Ryan: a coach to the players and the game
Watching them embrace him last Sunday, it brought to mind a story a coach from another sport tells about the man. A few years ago Ryan was one of the guest speakers at a high-profile coaching conference. The organisers were to provide players for Ryan to use in his demonstration to the attending coaches, but the night before it was to take place, Ryan was informed only three players were available.
At 10am the following morning seven Cork ladies footballers were up in Dublin to help Ryan give his demonstration. They’d only got the call at 10pm the previous night. That’s the regard they had for him.
Ryan will say it’s hardly the first time they bailed him out. A few years ago he reflected on the 2006 final against Armagh in which the team scraped through by a point.
“We weren’t at our best and I blame myself for that,” he said. “I went to see Armagh play in the semi-final and came back a bit afraid of them and I transmitted that to our players, making us do an extra night’s training. I shouldn’t have done that. I had the team quite flat on the day but the team saved me.”
It’s that humility and willingness to accept he makes mistakes that has endeared Ryan to the players. And what makes it all the more remarkable was there was a time when he wasn’t that way.
“Years ago,” he once told this writer, “coaching was all about me, what I said, what I thought. But then I started going to the NCTC [National Coaching Training Centre] and reading and began to reflect on how to go about the job. I now view my role as to create a positive environment where the player can flourish and become the best player they can be.
“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.”
That goes beyond football. When Juliet Murphy went back to college to train to be a primary school teacher, Ryan offered and gave her grinds in Irish.
There’s a lesson for all coaches there, and for anyone who appoints coaches too. In Waterford there is some concern that Wexford football manager Jason Ryan is the front runner to succeed Davy Fitzgerald as Waterford hurling manager, but we can see how Ryan, along with Kilkenny’s James McGarry as his coach, would be an inspired choice.
In the history of American sport, the most respected coach of all-time is John Wooden, who guided UCLA to 10 national basketball championships from 1963 to 1975. In terms of tactics and strategies, he was considered quite average. It was his ability to mentor players that made him so admired by people like Mickey Harte.
“There are coaches out there,” Wooden once said, “who have won with the dictator approach, but for me, concern, compassion and consideration were always priorities of the highest order.”
Wooden was tough on his players. More than once during a lax practice, he’d turn out the lights. “Gentlemen,” he’d tell them, “practice is over.” But he did not believe in abusing them, humiliating them, dictating to them.
In Mindset, the psychologist Carol Dweck says there are two kinds of coaches and two kinds of people. The underachieving kind have a fixed mindset — they believe you either have ‘it’ or you haven’t and they have it and there’s no need for them to learn anymore.
But those with the growth mindset, who have the willingness to make and learn from mistakes, are the ones who achieve.
It took until he was in his late 50s for Eamonn Ryan to realise the growth mindset would serve him and his players better.
Jason Ryan understands that and might just be what the Waterford lads need. He might know as much about hurling but he knows about hurlers. Sean Boylan was a hurling man who knew how to coach footballers. Because he understood: coaches don’t so much coach games as coach people.
They say the mark of a coach isn’t what your players make of you when you win but how they view you 10, 20 years later. When Wooden was dying last year at the age of 99, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar regularly visited his deathbed. It had been nearly 40 years since they’d formed the most exceptional player-coach punch in US college sport yet for all Abdul-Jabbar’s glory and fame and own exceptional wisdom garnered through the years, his grasshopper-guru reverence for Wooden remained.
In another century, after he’s probably won another 20 All-Irelands, Eamonn Ryan will be similarly honoured by his Rebels.
There’s no greater mark of a coach than that.
