Breeding a new generation to sport the black and amber

ONLY IN Kilkenny could collecting ten consecutive Leinster minor hurling titles be regarded as bad for business.

Back in 2001 they got to thinking about how to improve the standards of underage hurling on Noreside, and county chairman Ned Quinn decided to call in Kilkenny legend Pat Henderson.

“Ned put a group of us together to come up with a way to improve the situation,” recalls Henderson. “We’d won ten or 11 minor titles in a row but we were performing dismally at All-Ireland level. We were having success without having success.

Kilkenny coaching officer Brian Ryan outlines the simple plan they came up with: “Pat’s group and the county board chairman wrote out to inter-county players and well-known club players, asking if they’d be interested in getting involved in coaching.”

The response was overwhelming; Henderson recalls approximately 40 positive answers out of the 50 or so hurlers who were approached.

Though experienced as players, they were then sent on coaching courses and assigned to develop what many regard as the cornerstone of Kilkenny’s future success: the development squad system, with squads at U14, U15, U16, U17 and minor levels. As Ryan says, the variety in age groups is designed to ensure that no-one slips through the net.

There were teething problems: “Some of the clubs were very reluctant,” says Henderson, “They do a lot of good work, don’t get me wrong, but this new system meant attitudes had to be changed. Other counties had moved on, and we were playing catch-up.”

It wasn’t all about confrontation, and the success of the scheme lay in getting little the details right. The county board fixtures committee freed up Wednesdays for the development squads, meaning they had a dedicated night for sessions.

Another innovation was the allocation of three coaches to each squad. As Ryan says, “each coach would only have to take eight to ten sessions for the season, so no-one would be too tied up.”

The system also moved around the county, so club coaches could see the sessions and pick up some hints; as Henderson says, they wanted to improve coaches as well. Selection systems were also changed to ensure only development squad members were picked for representative underage sides, giving the squads legitimacy: clubs which didn’t want to forward players to the development squads soon realised their stars weren’t figuring on county sides.

A particular type of player was targeted for the squads. Each club supplies three candidates to a development squad, but “We wouldn’t be looking for maybe the best player,” says Henderson, “Or the lad who thought he was the best player. We wanted the player who’d learn most from being in a squad, who’d go back to his club and be an example to the others in his age group rather than looking down on them. We didn’t want prima donnas.”

Henderson is keen to see the rising tide lift all boats. He hopes to see an improvement in club hurling standards running parallel with a harvest of inter-county players; Ryan acknowledges that the true benefits of the system may take ten years to become apparent, though the powerful Kilkenny minor teams of recent years are a fair advertisement for its effectiveness.

Both men are at pains to point out that for all the good ideas, hard work is at the heart of the system. Securing pitches for training sessions and massaging fixture lists to accommodate those sessions can be problematic; the coaching itself can be the easiest part of the equation, with an All-Ireland ticket the only reward for those taking the sessions.

The players being trained benefit from the coaching, but they also enjoy at least one singular privilege. Pat Henderson explains: “We give every player a chance to wear the black and amber in competitive games, and they take pride in that.”