How all the hard work finally made UL’s talent shine
Last Friday night as her team turned to face the flag for the national anthem before their Superleague Cup final in the National Basketball Arena, UL’s Rachael Vanderwal placed her hand on the shoulder of her co-captain Louise Galvin standing in front of her. In seconds the gesture was repeated all the way down the line. The gesture was as spontaneous as it was powerful, just something Vanderwal intuitively sensed was just the right thing for that moment; their team motto being ‘I’ve Got Your Back’. Yet as awesome a display as that was of their solidarity, it was eclipsed by the display of team power they would give over the following 40 minutes.
Even though they were playing a DCU Mercy side going for their third national cup in a row, UL would win by 37 points, a record-winning margin for a senior women’s Superleague final. What was even more stunning was that they held DCU to just 27 points, another cup final record.
It’s an achievement that probably hasn’t received due recognition, mainly because UL entered the game as hot favourites on a 27-game winning streak, but for more discerning observers their transformation is one of the most impressive in league history.
Over the last five years the women’s Superleague has much resembled the men’s world tennis tour. Three sides are considerably ahead of the rest and up until 12 months ago, DCU Mercy and Glanmire Cork were very much the league’s Federer and Nadal, carving up 10 consecutive leagues and cup between them. UL were its Djokovic; a distant third in every sense. When their coach James Weldon called me on the eve of the 2010 league playoffs, in my capacity as a sport psychology performance coach, to work with his players, the team was coming off a 23-point defeat to Glanmire. Even the following season when I was in from the start the team were sent crashing out of the cup at the quarter-final stage, 72-63, by the same DCU side that took to the court last Friday.
We now call it our Stuck In The Snow moment. It was the first week of December 2010, the week of the big freeze, and as the team waited shivering outside DCU for 40 minutes for our team bus, serious soul searching went on. Bottom line DCU had a better setup than us. The morning of the game some of our players were eating a full Irish breakfast. Like Djokovic we needed to take the thing to a whole new level.
That we did. Weldon gave a commitment and skills programme to every player that they’d each get better. Three months later on the morning of our Superleague final win over Glanmire, our players staying in the Castletroy Park Hotel noticed their breakfast was healthier than that of the Tyrone footballers down in Limerick on camp that weekend. In the off-season we lost New Zealand international Natalie Taylor and captain Fiona Scally to emigration but secured the services of Dr Cian O’Neill, the then much-lauded fitness coach to the Tipperary hurlers.
The commitment the girls have given to their conditioning is staggering. Not only has Vanderwal, a teacher based in Cork, being called up to the GB Olympic team but she’s repeatedly finished first in all their fitness tests, even though she’s the only non-professional on their squad. Every UL player is in better shape, physically, mentally, technically. People lazily attribute the team’s run mostly to the presence of Vanderwal and Irish international Michelle Fahy and the mid-season return of local girl Rachel Clancy, yet that trio will be the first to acknowledge it is the team that has them playing so well. No one was talking about the Vanderwal effect two years ago when she was part of a losing UL team. Fahy excepted, UL’s personnel and talent level is pretty much what it was 24 months ago.
It’s not about how much ‘talent’ you have, it’s how hard and smart that ‘talent’ works. Eighteen months ago Aoife McDermott was a raw gangly teenager from Sligo; last Friday she tore down an incredible 16 rebounds. Louise Galvin’s determination makes her namesake and fellow Finuge native Paul seem like a timid choirboy. Six months ago Loretta Maher was playing Division Two local league basketball in Kerry; now she’s holding her own against the likes of Fahy and Suzanne Maguire. For the second consecutive cup game it was a Miriam Liston three-pointer that swung the game UL’s way. Fiona Lynch and Mai O’Leary commute three times a week from Cork, bringing not just their skills but a geniality that is the lifeblood of any team, while Cathy Grant and Áine Staunton provide depth no other team can boast.
The team has grown in accordance with their coach. While waiting in the snow for that bus, James Weldon contemplated resigning. But persistence is awesome, and thanks to Weldon’s guidance, so is his team’s defence. The same DCU side that dropped 72 points on his team in that cup quarter-final were last Friday held to the reverse of that — 27 points. Some turnaround. Some team.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
