Na Piarsaigh continue to raise the bar in Limerick

The challenge is real. Your club makes the senior breakthrough after years of heartbreak, and everyone is on a high. But the supply line that keeps the senior team in the limelight can’t be forgotten.

Donie O’Gorman of Na Piarsaigh agrees. The Limerick side are the new senior hurling power on Shannonside, but they keep a close eye on their underage structure. That’s his first port of call in our conversation.

“Obviously the silverware is vital,” says O’Gorman, the club secretary.

“ Senior-wise we’ve had a very good year, though we’d be a little bit disappointed with the return from underage. Normally we’d be winning a couple of trophies underage during the year, but this year we got a a county semi-final at U16 and that’s about as good as we did.

“I suppose we got to the minor final, and we lost the junior final, though there was good news in senior football. It was our first year in the grade and we held onto our senior status and only missed out on the play-offs on scoring difference.”

The Na Piarsaigh shop window makes them an attractive option in a city teeming with sporting outlets. Two years ago there was an awards night in the clubhouse and there were 21 trophies there on the night.

“That was a massive display, and attracting young kids to play for us isn’t a problem because we have a very good underage set-up. We run a morning for under-sixes up to under-tens practically all year round, apart from one month, and the numbers are always very good. On Saturday mornings there could be two hundred people there, which is great.

“The coaching structure is also very good within the club itself. We’ve worked very hard on that, and all the coaches with the teams are accredited and qualified, which is important. We’d be anxious to keep that going.”

Success brings its own challenges, though. Catering for hundreds of people means providing them with the facilities to match demand.

“We have a big push on at the moment in terms of our grounds – we have land bought to develop another pitch, or maybe two if the money comes in.

“We got a Sports Capital Grant there recently so we’d be hoping to start soon on a big development within the club. At the moment, our facilities just aren’t big enough physically to cater for everybody that wants to participate in the club’s activities.

“Your product, what you’re offering people, is very important. We discussed the development the other night at the executive meeting – hurling walls, the second pitch, all of that. Our pitch was out of commission for the bones of a year recently and we were all over the shop in terms of training, other local clubs were very good to us in that regard.

“Winning seniors or minors is great, but we have to keep an eye on underage at the same time, and all the time. We have a good relationship with the local schools as well, we’re helping out with coaching there.

They face Thurles Sarsfields this weekend, a game postponed after the tragic passing of Jack Griffin from the Tipperary club.

“We passed on our condolences, obviously, that was terrible news for Thurles,” said O’Gorman.

In terms of the provincial championship, they’re hopeful in Limerick.

“Obviously if you’re winning a first county title ever for a club, or the first in a long time, that can get into the backs of players’ minds a little bit – ‘we’ve that done’. The fact that it’s a massive achievement may mean they take their eye off the ball a little bit in the Munster championship.

“When we won our first title the team was very young, but now a lot of those guys are well out of U21. We still have young fellas, but there’s a lot of experience there as well.

“Having said that, we wouldn’t be that happy with how we’ve performed so far – we’ve been just getting across the line in games and we’d feel we have a bit more to show than that. We’d certainly need to show that on Sunday if we want to beat a team like Thurles Sars. They have a home-grown coach, Shane O’Neill, which they see as validating their approach to coaching structures within the club.

“We’re developing our own coaches within the club from underage up, so the thinking was, why go outside if you have the expertise within the club as good as anyone.

“Now Shane would have learned a lot from Sean Stack when we had him in with the team, Sean was a very good manager, but we’re delighted to have a home-grown manager, certainly.

“We’d be hoping to go one better this year, certainly. The ultimate aim is to win the All-Ireland, and we’ll probably see it as a small bit of a failure if we don’t, but first things first, we have a huge task on Sunday.”