‘Just because you’re a great player doesn’t make you a great trainer’

Professor Niall Moyna, head of the School of Health and Human Performance in DCU, isn’t short of an opinion on our athletes and GAA players — then again, he isn’t short of achievement either. Michael Moynihan took notes.

HAVING a chat with Niall Moyna can leave you a little dizzy. Which is ironic, as the Monaghan native is head of the School of Health and Human Performance in DCU. If it’s opinions you’re interested in, he’s got them.

The Olympics? “Let’s forget about them, particularly at distance events.”

GAA team preparation? “To spend more than 10% of the time devoted to collective training sessions on physical conditioning is a waste of time.”

That’s for starters. When Niall Moyna came to DCU after his post-doctoral work in exercise physiology in the US, he decided to shake things up.

“We had one degree in sports science and health and we convinced the academic council to provide places on that for elite sportspeople. The first person to come in under that scheme was Bryan Cullen. I got involved with the Sigerson Cup team, and after what I’d been used to in America, it was pathetic. That wasn’t the players’ fault, but the infrastructure wasn’t there. Sport wasn’t seen as important.”

Where it was seen as important it wasn’t being done properly. Moyna was amazed that U-21 football teams were training twice a week in November for a competition beginning in March and expecting players to go back from college for sessions.

“I couldn’t believe the training they were doing, having worked as an exercise physiologist with elite teams in America. In fact, I believe they were abusing players.

“I felt we could do that differently, and having seen the collegiate track and field system, I felt we could improve on that as well. That collegiate system is great if you understand you’re there to run for the four years you’re there, that it isn’t about long-term development. It’s a wonderful country and you get a great education, but it’s not about long-term development.”

Moyna started with an athletics programme, convincing Mark Christie and Fionnuala Britton — the top European finisher in this year’s world cross-country championships — to come to DCU on a track scholarship. They started with four and now have 52 athletes.

“I believe we have half the 2012 Olympic team here. It’s about the long term. With my background in athletics we identified Junior Cert students and carried out tests over three years to build up a physiological profile of those athletes.

“We don’t know if this is going to work, but it’s better than what was there. We started our athletics programme five years ago for 2012. The people who run sport will think about 2012 in 2011. We have 56 people here and if one of them makes it then it’ll be a job well done. The current MO in Ireland is ‘get good, then we’ll look after you’.

“I’m very disappointed with the lack of vision when it comes to elite sports. People are appointed to positions and there’s no openness, no-one knows how they got there. A guy was recently appointed in charge of sports science for the Institute of Sport. He works four days a month. I’m sure he’s competent, but he’s English — if a better job comes up in England, he’ll leave.

“There’ll be a review after Beijing, the same thing. We have to break that. We can’t be good at every sport, so let’s identify sports. I’ve told the Sports Council that when other countries come looking for our coaches, we’ll know we’ve arrived. That ain’t happening. We don’t have the sporting infrastructure.”

Moyna’s approach is radically different.

“Let’s forget about the Olympic Games, particularly at distance events. We can’t compete against the Africans. On an annual basis we should be looking to win a minimum of four to five gold medals at the European Championships. If we did that the Irish public would be very happy; having one or two making an Olympic or World championships final would make people very happy.”

What about the likes of Sonia O’Sullivan, then?

“Sonia O’Sullivan is interesting case. She didn’t run for her first three years in America because she was injured. I think that’s what made her. If I was a coach in America, under pressure to get wins every week, I’d do the same. Derval O’Rourke is in a very difficult event, and if she gets to the Olympic final I’ll be ecstatic. That’s what I’m saying — get one or two athletes to finals.

“That’s the model I’d like to see. How successful have we been in track and field in the Olympics? Sonia won a silver, John Treacy won a silver, before that Ronnie Delany won gold, then you’re back to the thirties. Let’s be brutally honest, we don’t have a great record in winning gold medals at the Olympics. Let’s not make that the yardstick, particularly now when it’s harder than ever to win those medals.”

Gaelic football was Moyna’s other passion, but horror stories of footballers being brought to county training, including twenty 200m sprints, on the same day they’d played a Sigerson Cup game left him shaking his head.

“There’s far too much conditioning going on in Gaelic games. We should reduce the amount of collective training by 50%, and severely restrict the amount of physical training you’re allowed to do, because a lot of people are hiding their coaching inadequacies by having players run all night.

“The culture pervasive in the last four or five years wasn’t conducive to the long-term development of young players. We set up our own academy — it isn’t perfect, but we’re looking after players. We look after sponsorship deals for elite players, and rightly so, we help them with their studies through study groups with graduate students, so it’s a club thing. When our first years come in I told them ‘if something is to give this semester, it’s your football; you come in here for a first-class honours degree. If you come here with that motto, we’ll look after the rest.’ That’s the most important thing. Since I came here the graduation rate of our senior team is 98.4%.”

In general terms, Moyna is careful to distinguish between his athletes and his footballers.

“There’s a difference in talking about elite athletes and amateur Gaelic footballers. From a coaching perspective, how many inter-county teams — the crème de la crème — do a fitness evaluation of their players before they even start? If you did that you might find 80% of them are exactly where you want them. Unless you do a simple fitness evaluation how do you know what you need to do?”

While he says 90% of conditioning at inter-county level should be the players’ responsibility, Moyna accepts that that’s the way most of them work: “But they’re still not evaluating the efficacy of their work. There’s a one-size-fits-all approach.”

So what would the players do in training if not run?

“The average scoring rate from play is 40%, which is very low,” says Moyna. “If I were an inter-county coach, I’d want my players taking 300 shots at goal per week. How many coaches in Ireland can tell you how many shots their players take in training?

“For forwards it’s about individual creativity, but we’re coaching that out of them when we should be focused on it. To spend more than 10% of the time devoted to collective training sessions on physical conditioning is a waste of time. Gaelic footballers aren’t as fit as professional soccer players, but they don’t have to be. A lot of them are right where they need to be.”

Moyna advocates early adoption of weight training as a means of getting players up to speed physically.

“You can show a kid of 14 how to lift weights with a brush handle, but what happens now is an eighteen-year-old is brought into a senior inter-county set up and is expected to do five years’ work in five months. You see scrawny kids arrive into senior dressing-rooms but if we had a conditioning programme in secondary schools — teaching the proper technique, with kids taking responsibility — they’d be far better.”

At the other end of the age spectrum, is it necessary for GAA players in their late twenties, with a considerable base of fitness, to slog through the January-February preseason grind?

“No. They’d need only five weeks of a proper programme on their own. The games would get them the rest of the way. The problem is the lack of knowledge among those in charge of teams. The way the GAA works is ‘so-and-so is giving them 20 laps, we’ll have to do 30’. Just because you’re a great former player doesn’t make you a great trainer.

“However, a lot of the problems come from county boards which have unrealistic expectations of managers. They give managers freedom and virtually no responsibility with a two-year programme when the county maybe hasn’t been successful for twenty years! Does that manager care about what happens in year three? Even in the US collegiate system you’ll get four years as a manager. Here, an inter-county manager comes in and starts from scratch, as if the players have never done any previous training, when a simple battery of tests will tell you where the players are at in terms of fitness.”

What, then, would Niall Moyna say to the new Minister for Sport, Seamus Brennan? What would improve sport generally in the country?

“There are two angles. You have to initiate physical education taught by physical education specialists in school. There’s a huge drop-out if the child doesn’t have a good learning experience; that point again, it’s people who make programmes.

“Second, there has to be a much more focused approach to what we’re doing. Unfortunately politics is played with sport.

“There are tracks in WIT, CIT but we have 52 full-time athletes and no track. There’s too much politics involved. Governments get elected on five-year programmes, not twelve-year programmes, and we all want instant gratification. There’s an over-emphasis on competing and winning at a very young age. We know from many sports that the elite junior athlete isn’t always the elite senior athlete.

“The Sports Council has done a good job in changing our ideas on what’s needed to perform at the elite level, but we could do more. I’m not sold at all on the Institute of Sport. I don’t know what it’s about. Seán Kelly is a very competent administrator but it’ll be interesting to see the Institute’s progress. I hope for the sake of Irish sport that it works, but the Government is hell-bent on Abbottstown.

“But those are the two big issues — physical education in primary schools and developing world-class coaching.”

Moyna and his colleagues in DCU are doing their best to cover the latter point, having put in an eighty-metre running strip in DCU “at our own expense, and we’ll put in an indoor and outdoor track. We want to become a national centre for excellence in Gaelic football and athletics, and other universities should do the same.” He’s keen to thank the likes of Martin Conroy, the secretary of the University. Declan Brennan, director of the GAA academy, and Enda Fitzpatrick, director of the athletics academy: “People make programmes, and we’re lucky to have all of them.”

People make programmes. Never a truer word.