Bridging 128 years...twice: Church dream big in the Slieve Felim hills

HISTORY MAKER: Owen Shortt of the Upperchurch-Drombane management team is congratulated by Loughmore-Castleiney manager Frankie McGrath after the Tipperary County Senior Football Championship Semi-Final. Pic: Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile

Upperchurch-Drombane will be hoping Tipperary senior finals are like that old gag about the buses. You wait 128 years for one, then two come along at once.

Having dethroned dual trend-setters and county champions Loughmore-Castleiney to reach a first-ever football final, Kilruane MacDonaghs stand between Church and their first Tipperary hurling final since 1894.

To call that their holy grail would seem an outlandish overstatement to traditionalists. Forget about county titles, Upperchurch are still waiting for their first senior divisional championship in either code. After all their decades hurling away in the hills, this Church’s holiest grail remains the Mid Tipperary hurling championship. They’ve just skipped that important step, for now, on their way to the top.

“Dreamland” is the only word club chairman Michael Griffin can find to begin to describe the situation.

Upperchurch-Drombane’s playing pool comes from its two eponymous villages, neither exceeding 50 inhabitants, and the surrounding Slieve Felim hillside. That’s one school, 410 households, around 1,400 people. As of a few years ago, one in five people in the parish were over 65. To field an under-13 team, they’ve to draw from players across a four-year age span, from 10 years old and up. That doesn’t stop them from competing. They won a Tipperary U14 A football title five years ago, the club’s first county A grade success since the ‘60s.

“Hurling is the number one sport,” says Griffin, “but since the ‘80s, we’ve promoted both hurling and football at juvenile level and given players the opportunity to play both codes as competitively as they can.” 

The demographics mean doubling up is next to mandatory. Of their 30-man senior hurling and football panels, 28 names appear on both. Hurling manager Liam Dunphy points out that most of his team play in the same positions for football. The same understanding runs through the lines and across codes.

Football coach Owen Shortt, their goalscoring hero when Upperchurch first emerged from the junior ranks in 2002, is still togging out on the bench for the senior hurlers and starting for their junior A team (who are also in a county semi-final this weekend). Their junior B footballers are in a county quarter-final too, with Shortt at corner-forward.

“There’s a long tradition of longevity in the Shortt family,” says Griffin. “His uncles would’ve played into their 40s for Upperchurch and he’s still playing on the junior team along with his brother Pat, who’s the captain.” 

Shortt was stationed up the sideline from his uncle, Loughmore manager Frankie McGrath, last Sunday; his cousins Noel and Liam McGrath leading the valiant Loughmore comeback. They had to be five or six points better just to win by one.

“Loughmore have been doing this for years and they’re the model,” Shortt told Tipp GAA TV post-match. “We took a decision at the start of the year that we were going to go hard at it. It’s probably easier in ways to go this way. You play your games on the Sunday and you’ve a lot of time off, light trainings during the weeks, which is probably less difficult than other years.” 

Dunphy concurs: “Morale is very, very good. Energy is huge. Not a huge panel of players but football and hurling managements work together. The training is light. It has to be light. It's about carrying guys from Sunday to Sunday or Saturday to Saturday and that's all we do now again.” 

Kilruane this weekend, Clonmel Commercials in the football final on Sunday week, maybe even Drom and Inch or Kiladangan in another final beyond that. Who knows how far dreamland stretches out?

Their strength and conditioning work has come on leaps and bounds this year. They don’t have household names from the inter-county game (James Barry is serving his retirement as a junior A centre-forward) but they’ve 40 players at training these evenings and the fitness to compete with Tipperary’s club elite. Brothers, cousins, uncles, nephews, and neighbours coming together in their autumnal ritual.

Their expansion to facilitate a camogie and ladies football combination with neighbouring Seán Treacys called Slieve Felim Rapparees means their pitch is even more in demand than ever before. They’ve agreed to purchase land with a plan to develop their grounds to include a second playing field, a juvenile pitch, and an expanded AstroTurf training area.

To do so, they’ve hit the roads with their latest fundraiser. Their ‘Win a new John Deere’ tractor raffle has made stops at the Ploughing Championships, the Tullamore Show, and Garth Brooks’ Croke Park concerts to sell tickets.

“We’re ambitious in taking on a project of this size,” says Griffin. “The players now are carrying through that ambition on the field through their performances and it’s given us a great platform to raise funds for our future developments.” 

Before they beat Loughmore, the bookies still had Upperchurch at 54/1 to do the double. Those odds halved overnight but they remain rank outsiders in both codes. That may always be the case until they go and win one, perhaps sooner than they ever dreamed. It could be them.