Sitting in to learn the game’s basics in coach class
Shane McClearn was over from Galway, busying himself over his laptop and coaching charts as we waited patiently to forget everything we thought we knew.
His trip, the third of its kind, was reinforcing the growing ties between Connacht GAA and the increasingly connected New York County Board.
Hurling is developing fast across the US but needs work in the tri-state area if it is to properly tap into the huge population of Irish-American children with a grá for their parents’ homeland.
Getting everyone singing from the same coaching sheet is one way of doing it.
I was there with two other Hoboken club members, curious about the Foundation Award that even the likes of Brian Cody saw fit to take.
By the end of a captivating six-hour course, I had a better understanding of what it is to communicate a skill and I had a clearer memory of the mistakes that were made when we were growing into the game.
But then how do you communicate coaching to a wannabe coach? McClearn brought energy, clarity and realism. When I spoke to him afterwards on our way to the practical part of the day, I found out why.
One of the greater skills of the underage coach is identifying the limits of the players. McClearn was someone who was astute enough to enjoy his own talent to its real potential.
The 34-year-old still hurls with Killimor, an intermediate club in East Galway, and has fond memories of underage success with the county team.
But he went out at the top of his inter-county game in the best way imaginable, captaining Galway to an All-Ireland IHC title in 2002, a replay victory over Tipperary.
“That was the end of my involvement with them. I had played intermediate for a good few years, I decided that was the extent of my level. That’s as high as I got.”
His interest in coaching really began to manifest itself in the late 1990s when he took a degree in sport at Waterford IT. While there, he was a team-mate of Kilkenny duo Henry Shefflin and recently retired Michael Kavanagh, playing corner back on the two-in-a-row team that took the Fitzgibbon Cup in 1999 and 2000.
“It was an experience to hurl with all those boys. I got involved with tutoring at the Connacht Coach Education Committee. Over the last few years I’ve been involved with Galway development squads and the Galway development committees.”
Throughout that province, 44 tutors have been gathered together for both codes but McClearn’s own emphasis is, as he puts it, to formulate a “plan for the progression of hurling in Galway”.
“We do Foundation and Level One at the moment. The plan is to move towards Level Two and Three but it’s not as if coaches in New York are trailing too far behind. We’re in discussion with Simon Gillespie (New York GAA Development Officer) about streamlining all this. We were just saying that we need some kind of twinning process between a county and New York or with a tutor and New York where you have open lines of communication and send over information and monitor the progress of kids, that’s the biggest thing. I’m the third person here now delivering a course. There was a foundation course here two years ago given by Damien Curley and then Damien Coleman was here last May. We’d be very similar in the way we work but obviously everybody has subtle differences.”
Donegal-born Gillespie said the connection with Connacht was becoming more vital every year for the New York County Board.
“Having Shane over is invaluable. There is a huge appetite for hurling here but we need to make sure we have the correct structures in place. Everyone is working together as well, that’s a good thing.
“The biggest thing is to ensure that there are people on the ground — that’s always the obstacle,” McClearn adds. “There are plenty of kids here. So you just take it from there.
“I’d be a good judge of where the skill levels are and how it compares to the kids in Ireland. We’ll record it and see what stage of development they’re at.”
As we walked up the steps and approached the gate of Paddy’s Field, the pocket of GAA turf at the eastern edge of Van Cortland Park, the other coaches were in good spirits on a grey day, ready to pick up a hurley and put McClearn’s words into action. “There are definitely enough people on the ground from what I’ve seen today. You can’t beat enthusiasm and that’s what all these people have.”
* john.w.riordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
