A small club with a big heart

It’s not so small that you’d miss it if you were passing through, but then you wouldn’t have much occasion to pass through.

Just to the north-west of Bandon lies Newcestown, not a big place but home to a GAA club which has enjoyed far more success than its size should suggest. Senior in football and premier intermediate in hurling, in 2012 the club won a minor A double working off a panel of 23 players.

For underage chairman Charlie Wilson, a county senior hurling medallist with Carbery in 1994, it was a journey that picked up more and more momentum as the campaign continued.

“I suppose at the start of the year the focus would have been on the hurling, winning that gave us a bit of belief and we managed to carry that into the football.

“It’s a funny thing, the football and hurling teams had the same trainer and selectors, and the players were nearly in the same positions in both too.”

Anybody who has ever come across Newcestown in competitive fare will know what to expect. In his acceptance speech on behalf of the teams at Monday’s awards ceremony, Wilson said the club tried to be “as obliging as we can off the field, and as unobliging as we can on it”.

The spirit shown has been fostered over the generations, and it was evident again in the minor successes.

“There is a huge importance in constantly striving to achieve and keeping going until the end,” Wilson said.

“In the minor football semi-final against Inniscarra, we were behind for a lot of the game but the belief was always there and we won with a last-minute goal.

“We’d always pride on ourselves on having great belief. Younger fellas see older teams showing great spirit and it rubs off. The opposite side of that is our U16 team got to three finals as well and lost them all. You learn from your experiences though, good and bad, and hopefully come back stronger.”

With numbers so tight, the emergence of a talented group of players has to be maximised, in Wilson’s view.

“You get a good burst of fellas every five or six years,” he said. “Ideally, you want some of them to make the step up to the adult teams in the near future, but the biggest fear we have, and many similar clubs would have, is that they’ll go away to college and then come out and you wonder if there will be jobs there for them. Up to now, we’d have probably said that we didn’t lose too many players to emigration, but if you sat down and thought about it, there are quite a few players gone.”

All of which means that those coming through the ranks must be nurtured. The paucity of human resources presents an opportunity for them, however. “The most valuable thing a young player can get is a coach’s time, it makes a huge difference,” he says.

“One advantage of numbers being so tight is that there is no other option but to play everybody, you might have a weak U10 or U12 player but because they’re getting so much game-time they’re constantly improving.”