I am reluctant to write anything about any coaching I do because being a paranoid person I don’t particularly want to give away any of my trade secrets. But the fact of the matter is that there are few secrets these days. So I dunno what I’m worried about really. The secret ingredient is the players you have to work with. And as far as the Eoghan Rua camogie team, we are talking an exceptional group.

Some guy whose name I forget and couldn’t be bothered looking up has brought out a book about GAA management called Can You Manage. My reaction having read it the cheap way – on two consecutive visits to Easons – is that if you are a total novice then buy this book.

But for me anyway, if you are interested in being any sort of serious coach then you need to keep adding fresh ideas to the bank of knowledge that you already have. Funnily enough although I do that satisfactorily in relation to my coaching capability – I am due to do a Level 2 course which will hopefully keep me going over the winter – I don’t do it in other aspects of life. I do harbour hopes to attend a John Simmons writing clinic at some stage for the experience.

Also, in my opinion any coach should be like a sponge, picking up ideas and wee ideas here and there. If you are talking to another sports coach about training and coaching, whether it is swimming, cycling , soccer, rugby, whatever and at some stage in the conversation you don’t think Jayze that’s a good idea, then the chances are you are talking but not listening. You should be open to pick up something everywhere you go

McLernon tells me he has written a piece for the proposed Eoghan Rua book about last year’s camogie campaign. What he won’t get for publication are the notes to myself, including a series of direct written questions I posed to myself to get over a serious and severe of pre match nerves last campaign, when I felt physically sick at the thought of losing.

It was all entirely irrational of course, and it was Sean McGoldrick that put it into perspective when he said if you do everything you can but meet a team better and better prepared then there is nothing more you could have done.

We were well prepared, we still are well prepared. Every time we go out. Personally it is my way of challenging myself, gazing down the barrel of the gun, confronting myself with a serious of ultra-critical questions. I know my own vulnerabilities, my foibles, what I think about when the lights go out, when I’m alone, when I’m driving alone to matches which I prefer to do unless travelling by bus. I’ve learned that, question everything. Give yourself a hard time. You soon see the cracks and having seen them you can start to fill them in or rebuild what is particularly badly undermined. Hence my visit to talk to Paddy Tally two years ago, and I still credit Paddy with changing my approach. I was gonna say philosophy, but we’re only talking about sport here.

Going back to gutting myself, undermining what I’m doing, asking the uncomfortable questions, I don’t necessarily like or appreciate others doing it; it gnaws at my own insecurity, the sense that I’m a fraud and I have inherited a set of good players that will perform regardless. And actually at this stage I think that is true. But I realised last week when I was driving somewhere that in my working life at one time I managed over 24 people. Women and men of all ages, I did leadership and management courses and I suppose a lot of that pays off in the team context.

For example the University of Ulster dragged us off to the Slieve Russell Hotel to take part in Grid Leadership training. This was top class stuff, the problem being the University Senior management weren’t on the same planet let alone the same page. The scheme foundered but the tools and skills are perfect for managing and coaching teams. One of the key components is in enabling people to take responsibility for their own actions. So if someone doesn’t attend training, that’s their choice, but they can’t then having made that choice complain about not being picked. The Grid also focuses on individual behaviour so you focus in how your behaviour affects others and not vice versa. As part of the scheme we had to undergo a 360 critique and feedback process which was challenging. We also got to the stage where we could confidently critique other people without being personal, rather focusing on specific behaviour.

That perhaps explains why I no longer do things like keep a record of training. Why bother? If I know why someone isn’t there that’s enough for me. If I think there is a problem I will deal with it my way.

Many times I think I’m into the last home straight in coaching at any level. I increasingly feel a Beckettian futility with the whole thing in that I no longer see the point of bollocking people at training. I still do it but I increasingly think it is a waste of time because unless through repetition you can purge errors and fault then you cannot eradicate them by shouting and giving out. Also, it is a fact that humans will make mistakes. Take carrying the ball on the stick. Some players don’t even realise they are doing it, yet they have been coached from an early age as soon as the gather a ball to place on the stick.

I may decide to give it up at any stage. That shall be at my time and of my choosing based on what the players want. These are conversations that are still to be had.

“She hates her life,

and what she’s done to it”

Rockin in the Free World

Neil Young

The rain of the last few days has been interminable. Apocalyptic even. I read a prophesy that before the end of the world Ireland would be under water for seven days.

The fantastical and tragic truth of a Garda washed away as he tried to help people. The film Se7en featured incessant rain as a background. As the perpetrator carried out murders in the form of the seven deadly sins the background theme was rain and more rain. In Insomnia the Al Pacino becomes increasingly disoriented and confused as his lack of sleep starts to take a toll.

For the last three weeks I seem to have entered a tunnel period in my life where there is a consistent stream of challenging news. At one stage it necessitated repeated trips to hospital in Derry and back to visit my mother who was suffering a chronic stomach ailment. The drives seem to be conducted entirely in the rain and the dark or both. My memory of the visits is wet feet crossing the highly unsatisfactory car parks at Altnagelvin and sitting talking to my mother feeling damp.

The apocalyptic weather and the disruptive interruption to my daily routine meant that at a time when I was building a seam of work I had to continually step away to carry out other duties. To the detriment of both I would add. It was highly frustrating. Even trying to describe this I can’t articulate what I mean.

I will start again elsewhere.

Students.

When I returned to Queen’s at the start of second year, my mother brought me and my gear down to Belfast. Myself and four other lads had rented a house down near the bottom of Dunluce Avenue. It was an awful place. Damp and fairly cold. Last year I had a series of dreams in which I was back in the house, it was awful, I could still smell the damp and feel the coldness upstairs.

When my mother dropped me off she came into the house and had a look around. It was the last time she ever set foot in a rented house I lived in. I think she fully realised the sorts of shit holes we inhabited. Then the landlords were probably as unscrupulous towards students as they are nowadays. Certainly they provided the bare minimum of comfort, the sofas were typically decrepit affairs, saggy and stinking from years of students’ arses perched on them and god knows what else.

As for the beds and mattresses in particular. Well. When I think about that my stomach churns, in each rented room the surface tapestry on show revealing scenes of emissions, no doubt accompanied and unaccompanied, night-time drooling, alcohol fuelled incontinence. Disgusting it was. They should each have been incinerated at the end of a year’s action. There’s only so much one can absorb impact and otherwise.

Around that time Dolmio came on the market. It may already have been on the market but it became known to us. We would prepare huge hulges of spaghetti Bolognese accompanied by loaves of garlic bread. The whole affair would be washed down with cheap wine, usually Bulgarian if I remember correctly. Then, after sinking a load of tins of cheap beer off we would go seeking a bit of what passed for debauchery in the Students’ Union, the Elms and wherever else we might roam.

One of the boys made a girl physically sick one night in the Union when talking to her. The reek of garlic off him after our spaghetti fest was too much and she turned away to vomit nauseated by the stench. The same fella had a regular handy tackle up the top of the street with whom he pursued an interesting relationship. He couldn’t pass the front door without calling and eventually became quite attached to the same girl. For a while anyway.

We once had a visit from the Police on behalf of the neighbours to complain about noise. This was before wardens and vans with CCTV on board such as they have now. The message was simple.

The big RUC man stood in the living room and calmly told us that our neighbour had told him if we didn’t keep the noise down they knew people who would make us keep it down. When I politely asked were these ‘people’ the police or some other anonymous grouping he told me to shut up and stop being smart. The previous year a student house had been petrol bombed. Point taken.

The lad in our downstairs front room thereafter kept a bucket of water in his room just to be safe. Occasionally we would come in full drunk and trip over it. I think he may have changed to sand when we pointed out water wasn’t the right job for petrol. This was in 1987 when the lower side off the Lisburn road wasn’t the trendy suburban thoroughfare with fancy shops that it has become. It was dark, unfriendly, too close to the Village for comfort, yet we came and went oblivious to any danger. The most threatening encounter was this visit by the law.

But then in those days the RUC played a wearisome game of cat and mouse with students. Regularly shutting down parties. A few years later, a big peeler said to me one night after he raided a house in which we were playing guitar ‘Not you again.’ He despatched me home, guitar and all with a laugh about it all. Wasn’t always the case. Once they arrived at a friends house after a front door pane of glass was broken. The rookie in the squad confidently announced that the glass had been broken from the inside to which was heard the response from one of the wits from Lurgan “Aye right Sherlock!” accompanied by school boy sniggers. The crime remains unsolved.

The house in Dunluce deteriorated further over the course of the year. We had a house rule about dinner plates. To stop boys using other people’s plates the rule was you were responsible for your own plate and, if you should have food prepared and some other lad was using the plate, you were entitled to empty his dinner off on to another plate so as you could use your own. How we managed to live in that wonderful squalor remains a mystery.

Our premises were no better than any others and in fact I can think of several that were much worse. Our final year wasn’t much better but that’s a story for another day.