Galvin from Finuge, eyeing a Cork scalp
In Finuge, she explains, nearly every second person is a Galvin. There’s Paul and his clan. There’s the relatives of John Galvin, the Limerick footballer, whose father hails from the village. Then there’s her crowd. She has a brother who won an All-Ireland with the senior men’s team all right, but that was back in 2000 when Enda was a sub, coming on during the epic semi-final saga against Armagh. He’s not related to Paul either.
And in Finuge nearly everyone is into football. Other sports might grab their interest, like Paul started out as a hurler and Louise remains one of the country’s leading female basketballers, but when you hail from the same village as Jimmy Deenihan, football will always assume a certain primacy. She was reared on the Kerry Golden Years. “Instead of watching cartoons,” she smiles, “I’d slip on that video instead.”
It didn’t matter if there was no girls’ team when she was a kid, she just joined in and played with the lads. It wasn’t a bother to her; she’d stay in a car or a bus and put on her top there while the lads got changed in the dressing room but then when they were ready she’d join them and they’d run out together with her just one of the lads.
Actually, she was more than just one of them. She was better than them. She was the North Kerry U12 Player of the Year. Not the best girls’ footballer in the region in that age group, simply the best footballer in the region at that age group.
But then the boys started getting that bit bigger and stronger than her and after U14 she was no longer able to play with them. The nearest girls’ team was nearly half-an-hour away. Being one of five children, living on a farm, it was a bit much to be asking her parents to take her there and back a few times a week. So she threw away the boots. During her college years at the University of Limerick, she didn’t even own a pair. Having not played the game since she was 14, it never occurred to her to try out with the college team. “I assumed the level would be too high.”
By then she was established as one of the best underage basketballers in the country, playing with the college’s senior team in the national Superleague. While in her secondary school years the nearest ladies’ football team was a bit of a haul, Presentation Listowel was just a skip down the road. One of the PE teachers, Ger Tarrant, was one of the leading basketball coaches in the country and every lunchtime he’d coach them. He’d take them to Egypt and Brazil for international tournaments too. By her final year there Louise was captain of the U18 national team.
One of Tarrant’s coaching protégés, James Weldon from Killarney, was coach of that team. For him it was a no-brainer to hand her the armband.
“Right away I just liked her energy and confidence. That team would have had a lot of two- and three-day training camps but there was never any letdown in the way Louise trained and played and that set the example for all the other kids.”
Weldon has one abiding memory of Galvin and that campaign. Their European championships qualification tournament was in Bosnia where the Irish played the hosts in a packed hostile gym generously peppered by bullet holes from the conflict that ravaged that part of the world only years earlier. In Bosnia basketball is the national sport so the game was televised live on a Saturday night and in the mind of the locals that Saturday night would have been all right for fighting. When one of Galvin’s team-mates, Fiona Scally, made a robust play that wasn’t called by the officials, the Bosnian bench and crowd erupted. The officials duly smacked them with a technical foul. Weldon nominated Galvin to take the consequent free-throws and while she was booed and her team bench was riddled by water bottles and cans, Galvin nailed them both.
Once the game finished and a rancorous home crowd rushed on court to celebrate a narrow win, a security team dashed onto the floor as well to shield and escort the visitors out of the gym onto their team bus. It was an offer virtually the whole Irish party and any of their accompanying parents were more than glad to avail of, but while they were being whisked away, Weldon nearly had to go looking for Galvin who was nearly looking for a fight. She certainly wasn’t afraid of one as she remained on court, relishing it all.
“I know it’s a bit of a cliché,” says Weldon, “but that night Louise almost literally proved it true: if you’re going into a war or a warn-torn country, you’d want someone like her by your side.”
That bring-it-on warrior mentality remains one of her calling cards as a basketball player. Along with the Cork ladies’ footballers and Wexford camogie team, UL have become one of the most dominant teams in all of Irish women’s sport, their unbeaten record now stretching to 35 games and almost two years. They are notably endowed with talents such as Rachael Vanderwal, who played with Great Britain in the recent Olympics, and Michelle Fahy, one of the best five Irish women’s players of all time, yet more often than not, it is Galvin who is assigned to mark the opposing team’s leading player, like a Lindsay Peat of DCU or Niamh Dwyer of Glanmire. In fact, Vanderwal has credited Galvin’s intensity in training where they’ve had to guard each other night in night out, as a pivotal part of steeling her for the Olympic experience.
“Louise isn’t intimidated by anyone or anything,” says Weldon, who has also coached her the past few seasons at UL.
Galvin has brought that same dynamism to the football field since she resumed playing that sport a few summers ago. At first, when they set up an adult ladies’ team in Finuge, Galvin tagged along as a means to keep fit in the basketball off-season but within a year she had come to the attention of the Kerry senior management.
William O’Sullivan had just assumed the post, inheriting a team in turmoil and already relegated to Division 2, when he attended a Division 4 club league game between Finuge and Legion. He had tipped Galvin off that he would be there to see her go up against his own fiancé, Bernie Breen, the Kerry captain and midfielder. He would get the reaction that he wanted. Within the first five minutes Galvin had put in two ferocious hits on Breen. Normally O’Sullivan wouldn’t want to see someone rough up his fiancé but on that occasion, he says: “I was very happy to see it!
“It proved to me that reputations meant nothing to Louise. Louise brought a determination that we’d been severely lacking, without her ever getting out of control. I don’t think she’s picked up a yellow card for us in league or championship the past three seasons. It’s just she has this ferocious will to win.”
Within weeks of that battle with Breen, Galvin was propelled into the county’s starting line-up. The team’s last league game of that 2010 season was an away trip to Tyrone. Galvin would score a goal and a point on her debut, pleasantly surprising nearly everyone, not least herself.
“I was fairly nervous heading into that game, wondering, ‘What have I got myself into here?’ As it turned out it went well and coming off the field a couple of our players who had been away the previous few weeks with the All Stars came over to say to me, ‘Where did you come out of?’ But deep down a bit of me was thinking, ‘Am I fooling everyone here?’”
There would be a couple of rough days though soon after that. In a televised early-round qualifier against Mayo she was taken off well before half time.
“I dropped the first ball. Then with the next one I went to hop it, which was stupid because it was a wet day and it didn’t come back up. William rightly took me off. I was shocking. For a few days after I said to myself, ‘This isn’t going to happen, you’re out of your depth’. But William is brilliant. The next night at training he called me over and just said, ‘What happened?’ I mentioned something that I was out of my depth, that I’d only been fooling him and myself and everyone else for the previous two months, but he said that was nonsense. ‘Just play like you have all your life’.
“I remember thinking, ‘But I haven’t been playing it all my life! I’m only back playing a year after not playing for seven years!’ But William said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m starting you the next day’. And he did. I couldn’t believe it. I went well enough that day. As the year went on I was moved to centre-forward and became more confident. We ended up getting to the All-Ireland semi-final, taking Tyrone to a replay, but looking back on that first year, I was still nearly more worried about not being taken off than on playing well and dominating my opponent.”
That’s not her mindset now. Her game sense has improved beyond recognition. And as O’Sullivan has observed: “Louise’s progress as a footballer correlates with the success of the UL basketball team. She’s got enormous confidence from their winning run.”
Galvin has been critical in UL’s success. In the 2011-2012 season she co-captained the side with Vanderwal as they went unbeaten for the whole season, winning both the cup and retaining their Superleague title.
“Everyone will talk about Louise’s energy and defence but she still ends up with 10 or 12 points in most games, including the big games,” notes James Weldon. “If you offer her some constructive criticism she’ll work on it, as if to say, ‘I’ll show you’. She almost gets a bit insulted, but in a healthy way, which is a great attitude to have.”
She’s been going non-stop for over three years now, between the two sports. It involves a fair bit of commitment. A typical week in February or March would start off on a Monday with heading to UL after work in the regional hospital as a physio for a gym and shooting workout; training with the Superleague team on a Tuesday and again on a Thursday; then drive down to train with Kerry on a Friday night; drive back up to play a Superleague game with UL on the Saturday; play a league game with Kerry on the Sunday before it starts all over again on the Monday.
Training with Kerry can be particularly testing. With UL she’s training in probably the best indoor facility in the country. With Kerry during the winter and spring they regularly train on a pitch with one goalpost because the pitch has only one light. They don’t have any pitch of their own. Any pitch they hire out they have to pay for. Even the field at the front of Fitzgerald Stadium costs €35 a night. In that way basketball, for all its flaws, treats its female members in a much more equitable way.
“I remember earlier this year travelling down to play a challenge game against a club team before our league semi-final. We played it on this pitch beside the cathedral in Killarney. There were no changing rooms or anything. There was a group of our players studying in Limerick in the car with me and it was lashing rain and we had to use the local petrol station to go to the toilet, get changed in my car parked in the grounds of the church and then do the same after the game. After the league we kicked up a fuss, saying if we couldn’t train on a proper pitch how can we be expected to perform on a proper pitch?”
They’ve since got that sorted. Over the summer they were back training in Tralee IT, which has a fantastic pitch and proper dressing rooms and showers. But as to what happens next winter? They’ll cross that bridge when they come to it. Suffice to say, you now have a better understanding of why a team that has contested the past three All Ireland semi-finals still can’t get out of Division 2 of the league.
For now, tomorrow’s All-Ireland final against Cork is all that’s on her mind. Next year’s league, or even this year’s Superleague with UL, doesn’t come into it, though she’s found shooting some hoops on her own a nice diversion in the lead up to this big one in Croker. There’s quite a tradition of women dual players. Cork’s captain Juliet Murphy was a former Irish senior basketball international. Lindsay Peat has won top honours with Dublin and DCU. Now Galvin intends to join them by adding an All-Ireland title to go with her multiple honours with UL.
Every one outside the Kerry camp can’t see how it can happen this year. But within it there’s a quiet confidence and determination. They’ve improved significantly since this year’s Munster championship defeat to Cork. They’ve beaten Dublin. Against Galway they weathered a goal shortly after half time that left them trailing playing against a strong breeze but they’d score 1-6 without reply. That’s the kind of game they’d have lost a couple of years ago, just as UL used to quake when opposing teams used to make a run at them a few seasons before their dominance.
That both teams feature an emboldened Galvin is no coincidence. As Weldon recognised all those years ago in that besieged gym in Bosnia, when you’re in a war zone, it helps to have a warrior like Galvin.
