THE TONY LEEN INTERVIEW: Born to be a coach
IT’s quite perverse that the women’s Superleague coach of the year for the past two seasons is defending his reputation after a 45-match unbeaten run, but such is James Weldon’s place in the rarefied environment of the UL Huskies basketball team.
The double winners from 2012, who retained their Superleague Cup last night, make a persuasive case for being the most dominant women’s basketball team in history, and more than once it’s been suggested that any squad with luminaries such as Rachael Vanderwal (26 pts again last night), Rachel Clancy and Michelle Fahy barely require intervention from the bench.
Weldon doesn’t bridle at the suggestion, and not just because he’s heard it all before. Though only 36, he’s been coaching international basketball for over a decade, and when that 45-game winning run came to an end against rivals Glanmire in December, he spent Christmas Day poring over the video. ‘It’s not just a question of they made their shots, and we didn’t; there’s got to be more to it than that,’ he told himself.
Weldon doesn’t need anyone to pick holes in his game-plan because he’s better at it than anybody else.
Intense? Maybe. Nerdy? Probably. An anorak? Undoubtedly, but what has turned the Killarney man into the Superleague coach of the year is his voracious appetite for learning, the need — the need, mind — to stay one step ahead of the pack.
That insatiable appetite has taken him across Europe and into the American collegiate community, a veritable basketball backpacker, swapping business cards and strategies with the game’s foremost thinkers. Talking X’s and O’s.
“I’m a bit of a networker. I’ll take myself off to Olympic qualifiers. A couple of years ago John Hayes (from Waterford Wildcats, father of Gillian) took off to the Europeans in Riga. “Latvia against Russia, 10,000 people for the quarter-final, and the Latvians got a lay up on the buzzer to go to overtime. The place went mental and we’re there high-fiving in the middle of them.” Every summer up to last, he’d bring his folders and foolscap pages to American colleges to learn. Rutgers, St John’s, Binghampton, Iona. Each time establishing links and contacts that would pay dividends later.
Last summer though, he networked his way into the big one — riding shotgun with Team GB as they prepared for the Olympic Games.
“I am about improving my knowledge all the time, the girls at UL have come to expect it from me. The GB thing started with Rachael (Vanderwal) being involved with them (and assisted by Weldon) in 2011 and bringing home two folders of notes from their camp. The coach Tom Maher has been at four Olympics (he was reputedly on £1million for coaching GB women) and so before the Olympics they agreed to give me access all areas. I booked into student accommodation for a week and was in on everything: team meetings, video analysis, how they were going to scout their opponents. A couple of nights I went out for pints with Maher, just chatting things through. Their assistant, Ken Shields, coached the Canadian men’s team for eight years so it was a dream scenario.”
Weldon was fascinated by the minutiae, like monitoring the players by inserting chips on their bras which was hooked up to GPS system, to establish their input into each drill.
But at what point does natural coaching instinct end and book-learned instruction begin? “Well, you have to be a good communicator. That’s key. There’s little point in having all that information if you can’t express it. A lot of that is down to Kieran (Shannon, the sports psychologist) who has made me a better communicator. I take time to know what’s going on with the players. I would have a very good relationships with them to the extent I would certainly know who all their partners are (none of the UL squad is married yet). It’s important we are all on the same wavelength but I would only have gone out with them three times in the four years. I went to the Christmas party this year but that was like a funeral (after the defeat by Glanmire).
“The group are a very genuine group and they treat everybody with respect. There are no airs and graces. What stood out for me from Tom Maher was his first-day explanation of the seven traits he expected in all his Team GB players. I don’t remember them all but the first one was being a decent person. It costs nothing to be pleasant.”
HE got his minutes here and there as a Men’s Superleague player with Killarney almost two decades ago. He was first into the Pres gym training every night, but the bulk that helped him as a school-going teenager was no longer an edge in the land of girth and giants.
“I was a role player,” Weldon admits, “I was average. I fell in between positions, too small to be effective inside, and not enough skill on the perimeter to play there. I travelled up and down the country for my two or three minutes.”
Already though he was taking and storing notes. By the time he reached 18, Weldon was already coaching Killarney’s women’s National League outfit.
“(Tralee powerhouse) Lee Strand used to train before St Paul’s men in the Pres gym in Killarney and occasionally they might have only nine players, so (coach) Jimmy Diggins might ask me to fall in for a game. I was maybe 17 at the time and thought to myself ‘I’d better take it easy here’. Straight away I got a few wallops, and I thought ‘wow these guys can play’.”
That Lee Strand monopoly of women’s basketball was forged in Tralee but supplemented by marquee additions from Blarney, who had folded. The Forde sisters, Sandy Fitzgibbon, Rose Breen, Bernie Lillis. As good as UL now?
“It’s like comparing Kerry teams from then and now. I know how good our players are now. The first thing I say to everybody is ‘look, I have a really good group of players. People say ‘sure, how can you not win with what you have?,’ but it’s what we are doing with what we have. These girls lift weights three days a week, they’re doing shooting and skills programme before they go to work in the mornings. They’re raising the bar for themselves.
“But we have developed things with them. People like to forget that this team, with the exception of Michelle Fahy who arrived later, was 0-6 against the big two (Glanmire and DCU) three years ago.”
Weldon has coached men’s teams — he had a successful season in basketball-mad Castleisland — but acknowledges it’s a different mindset, with a different tempo and vernacular. Where you will berate a male for the weight he piled on his ass over Christmas, that doesn’t work in the other changing room. Not in today’s society.
“There’s ways of talking to women, and I’ve been coaching women since I was 16 years old. But it would be quite difficult for a male coach going into a women’s sport, a harder adjustment I’d say.
It is easier the other way around.
“Women are easier to coach, they’re quicker on the uptake. I know fellas will kill me for saying that but from a tactical and technical point of view, they are quicker at picking up the skills, quicker at installing a new offence or defence. Probably more receptive to new thinking. Maybe it’s a testosterone thing too with us males.”
Last night’s 69-59 Cup final success over Glanmire, when they withstood a massive examination of their mental strength, in some ways, makes for a more challenging future for Weldon.
“We have to approach some games as if the opposition doesn’t exit. All the time we are competing with ourselves, looking for little edges, that make us even better.”
When there are so few of them, he takes defeats around the place with him. Dates and mistakes weigh heavily even if they’re as frequent as Santa Claus. “We went out of the Cup to DCU on December 8th, 2010. That was our last loss up to this Christmas. We went two seasons without a defeat so it terms of keeping the players on their toes, it’s very hard to keep going back to the girls and talking about the pain of that game we lost.
“But in my first season (2009) we were going up to play DCU in the League semi and I was in a bad situation. People say now, ‘do ye really need a sports psychologist?’ but we did then. Kieran Shannon — who in another life penned the definitive tome on the golden age of Irish basketball, ‘Hanging from the Rafters’ — came in the week before, and targeted one or two specific things. I could see the impact he had made in those small details, even if we didn’t win the game. I thought, yes there’s more to this.”
The evolution of a new force in Irish women’s basketball was underway. Shannon reminded Weldon of the facilities and expertise at his disposal in UL. Cian O’Neill came in and when football took him to Mayo and now Kerry, Ed Coughlan brought it to another level.
“He’s a skills acquisition coach, and a lot of clubs will turn their nose up at this kind of thing. But he’s unbelievable. The first night he came in to training he was taking notes, five or six foolscap pages, challenging me and showing how we could take stats on shooting percentages in training.”
The penny was dropping. Where Weldon had originally used UL as a recruiting tool, now he was using the premium indoor facility in the country, morning and night, as a preparatory tool where the players use the same elite gym facilities as the Munster rugby team.
“One of the first things Cian O’Neill said to me was ‘you’re not coaching a sport, you’re coaching players’. We’ve got to keep them progressing.”
After recruiting Vanderwal from Iona in Cork, UL chairman Phil Deegan advised him of a whisper about Rachel Clancy who had come up through the ranks before rising to Conference Player of the Year in California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) on America’s West coast. On a visit home from a pro outfit in Spain, it seemed she wasn’t keen on going back.
“Initially I was saying, ‘do we need to upset the dynamic’, and was wondering how to fit her into the rotation. But she’s a very good person, a role model, a perfectionist off and on the court. And a top top player.”
Weldon takes an hour and threequarters each way to training from Killarney, mulling over when’s the right time to curtail his own involvement. He’s not there yet though. The college turnover in players means familiarity is not the issue it can be.
“Kieran has stepped back a lot this year, but we’re at a place with the team where I’m comfortable taking suggestions from the group. Once every three or four weeks, they’ll have a 30 minute meeting and they’ll come back with feedback on what’s working and what’s not.”
Besides, he reckons he knows now when to ease off or step back. Even at 36, he’s been coaching more years than he’s not.
“Fellas said to me I was mad going into coaching so young but I had already played six or seven years SuperLeague at that stage.
As ever, there was a role model. Weldon’s was Ireland U18 coach Ger Tarrant from Listowel, who picked up on his neighbour’s ballsy move to apply for the women’s U16 coaching post with Ireland and invited him to an 18’s session at Scoil Carmel in Limerick.
“I loved it. Ger was my mentor from day one, I went off to Madeira with them and scouted, getting up at 5am to have the video sessions ready for 8am player meetings. After that I was hooked.”
Patience and passion paid. He got the U18 gig himself two years later and in 2007 took a group that shared his ambition — Jessica Scannell, the O’Reilly twins, Claire Rockall — to Timisoara in Romania where they became the first ever Irish team to top a European Championship group.
“Every summer then I would hook up with a college in the US. Classic cuckoo stuff, picking up hints from everywhere.
Everybody is stealing ideas and looking for the new edge. Even (Team GB coach) Maher was asking me about hurling — his great grandfather was from Templemore in Tipperary — so I brought him over a Tipp polo shirt. He was intrigued by the movement around the pitch. He also wanted to scout AFL training camps, because he was more and more into agility.”
On Cup final weekend, it’s not a good time to bring up downtime with Weldon. Even his girlfriend is a basketballer. But he knows there has to be a balance, for everyone’s good. “Kieran Shannon gave out to me at Christmas for watching that video of the Glanmire game. ‘You’ve got to switch off’...
So Weldon took his advice — by heading off on a two-day camp with the Ireland U18 team, which he’s taken again this year.
It isn’t the glory or the cash that keeps his fire stoked — he gets petrol expenses, no more — nor the thrill of the crowds at UL. Because there is none. “The atmosphere in Cork for the Cup semi-finals was superb. One of the real grievances in UL is that we have at least two or three of the best players in the country — maybe to ever play the game — and we might have ten people watching. And games are free to go into. That’s a shame, that these players don’t get to play in front of bigger, more appreciative audiences more frequently.”
Same as it ever was for women’s basketball. And that’s a shame. If there’s an upside, it’s the security that everyone does it for the love of basketball and their local club. The Neptunes, Demons, Killester, Wildcats.
“We played Wildcats in Waterford last year,” Weldon says, “and a friend of mine came down from Kilkenny to watch us play. I went up to the stand after to have a chat. I was coming back down the steps and nearly tripped over someone brushing the floor. It was Gillian Hayes, one of the best female players of her generation. That’s what keeps it going.”
