Sacred Heart focused on camogie final challenge

At the function to honour the February Rebel Óg monthly award winners, the senior camogie team from Sacred Heart Secondary School in Clonakilty, one of the judges, Miriam Murphy, told the members of the team present not to read this article today.

In her defence, she did tell them to buy plenty of copies but to wait until tomorrow evening to look at it. The reason? Clon play St Dominic’s of Cabra in the All-Ireland Senior C final in Nenagh today and as a former Cork player and selector, Murphy was advising against being drawn into any hype.

As manager Brian Daly relates, though, there certainly wasn’t any hype at the start of the successful Munster campaign.

“We weren’t even contenders to win a match, to be honest,” he said.

“It sounds like a cliché at this time of year but, genuinely, if we could have won one or two games and moved on to next year it would have been brilliant.

“I think we’ve nine third years on the team so it was a case of giving them a bit of enjoyment for the year and going from there but it just really took off.

“In our first league game, we were absolutely destroyed but then things seemed to click for the championship and we haven’t looked back since then really.”

Sacred Heart won this competition in 1999, with former Cork star Jenny O’Leary a key member of the team. Another Barryroe player, team captain Claire Sexton, is now the heartbeat of the side.

Daly is keen to impress on the players the importance of making the most of this opportunity.

“We’ve won competitions at the tail-end of the year, secondary championships or leagues when other schools mightn’t have strong teams in,” he said.

“We’ve had serious teams and serious players in the school and they might have only left with a medal or two so you’re trying to make the girls aware of that.

“Some of the third years might think that there’ll be loads of other opportunities but you might only get one shot at these things. We have to grab Saturday with both hands, really.”

As a result of the Munster championship win, Sacred Heart will play at B level next year. Daly accepts that it will be a challenge but there is potential there.

“We’re losing a lot of important players like Claire, she’s frighteningly good,” Daly said.

“A lot of the juniors, you don’t know if they’ll kick on from being good players now to great players in the future but you have to be hopeful.

“To be honest, I haven’t thought about it too much. We’ll try to win on Saturday and then go from there.”