Kieran Shannon: Above all else, Éamonn Ryan provided his players with invaluable life skills
Éamonn Ryan celebrates with Angela Walsh, left, Geraldine O'Flynn, and Deirdre O'Reilly, right, after Cork's victory over Dublin in the 2014 All-Ireland final. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
‘Welcome to coaching. What a privilege to be a coach — to have the opportunity to guide young people in their sport participation. As a coach think of yourself as being in the ‘positive persuasion’ business. Successful coaching is much more than just winning contests. They help athletes master new skills, enjoy competing with others, and develop self-esteem. Successful coaches not only are well versed in the technical and tactical skills of their sport, but they also know HOW to teach those skills to young people. And [they] not only teach sports skills, they also teach and model the skills athletes will need to live successfully in our society… Prepare yourself to use your power to do good.’
While the opening page of Rainer Martens’ now reads like such a summation of Éamonn Ryan’s philosophy it’s as if it was a foreword penned by the great Corkman himself, there was a time when it severely shook and altered it.
Ryan had long had a knack of improving teams and players and leading them to breakthroughs but it was only while he was approaching his mid-50s that he pressed what in Belgian soccer circles might be referred to as The Coaching Switch.
He once explained it to me back in late 2009 when he’d just guided Cork to a fifth consecutive All-Ireland title.
“Fifteen years ago, coaching was all about me, what I said, what I thought. But then I started going down to Limerick and the NCTC [National Coaching Training Centre] and reading material [recommended] by [GAA games development manager] Pat Daly and I began to reflect on how to go about the job.”
Martens’ book in particular was a revelation to him. It identified several different coaching and communication styles such as the command approach which was particularly en vogue in both Marten’s homeland of the United States as well as Ryan’s; indeed around then, with players from that same UL campus where the old NCTC was based, one Ger Loughnane, with Mike McNamara as his team trainer, was driving Clare to All Irelands. But Martens advocated a more co-operative style which was more player-centred, in which you guided them more than drove them through the power of questions.
“I now view my role as to create a positive environment where the player can flourish, physically and mentally, and become the best player they can be,” he’d elaborate in that 2009 interview with me. “If you just have them run laps, that’s mentally not a positive environment; there’s no fun in that. I’m there to serve them, not for them to serve me.”
What made Ryan’s comments all the more insightful was that they were offered at a time when coaches and managers younger and considerably more high-profile than him were struggling to coach and adjust to the 21st century athlete.
In hurling, that other sport Ryan loved and coached so well, there had been a rake of highly-successful coaches that had recently departed county setups in disappointing and often acrimonious circumstances. Justin in Waterford, soon to be followed by Limerick. Gerald in his native Cork. Loughnane in Galway, Mike Mac in Clare, Babs in Tipp. Men who had been ahead of their time were now behind the times and the GAA management landscape seemed to be no country for old men. Or at least Old School. But the brilliance of Ryan was that he had the humility to learn again and the adaptability to go New School.
Before he came into their lives, the Cork ladies footballers were a bit like what Seabiscuit was prior to Tom Smith and Red Pollard entering his: Also-rans, afterthoughts, nobodies.
But like Smith, Ryan would prove to be a masterful horse-whisperer, striking up one of the most remarkable and unlikely success stories, thankfully also documented in book form by Mary White.
In Martens’ book there would be a line that would say the measure of a coach wouldn’t be so much what they won with a group of players but rather how those players viewed them long after they were no longer coached by that coach. Valerie Mulcahy’s beautiful tribute in this paper last Friday underlined just how 10 All Irelands in 11 years is only the tip of the iceberg in how successful Ryan was with those Cork players. When the pair of them met for what would be the last time last August, Ryan expressed to Mulcahy his pride in how they’d all fared off the field after football.
Humility is an over-bandied word in sport these days but there has never been a more decorated yet unaffected player in GAA history than Rena Buckley. Much of that stemmed from her own personality and upbringing but it was further cemented in being exposed to a coach like Ryan.
He was as much interested in developing them as people than as players; in her column Mulcahy wrote about how he’d not only help her with her free-taking but also her Gaeilge preparation in advance of an interview for a teaching position.
After filing that column she went for a walk around Blarney Castle, repeatedly playing Ryan’s favourite song — Tina Turner’s Simply The Best — when she happened to bump into Juliet Murphy where they each lamented the passing and celebrated the life of Ryan, laughing about his old tics and banger cars. And it reaffirmed for her what she’d written only hours earlier. With Ryan, they had the best of days together.
The record books will show that no one in ladies football has won more All Irelands than Eamonn Ryan but what made him such a successful coach is better explained in that opening page of Martens’ book. No one was better at the positive persuasion business, creating an environment that would make players not just return but flourish. He was an exceptional teacher of the technical skills of the sport, stressing the importance of being a two-sided player and the art of the blockdown, often diving on the ground himself while well into his 70s. And above all he taught them skills for life that has outlasted their county careers and as it proves his own lifetime.
No one prepared himself better to use his power to do good.
What a coach. What a life.
