Keegan facing fight for tickets

AS DIRECTOR of High Performance, Gary Keegan spearheaded the programme that qualified five Irish boxers for the Olympic Games but he admitted yesterday that he may have to watch their fights on television.

“It is quite possible I won’t be able to get tickets and I will probably have to watch the fights on TV,” he said. “I’m disappointed but I am also excited for the boys and accreditation is not something that is on my mind right now. I have to try to focus on what I can do for them here.

“Over the last couple of days things have gone pretty well for us. We got our physio into the Village yesterday and today we have our physio and our psychologist in so we are happy and if it continues like that they may not need the apartment at all but if they do it is only eight minutes walk away.”

After the Olympics, he will leave the IABA’s High Performance programme to take up a post with the Institute of Sport at Abbotstown and while he has enjoyed a more than considerable amount of success with the programme over the past five years he has had his fair share of opposition as well.

“You are bringing professionals into a sport that was traditionally run by volunteers — people who have worked their butts off for the sport and I was one of those having served the sport for 21 years as a volunteer working through the ranks from club level all the way through to vice president of the county board right up to secretary of the Coaching Committee.

“I did my stint as a volunteer but we needed to professionalise the system and there was a lot of fear there and then we have a big problem in Ireland in that we don’t believe in our own people. It is OK if we bring a foreigner in to do a job for us — nobody questions him but just assumes he is going to be great at it. Then if we put an Irish person in charge or we appoint an Irish guy as a head coach or whatever, all of a sudden people want to pull the rug from under his feet and knock him down.

“We had to work very, very hard to gain credibility within the system. I felt that every step we made was being watched but I think, as the years went on, we began to grab their attention.”

Before long they had the Ulster boxers travelling to Dublin for squad training. In the past they would question the value of doing that.

“The other problem we had was the title ‘High Performance’ seemed a bit lofty. I thought that turned into a rod that they beat us with from time to time and I thought about changing it.

“I don’t know what it is but in Ireland we have to learn to live with success and we have got to learn to applaud and celebrate it because we are not good at doing that.”

As Director of High Performance, he quickly became one of the high achievers of Irish sport and won lavish praise for the programme from within the Irish Sports Council.

“We are getting value for money in the High Performance programme but we need to invest more in it if we are going to sustain this level of success. We don’t have the numbers so we must get the development of the boxers right.

“I hope the IABA embraces the success that we have achieved with those boxers because they own that success and have always been a part of it. The clubs produced the boxers and we have fine-tuned them.

“Of about 260 clubs in the country, probably 30 of them are doing well in terms of winning national titles so we need to bring the other 230 into the loop because we cannot afford to keep drawing our High Performance boxers from 30 or 35 clubs. We need to bring all the clubs into the fold and assist the coaches to develop the talent at club level around the country.”