UCC planning to maximise potential on and off pitch

UCC Director of Sport and Physical Activity Morgan Buckley paid tribute to the double-winning GAA club in the college yesterday when outlining the university’s ambitious new sports strategy.

UCC landed the Fitzgibbon and Sigerson Cups last week and Buckley said: “The successes this week, the foundations for that were laid by Declan (Kidney), John Grainger, and all the hard work they and others have done.

“I was lucky enough to come in as all that has come to fruition, all that hard work. We’re asking ourselves now, ‘how do we build on that?’ It’s about coaching and recruitment, looking after people, and that’s something John (Grainger) does to an exceptional degree.

“We’re under-resourced - we have one GAA officer who runs 15 teams, so we’re also saying ‘we’ve had success but we need more resources in our performance strategy’.”

Buckley said UCC had worked hard to prepare their new strategy: “We have 23,00 students and sport and physical activity is a huge part of student life. We’ve had extensive meetings with students, campus surveys, met with Cork GAA, Munster Rugby, Rowing Ireland, Athletics Ireland, other governing bodies, to get a sense of where we were at. The sense we got was that we had huge potential and had been up there - but that we’d fallen behind in some ways.”

UCC still hosts 55 different sports clubs, with 4,000 students as members of those clubs, and 13,000 students using the facilities in the Mardyke Arena, but Buckley felt there could be a wider appreciation of what sport and physical activity could do to benefit students, the university and the community.

“One key role for us is to play our part in the community of UCC but also in the wider community.

“There’s the area of sports development and coaching, recruiting volunteers and officials, and we have governing bodies looking for UCC to take a lead in their sports.” The strategy also focuses on the famous Skull and Crossbones logo.

We felt we weren’t making the most of that, so in the coverage of our successes last week it was to the fore.

“It’s renowned in sport so we feel we need to maximise it with alumni, graduates, students, but we haven’t connected people with that. We can’t just rely on the university for resources.

“Bank of Ireland are key sponsors for us but we feel there may be other potential sponsors.”

The strategy also focuses on increasing participation.

“We feel people should leave university in a better place not just academically but in terms of their sports and physical activity. How do we do that?

We have over 60 coaches but we can do more to increase participation, and we have plans on increasing female participation and the 20x20 campaign.

“We need to do more for people with disabilities, and we need to do more in terms of outdoor sports, to form partnerships in that regard.

“There’s a big focus from the Students’ Union on mental health and we can contribute to try to ease those pressures, to show there are different outlets. Students can go for a run, or head down to the Mardyke or join a team.

UCC intends to reach out to other organisations to build partnerships under the new strategy.

“We want to go up to another level, so we’re coming up with a performance strategy - we’re sitting down with the sports to see how we can build on the successes we’ve achieved.

“In the last three years we’ve identified 400 successes across all sports, and there’s a sense that that hasn’t been celebrated. So how do we support our coaches to do what they do? We can’t succeed without the likes of Billy Morgan, Eamon Ryan, Paul Thornton, all these guys coming in.

“We also need to play a part in reinvigorating sport in Cork. In that way we’ve had very positive discussions with the Cork County Board, with soccer, with rowing. We think we can offer help in terms of technology - we’ve just started a scheme with Statsports tracking our rugby team, we have AP Microbiome in nutrition, world class strength and conditioning in Jeff Gomez, Mick Molloy - and we’re in discussions with the Institute of Sport at the moment also.

“A new high-performance plan is being developed, and there’s a realisation that a lot of work is being done through Abbottstown.

“We’d like to be the southern hub for that and that work is already underway. We’re working with national governing bodies on this and our agreement with Rowing Ireland is almost ready - we have to make sure our plans suit each other without squeezing athletes.

“In that sense at UCC could provide the backbone for the rowing team for the next Olympics.”