Coaching that’s just a click away
He piqued our interest in the online coaching college, so we rang someone we knew who just happened to help found it.
Liam Hennessy has been involved in coaching top athletes, All-Ireland-winning hurling teams, Pádraig Harrington and the Irish rugby team. He can trace the development of the coach education back to his time in the 80s as a student: “I was lucky. I was educated with some of the top sports physiologists in the world. In Loughborough I struck up a relationship with George Gandy, Seb Coe’s coach. You got to learn by meeting people.”
Hennessy wanted to learn more about making athletes better in a drug-free environment, so he and Jim Kilty, another household name in Irish coaching, created the first pathway of education for athletics coaches.
“Education was always a strong part of what I was doing, of better ways to improve them. When I joined the IRFU in 2000, Ireland as a rugby nation was minimal in conditioning processes and performance enhancement.
“We started an education programme, the certified conditioning course for coaches of rugby union — the IRB took it on board and it’s become the standard course, it’s delivered in 96 countries and has been completed by 13,000 people.”
He and Kilty set up Setanta College in 2007. “It was always clear to me that education and information were key. Every month you find out something you could have done better. Setanta was meant to be an education provider, an accredited college, which meant it had to be aimed at a general education — helping athletes and players improve performance. It spans nutrition, strength and conditioning, psychology, management — those are the fields we deal in, including coaching skills, planning and preparation.”
So far so good. But where would they locate the campus? “It had to be mobile,” says Hennessy. “You couldn’t just have it static in the traditional college sense because coaches are working during the day and then — in Ireland, anyway — dealing with their teams or athletes in the evening. We had to make it accessible for them, and the blended learning online concept made that an obvious path. It’s providing that continuous education for sports people in all disciplines.”
Hennessy says the students range from elite athletes considering coaching to primary school teachers who want to improve their teaching of PE — “last year we had 2,000 primary teachers doing our courses” — to world-class coaches.
“Most share a passion for sport, and they’re applying the experiences they were exposed to, so the limitations can be understood. We understand that so we facilitate people with our short courses, which can maybe expose people to the fact that there are many ways to deal with sportspeople, both the group who just wish to participate and those with the potential for elite achievement.
“Best practice is what we’re after. Traditionally we don’t have something in place, it’s down to the well-intentioned father of one of the participants in many sports. We’re providing information and best practice.” If you want to learn more, log on to setantacollege.com.
Have we been here before?
A bit of noise about the Gaelic footballers of Carlow and Laois having to take a day off work before their Friday evening championship game and suddenly professionalism is back on the table?
“If they are going to be taking half-days off work then absolutely, yes, they need to be compensated,” said Dublin boss Jim Gavin last week, with the air, perhaps, of a man looking into his future and envisioning a personal apocalypse trying to pull his players from the four corners of a traffic-choked capital some Friday evening.
It’s an idea that could have been handled a lot better by the GAA. A little foresight could have forestalled any suggestion of a George Hotel-type meeting of the players concerned.
For those of you with an eye to history, the George Hotel in Huddersfield was where rugby club representatives decided, back in 1895, to take a stand on the issue of broken time payments to players missing work, and professional rugby league was the result, splitting for a century from rugby union.
Much as we’d like to see — or preferably cover — something similar, it doesn’t look likely in this latest storm in a GAA cup. For all that this looks like a shared issue, of compensating sportspeople for losing out on work, there was a good deal more bubbling on in the background in 1895; for another, even in the century before last professional sport was always a more likely prospect in a country with over a dozen times the population of our little island.
In any case, discreet arrangements have always been made by the GAA to ensure players are not out of pocket, to use that ripe phrase.
One of the illuminating corners of Enda McEvoy’s biography of Fr Tommy Maher, the Kilkenny trainer for decades, sheds a little light on the attitude of the Kilkenny hurlers when Waterford fought them to a draw in 1959: “..... the only ray of sunshine for him and his colleagues was the three pounds the county board gave each of them the next day in lieu of the wages they’d lose through missing a second Monday at work.”
You could go back even further, of course — a century ago entire county teams were sequestered in hotels and dormitories for a week or two before All-Ireland finals. Collective training was the term in vogue then, but it was professionalism in all but name, and recognised as such in the determination of the GAA to do away with it.
A little common sense then. A little common sense now wouldn’t hurt either. Jim McGuinness of Donegal demolished any pay-for-play overtones with a simple shot of logic: “There is no way a player is going to go to work the day of a championship match. But they are not getting paid to play, they are getting paid for the time off work.”
Jim Gavin asked the most obvious question: “If people don’t like it, then just play the games as they normally are, on Saturday and Sunday.”
As with all obvious questions, there’s usually an obvious answer.
Nobody asked me, but has the Lions Tour now been going on since man discovered fire?
An odd temporal effect has me half-convinced that the men in red started this tour within 24 hours of their previous jaunt ending: maybe it just feels like four years.
Anyway, they beat Australia on Saturday. To be honest, if it were the Morris Dancing And Sea-shell Gathering World Championships and Australia lost, I’d be happy. Or rather, if the Australian rugby team lost, given a long-standing dislike of Robbie Deans.
Even though the Lions have been on the road so long I’m not sure whether Willie John McBride is some kind of advisor or still the captain, any team that puts manners on Robbie is alright with me, frankly.
Dear me. There I was sitting in the car, steaming slightly as the man in the vehicle in front tried to get his money sorted for the toll in Limerick. Notes were tried. Coins were tried. At a distance of a couple of metres it looked as though even a beseeching word was tried.
Eventually the man had to hop out and root around underneath the car for his €1.90, and he came up with the goods.
Perhaps it was just me, but did that man look like Seán Walsh, former chairman of the Munster Council? Just to show there were no hard feelings for the five-minute hold-up I beeped.
Seriously Seán, that was the only reason. I had the hand in my pocket in case you were stuck.
