Kieran Shannon: Tralee basketball's growth gospel...according to John

The Warriors are supposed to be in transition after losing a pair of their leading lights. Except no one told head coach John Dowling and his young side

BASKETBALL GROWTH: Garvey's Tralee Warriors’ Head Coach John Dowling. Picture: ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne

You know you’re in the company of a die-hard when before any mention of the Superleague or the magic of the Cup weekend in Cork, he’s taking you down to the grassroots and offering multiple takes on "what’s the biggest issue we have in Irish basketball”.

“Our rings are too high,” says John Dowling early into the chat we’ve squeezed in between him teaching classes in Mercy Mounthawk secondary school, Tralee and a run to the crèche.

“You look at most of Europe, at U12s they still have the basket lowered. Because they want them to shoot the ball properly, have the right mechanics. Here we have 11-year-olds trying to shoot three-pointers and they’re having to bring the ball over their hip to fire it up. It becomes a javelin.” 

We’ve met up the week Basketball Ireland have announced that the senior men’s national coach Michael Bree will fill a newly-created position of ‘head of player pathway coaching and content’, working with the national U14, U15 and U17 academies. Dowling considers it “a brilliant appointment” but hopes Bree’s remit extends beyond and below that. Only a fraction of the kids playing the game make it to their U14 regional academy.

Take those same U12s heaving the ball at a basket the same height as the one Victor Wembanyama shoots into. Almost all of them are playing full-court, five-on-five. Dowling’s club is one of the more enlightened setups in the country that plays two crosscourt games of 4v4 simultaneously for players and teams of that age.

Tralee Warriors head coach John Dowling during the Basketball Ireland Pat Duffy National Cup semi-final match between Garvey's Tralee Warriors and Irish Guide Dogs Ballincollig at Neptune Stadium in Cork. Picture: Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile

“If it’s your conventional five-on-five at U12, invariably the best two players are getting most of the touches and taking most of the shots. And chances are they’re the bigger kids, or already good at soccer and GAA which they’ll ultimately opt for. The fella then who likes basketball but isn’t yet that good at it isn’t getting touches and right away is playing the catch-up game. But if you’ve two 4v4 games going, he’s getting more playing time, touches, shots.” 

A couple of minutes later he identifies another “biggest issue that I have” – area boards are only obliged to organise games from U12s up.

“My daughter joined [Austin] Stacks football academy this year. A month later she had a game against Churchill. Now, she hadn’t a clue what was going on, none of them did, but they had the Stacks jersey on them, a ball was thrown in and they got a little prize at the end of it: Congrats, you’ve played your first game with Stacks. And right away they were hooked. Whereas in basketball, there’s no game for them!

“I don’t think the score should be kept until they’re out of U12 but we should be providing games for them by U8s, three on three.” 

For that to happen though you’re back to lowering those baskets. That goes beyond mere facilities and finance. It’s a matter of mindset: Can you find a way?

Last week when Conor Meany from this parish was issuing his mid-season awards, Dowling was his standout coach in the men’s Superleague. Tralee Warriors were supposed to be in transition, having lost in-their-prime local talents like Rap Buivydas and Ryan Leonard on top of the retirements of veterans Kieran Donaghy and Fergal O’Sullivan the previous season. Yet here they are in a Cup semi-final this weekend in Cork and on track to make the league playoffs. They’ve found a way.

Warriors wouldn’t even exist without that mentality. It’s 10 years ago this month since three basketball heads from the town sought an audience with then BI CEO Bernard O’Byrne and pitched the idea of the two intermediate teams in the town, St Brendan’s and Magic (then known as Imperials), combining forces to participate in the Superleague.

Donaghy, fresh off winning the National Intermediate club with Brendan’s, was one of those three wise men. Jimmy Diggins, a coach in the Magic academy who had presided over the successful Lee Strand women’s teams of the ’80s and ’90s, was another. Dowling, who was then both coaching Magic and Mounthawk underage teams, was also in the room where it happened.

“Jimmy outlined the tradition of basketball in the town. Donaghy spoke about the sponsors we had ready to back us and the match-day experience we were going to roll out to capture the imagination of the local kids like the Tigers had captured his. And I broke down how it was going to work.

“We had two feeder clubs that would all filter into the one Tralee town franchise. You wouldn’t have people abstaining from games because the team was either Brendan’s or Magic. They’d all go because they’d get to keep their identity and want to see this team that was representing them all and the town.

“Donaghy was adamant we had to go straight into the Superleague. He didn’t want us going into Division One because we could be stuck there for years. We were lucky that at the time there were only 11 teams in the Superleague and there was room for one more. And Donaghy promised Bernard O’Byrne that if he gave this the green light it would be the best thing to happen to the national league in 10 years.” 

John Dowling, Mercy Mounthawk, in action against Ronan McGrath, Malahide. All-Ireland Schoolboys Basketball League, U19 'B' Final, Malahide Community School, Dublin v Mercy Mounthawk, Tralee, Co. Kerry, ESB Arena, Tallaght, Dublin. Picture: Brendan Moran / SPORTSFILE *EDI*

It is to the eternal credit of all parties that Donaghy’s words got the chance to be prophetic. Since the Warriors have entered the league no team in the country has drawn larger crowds and no one has won more than the five major titles they’ve accumulated: two Superleagues (2019 and 2022), a National Cup (2022) and two Champions Trophies (2017 and 2018).

Dowling has been the one constant all through. In the first couple of years he was an assistant to Mark Bernsen, then served the same role to Pat Price for a further two seasons. When Price stepped away in the early months of Covid, Dowling finally felt – and was adjudged – ready to be head coach.

Life had taught him that most good things come to those who wait, or at least persevere. He’s dyslexic yet teaches maths and science, something he attributes to his mother sitting on him as a kid and ensuring he learned his maths tables by rote.

As a footballer he was good and tall enough to make the same Kerry minor panel as Bryan Sheehan but not enough to ever leave the bench. When he met his father in the Hogan Stand after an All-Ireland semi-final defeat to eventual champions Laois, he was in tears.

“I said, ‘Jesus, Dad, I’ll never be here again.’ He said, ‘Ah you will, you will’ but I couldn’t see how. My club Ardfert were in Division Five of the county leagues.” 

That same year Seán Kelly became GAA president and extended the All-Ireland club championships to the junior and intermediate grades. In 2006 Ardfert won the All-Ireland junior championship. A year later they won the intermediate. When they won it again in 2015, Dowling got to go up the steps of the Hogan for a third time.

His devotion to the Ardfert cause finished whatever playing basketball career but its lessons would inform his coaching. When he was asked early on in his teaching career to take the U16s Mounthawk team featuring future Warriors Darragh O’Hanlon and Paul McMahon, Dowling became intrigued by the possibilities that an all-in approach could reap. The school had won multiple B All-Irelands but never an A.

“I’m not an entrepreneur but this was a real project. I was a single man at the time without kids so it became an obsession.”  Three mornings a week he’d open the school hall for 7.30 so the players could work out for an hour before grabbing a shower and breakfast ahead of class. Then they’d reassemble in the evening to practice again.

During mid-term breaks he’d hop on a plane and then into a car and drive around America with Diggins and O’Hanlon’s father Tomás for company. They sat in on the sessions of Geno Auriemma and Bob Hurley Snr and watched how the legends applied tough love.

“I remember the second year we went to Geno in UConn, there was a heavy girl who was redshirted and they had her doing the Mikan drill and sprints on her own by the side baskets. She vomited because the training was so hard.

“Bob Hurley then was working with inner-city high-school kids and God, he’d show them his ring: you better start running or you’re going to get knuckled. I was shocked but it’s what those kids understood and they loved and respected him. Afterwards he explained to us that they didn’t see discipline anywhere else in their lives. ‘If I don’t give them discipline they’ll end up dead.’ That was his statement. ‘They’ll end up dead.’” 

Even as Mounthawk began winning All-Ireland A titles, Dowling continued to serve his apprenticeship under a couple of other veteran American coaches in Bernsen and Price.

“It was a dream. Like having an encyclopaedia written and demonstrated by people who knew more than you. Mark was a great disciplinarian. Old school. If you fecked around in practice he’d feck you out of practice. And he devised a system of play that allowed a group of lads that had played only intermediate to compete. It might have been viewed as rigid but it helped fellas straightaway get to the level.

“Pat then was more about reads. If you felt the read was to reject the screen, you could reject it. A player like Quigs [Eoin Quigley] flourished under Pat. Paul Dick the same. Pat wasn’t going to tell him what to do. He’d always say, ‘You make the read, Paul, and we’ll live with the consequences.’” 

Even when Dowling finally ascended to the head coach position, he had to bide his time. The 2020-21 season was a write-off. “Oh man, I struggled during Covid. Ask my wife [Ursula]. I was on all these zoom courses and learning as much as I could but if you’re doing a coaching clinic at the weekend all you want to do is get into a hall on the Monday.

“I think that was a big reason for our success in 2021-22. Everyone was just grateful to be back after a year away from it. And everyone wanted to see me and [assistant] Gareth [Moore] as local lads succeed – including the players.” 

Since winning the double in Dowling’s first year in charge though, Tralee have been unable to get back to any final. They’ve been close, losing by last-second baskets in Cup semi-finals (2024 to Ballincollig), league quarter-finals (2024 versus eventual champions Éanna) and league semi-finals (2025 to eventual champions UCC Demons). But when Buivydas and Leonard opted to play elsewhere this season, on top of the league’s new stipulation that at least two Irish players have to be on the floor at any one time, Tralee’s days as even contenders appeared over.

“It was the same when Kieran and Fergal finished up. People thought the Warriors were going into a decline and maybe even go away as the Tigers did. But people don’t realise the work that’s going on down on the ground in the schools and in Magic and Brendan’s and how invested they are in the Warriors. Basketball is booming in the town.

“You don’t cry over spilt milk. Everyone loved going to the Complex [which remains closed after its roof fell in 12 months ago] but MTU is a fantastic facility that our players love playing in.

“We have four lads currently playing in America. That’s where every player in their head wants to go. But that goes back to why you’ve to work with everybody. Stephen Bowler never made an Irish team. Keelan Crowe the same. But they’re playing valid minutes in the Superleague and that plans the seed for other kids, ‘I can play with the Warriors.’ 

“People said the crowds would decline with the two-Irish players rule because the standard would be poorer. But I see more of our kids and their parents going. Because they’re seeing their own on the floor.

“Before, it was an arms race. You’d pump the money in and get as many pros as possible because that was seen as the only way you could compete in the league. But last year we had a load of pros and in the end it didn’t work – we didn’t get it done.

“So as a club were going this route regardless. The lads had won two U20 National Cups and the BI Development League. What were you supposed to do with them? Keep them on the bench? We’d made the decision we were going to blood these lads and see where it’d take us.” 

It’s not like Fergal or Donaghy disappeared either. O’Sullivan remains the chair and driving force behind the Brendan’s juvenile section while Donaghy, even with his Kerry commitments, continues to help out behind the scenes. Whenever the team is hosting a home game, Donaghy does the on-air commentary for BI TV before offering some off-air observations to Dowling.

“You’ll always get the killer one or two lines. A couple of weeks before we played Killester in the Cup, we played them in the league and Donaghy felt we could be in better shape. ‘You’re going to have run them harder, boy! They have to hate you by the end of these two weeks!’ And of course when he says it, you’re like, ‘Right, that’s what I need to do so!’” 

Find a way.