches, new players and a four-month grind of matches every week before he got a chance to take a breather and recharge his batteries.

“I spent a lot of time at Edinburgh as a player and it is a good place to be at the moment,” he said as he became the third of the assistant coaches to sign a contract extension this week. “It has been different, a challenge but a good one. It was a hard year, but a good one. The good thing for me is that over the last eight or nine years, I have seen a lot of teams, experienced a lot of coaching environments and that has stood me in good stead.”

The displays are starting to show that Hodge is having an effect on the Edinburgh side. They are still not capable of playing the swashbuckling style favoured by Townsend, an old international team-mate and friend, over at Glasgow, but they are getting the ball wide more often and scoring a few more tries as a result.

“There are a few parallels to four years ago when I started doing the backs and attack at Scotland,” he said. “Then we had a group of young backs with potential, now at Edinburgh we have the likes of Sam Hidalgo-Clyne, Sean Kennedy, Nathan Fowles, Blair Kinghorn, Duncan Weir, Chris Dean, Damien Hoyland, Glenn Bryce all coming through for next season. I do see parallels, there is real talent there.

“I have seen a big shift, we are getting there. There were a lot of things that needed to be worked on but I think we are getting there and have seen the fruits of that over the last few games.”