School of excellence

Kilkenny’s great hurling nursery is St Kieran’s College. Michael Moynihan visited a place where they take the game so seriously one of their pitches is lined to exactly the same dimensions as Croke Park.

ROLL past the roundabout that leads you onto College Road in Kilkenny and you’ll see it, the great grey building in lush green surroundings. St. Kieran’s College has changed: part of it is now colonised by NUI Maynooth and the fine sports hall and squash courts are a huge resource for the local community, with trampolining and indoor soccer on offer. There aren’t any boarders in the college any more, and like any modern school it offers a range of games: gaelic football, soccer, cross-country running and handball.

But hurling is synonymous with St Kieran’s. For generations, the school has supplied Kilkenny — and other counties — with star players, and that tradition endures. The Cats’ line-up on Sunday will feature 10 men who wore the white and black hoops of Kieran’s before graduating to black and amber stripes, and they all come back to the college afterwards in one way or another: quite apart from the traditional visit to the school with the Liam McCarthy Cup after an All-Ireland win — always on the Friday after the game — the Kilkenny senior hurling team use the big sports hall for winter conditioning.

Neil Connolly, a teacher at the school since 1983, has trained the college’s senior hurlers for the last few years. He acknowledges changes in the St Kieran’s enrolment, which now stands at about 640.

“We’d still have one or two from the Laois side, and Mullinahone in Tipperary, but through the years we’ve always had a good sprinkling of boarders on our teams — the last year we had boarders five or six of them were on the team. The loss of the boarding meant we lost out probably on a couple of lads who’d have come here, but there’s still a lot of talent down through the house — and coming through.”

Connolly isn’t understating the power of the boarder. In the 30s a young giant came across from Killane to pick up the skills of the game in Kieran’s; 20 years later Nicky Rackard sparked the Wexford hurling revival. In more recent years a little wizard from Mullinahone rambled down to learn a few tricks before going home to help the Premier to an All-Ireland. It was probably the last time Kilkenny people were happy to see Eoin Kelly of Tipperary.

St Kieran’s is about Kilkenny first and foremost, however. Enda McEvoy’s superb history of the college shows clearly how inter-county revival often followed closely on collegiate success. When Kilkenny had tough times in the fifties they only had to look at the exceptional centre-forward on the St Kieran’s team as a sign of better days to come: Eddie Keher captained the college to All-Ireland success in 1959.

Good times in the seventies were presaged in the Kieran’s All-Ireland win of 1971, which sent Brian Cody and Billy Fitzpatrick to buttress the inter-county side. Then they had the team of the late eighties.

“We’re always looking out for the coming stars among the first years,” says Connolly. “Every All-Ireland winning team we’ve had, you can see the sprinkling of exceptional talent. We had DJ Carey, Pat O’Neill and Adrian Ronan all in the one year: they were a great group. PJ Delaney stood out as well as a great colleges hurler, and in recent years Eoin Kelly stood out.

“You’d see them out here on the field pucking around and you’d just marvel at the skills they had. DJ is obviously one that stands out in my mind – even as a very small first year you’d marvel at the things he could do. Teachers would come out and stand here after classes and just watch him. He was just marvellous.”

Carey, Ronan and O’Neill back-boned the side that won the 1988 All-Ireland Colleges final and repeated the dose the following year. No surprise Carey managed 3-3 of St Kieran’s 3-5 tally in the ‘89 All-Ireland colleges final, a game in which O’Neill gave a terrific performance. At that stage Ronan — regarded as a marginally better prospect at the time — was already on the Kilkenny senior team. In 1989 Carey and O’Neill were joined by Andy Comerford and Philip Larkin. Then in 1996 you had Henry Shefflin, Michael Kavanagh, Jimmy Coogan, Sean Dowling, Donncha Fahey of Tipperary. Go back three or four years and you had Donncha Cody, John Tennyson, Richie Power on one team. You get the idea.

“I was looking recently at some of the teams that won All-Irelands, and while a lot of them had very talented hurlers, you’d see some which didn’t have a lot of players who went on to play intercounty, or who didn’t even play a lot of club hurling afterwards — but they were still fantastic sportsmen in the college here, great colleges hurlers. They had great careers here.

“We’re as happy as we ever were with the quality of what we have: the lads won the U-14 and U-16 Leinster championships, and our second year group seems particularly strong, so we seem to have plenty of talent coming through.

“If you were involved in Leinster colleges hurling you wouldn’t be too downhearted about the quality of hurling in the province. Birr had a great team, Castlecomer and Kilkenny CBS both had very good teams and will again this year, and Dublin Colleges will put it up to anybody. Good Counsel will always be good competitors as well.”

Connolly name-checks a list of coaches and managers that will be familiar to any former St Kieran’s pupil: Waterford selector Nicky Cashin, Tommy Lanigan, Denis Philpott, Seamus Knox, Kilkenny U21 selector Adrian Finan, Pat Murphy, Tom Hogan, John Quane, Art Anglin. Those are the men who take teams down to Fennessy’s Field, a smallish pitch in the far corner of the grounds which was used for training when the (now) main pitch behind the college was used to grow potatoes.

As much a part of the school as success itself. How about next year?

“We’ve two of last year’s team still available and a good few of the panellists, but it’ll be a youngish team. They’ll be good, though.”

When Enda McEvoy’s history of the college was published in 1998 he added a coda about future stars in black and white hoops, wondering if one might be: ...some fair-haired youth off the Ballyhale Shamrocks team that captured Féile na nGael honours as this book went to press.

You’ll see him on Sunday; that fair-haired youth was Cha Fitzpatrick.

Black and amber after black and white, same as it ever was.