Mike Quirke: Whatever else, keep your eyes on the ball

For club teams all over Ireland, this is the time of year filled with optimism and expectation.

New or returning management teams are in place, and they have begun their first phase of training with the highest number of players that they will probably see all year — everybody comes out for pre-season.

The meeting has surely taken place by now, you know the one… where everybody pledges their complete devotion to the club for the year, and each and every one promises faithfully that America is definitely not on the agenda for this summer.

I still believe it could have been the GAA managers of Ireland who secretly petitioned Henry Healy to lean on his influential 8th cousin Barrack Obama, to modify the J1 visa and thus make it just a little more awkward for the annual summer exodus of Gaelic footballers from our shores to everywhere from the Bronx to the Bay area.

Speed endurance, weights programmes, yoga, Tabata, heart monitors, fitness testing… just your typical February for club footballers nowadays. Everybody is full of good intentions to drop their percentage body fat, or increase their vertical leap or VO2max. Improving strength, power, speed, and endurance have become the early season pillars of most club teams. The actual football itself usually appears well down the pecking order.

In fairness, this season more than most, club pitches have fallen victim to the bad weather and are almost a complete no-go zone. It’s even driven the Kerry team to go training on Banna beach over the weekend. Dry fields are at a premium. So it makes it much easier for coaches to run and run their players and have them lamp into tackle bags in these dark, bad, nights on poor surfaces. Planning for football is much more difficult.

For the first time since I’ve finished playing, I’ve dipped my toe into the managerial waters. Well, I’m knee deep really. Luckily, in case we hit an iceberg, I’m in a boat made for two. Joint managers.

Without a game played or a ball kicked in anger yet in 2016, it’s obvious the 10-foot walk from sitting in the stand, to standing on the sideline feels more like 10 miles.

Being involved in training or managing a club team is a hugely privileged yet onerous undertaking. For county bosses who have the benefit of a strength and conditioning guy, a nutritionist, a forward’s coach, defensive coach, and various other consultant gurus, it’s all about assigning specific roles and managing the quality of the delivery to, and expectation of, the players.

At club level, the manager must be more of a jack of all trades — a motivator, communicator, counsellor, kit man, chief bottle washer, tactician and shoulder to cry to on. But when it’s for your own club people, your own community, the burden feels light when shared across everybody’s shoulders.

We trained over the weekend, and with the first bit of blue sky of the year overhead, we flooded them with ball.

At one point there were about 25 footballs flying all over the place. It was a beautiful chaos.

After the session, I met one of our great club stalwarts, CJ Sheehy, who had been watching on longingly.

He was laughing at the amount of footballs we were using and it reminded him of a great story about a time when footballs weren’t so plentiful around Strand Road, going back 20 years or so.

Kerins O’Rahilly’s began that particular year with 10 brand new O’Neills footballs, the ones just out of the wrapper, that feel like they just stick to your hand all by themselves. After the first four rounds of the county league that year, they were down to just six. One a game had been pilfered. The club was the victim of a veritable crime spree on the pitches of Kerry. It’s the type of ‘crime’ that befalls every club a few times a year. Footballs aren’t cheap.

During the fifth round of the county league, someone in blue decided it was time to start to redress the balance.

After the game, a football clearly marked ‘Dingle’ in big red writing, somehow managed to make its way into our dressing room, and made a bed for itself inside a gear bag near the showers.

At this point, the culprit must have thought they were home and hosed. Sweet retribution.

Two points won in the county league and back up to seven footballs for training. Happy days. It proved to be a short lived contentment though, as a knock on the dressing room door revealed an investigative opposition manager seeking to check the net of footballs in case one of theirs had ‘mistakenly’ got mixed up with ours.

Whoever took it, and to this day, no-one is completely sure of the perpetrator, but they were clever enough to cover their tracks and hide it somewhere less obvious than the ball net just inside the door. Just as the Dingle manager was leaving the dressing room, satisfied in the knowledge his search had shown up zilch, and convinced they must have mislaid it themselves, a voice from the other side of the dressing room… “hold it, come back, I found it here…”

One of the more straight-laced members of the team had seen it in the gear bag on his way to the showers and felt compelled by his honest nature to return the stolen bounty, completely oblivious as to why a ball marked ‘Dingle’ might have been stashed in someone’s gear bag under a bench.

That moment of innocence has stayed with him since.

So for all you club managers and coaches out there who are preparing for the season to start, heed the wise words of our CJ and you’ll do fine; “If you win something this year, that’s great. But if you manage to keep all those footballs, then you’ve played an absolute blinder!”