“Rebuilding” is a description often trotted out with the pre-season narrative when someone new takes over as a Premiership director of rugby.
At Bath Rugby, Stuart Hooper is determined not to throw that crutch out there in case things don’t go well in 2019/20.
Nor will he play the inexperience card - a concern some supporters have about the 37-year-old who has not held a coaching role before taking the top job at least a season earlier than expected.
While there have been lots of changes to the coaching and performance staff this Summer, only five new arrivals have some in to join the first-team squad.
Rugby World Cup absences aside, in theory there should be continuity on the field and in training - an opportunity to improve on four years of inconsistency of performance and results.
No senior trophy since 2008 and one Premiership play-off appearance since Bruce Craig bought the club in 2010 makes grim reading.
In his first press conference at Farleigh House since taking over from Todd Blackadder, Hooper said: "We’re not here to build something. We’re here to get out there and attack the competition and to win as many games as we possibly can.
“I think I’d be doing the lads a disservice if I sat here and talked about ‘building’ and ‘developing’.
“We have a team – you can see from the contingent we’ve got at the World Cup – that are quality, include world-class players and they’re desperate to play well for Bath.
“Myself, the rest of the staff and management will do everything we possibly can to allow them to play their very best at the weekend.
“We’re very much focused on our game and what we need to do to perform well. Over time we will narrow our goals down.
“We want to be showing each other we’re desperate to win for this team. That hunger has really started to come through in training.”
Girvan Dempsey is the only person who was part of the senior coaching team last season and will continue to take charge of the attack and backs in 2019/20.
Luke Charteris has retired to focus on the lineout and pathway coaches Ryan Davies and Mark Lilley have also been busy this Summer working with the squad on backs/skills and scrum/defence respectively.
As previously reported, Bath decided not to bring in an interim coach to work on defence while Neal Hatley is away working on England’s Rugby World Cup campaign.
Hooper, Dempsey and Lilley have been working together on putting the rearguard system in place.
"So far, it’s been genuinely enjoyble, exciting, challenging and rewarding,” said Hooper, the youngest DoR or head coach in the Premiership.
“We’re getting to know each other pretty well and getting through some really good work.
“I tried to take on as much as I could in the years prior to taking on the job. I’ve been around an awful lot of pre-seasons and seen lots and lots of different scenarios play out.
“The lads have been fantastic. When you come into a role like this the players you work with day in, day out are the guys who really can make a huge difference to what we do.
“They’ve been engaged in being part of something which is a change at the club. You need to make sure it’s your own. It needs to be real. I need to lead this authentically.
“My challenge to the staff has been let’s make sure we’re maximising the minutes the guys are training and make sure everything they do has a purpose, and adds to them being able to perform for 80 minutes at the weekend.
“There’s a lot of rigour and thought to allow our guys to be the people they are and play the game we want them to play.”
There have also been other staff changes, with PJ Wilson arriving from Munster to replace Allan Ryan as head of strength and conditioning, and Dr Joshua Darrall-Jones coming in from Wasps as a new S&C coach.
Hooper hopes the result will be the fittest playing squad during his time at Bath as a player, captain or DoR; one which can win games at the death rather than lose them as they did in such a costly way last season.
“Everything we’re doing is aiming towards that,” he said. “The effort they’re putting in day to day is to allow them to go out and be physically able to play the game we want to play right from minute one to whenever the referee blows his whistle at the end.”
Unless there is a serious injury, there will be no more player arrivals before the season kicks off with the Premiership Rugby Cup in a month’s time.
Props Will Stuart, Christian Judge and Lewis Boyce, second/back-rowers Josh McNally and Mike Williams are the new faces, plus the likes of Tom de Glanville, Miles Reid and Will Vaughan stepping up from the senior academy.
Did Hooper not feel the backline needed reinforcements too?
“There is a huge set-piece element to the Premiership,” he said. “Another massive part of the Premiership is you have to generate momentum.
"We already had players who were very good at that, but we need to compete across a whole season so we needed to bolster there.
“You can’t always find space to run into, you have to create space to run into. The strategy around our recruitment has been people that can give us set-piece ball but can also generate momentum and create space for the likes of Roko (Rokoduguni), Ruaridh (McConnochie) and Joe (Cokanasiga) – he can probably create his own space – to run into.
“It’s front-line heavy in defence in the Premiership so you need to find a way to go through them before you can go around them.”
