Super League basketball comes to Ballincollig: 'This has given me a new lease of life'
The Ballincollig team celebrate after the Hula Hoops Presidents National Cup Final win over IT Carlow at the National Basketball Arena in January 2020. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
This afternoon in a school gym on the western fringes of Cork city, a piece of Irish basketball history will be made.
Ballincollig Community School isn’t one of the sport’s or city’s celebrated sports cathedrals the way the Parochial Hall and Neptune Stadium are for housing all those barnstorming northside derbies and national finals and international tournaments. Up to four years ago, it hadn’t even hosted a national league game.
But today it is Broadway because its home club is finally on the big stage, in the big league.
You have to go back to Iona’s winless campaign of 1979-80, when the only Americans in the league were the two Killarney players (in)famously parachuted in that autumn, for the last time a Cork club outside the fabled Big Three of Demons, Neptune, and North Mon played in the men’s top tier.
Not since the Mon’s demise 25 years ago has a Cork club outside the Old Firm of Neptune and Demons played in the Super League.
And with neighbours Fr Mathew’s still operating in Division One, this will be the first time a team from south of the Lee will play in the top men’s league in the country.
Geography is a big part of what makes this such history.
Basketball Ireland seem to have recognised it too. To launch the grand reopening of its national leagues after a 579-day shutdown, they’ve come up with an opening weekend schedule of games that would impress the NBA Christmas Day matchmakers. All but one men’s Super League game is a derby. There are two in Dublin, one in Kerry, another in Galway, but the most fascinating and most novel is the one in Cork.
That game in Ballincollig Community School doesn’t just pit the league’s bright young things against one of its true bluebloods in the form of Neptune.
It will the first true crosstown men’s Super League fixture. Although Blue Demons somewhat bridged that divide when linking up with UCC and playing in the Mardyke almost 20 years ago, its heart and base is still rooted in the Parochial Hall. Up until today a club exclusively based on the southside of the city has never faced off in a men’s Super League match against one exclusively based on its northside.
There’s something you have to understand, though. Without northside basketball, there’d be no Super League basketball in Ballincollig.
Because without the O’Sullivan family there’d be no Ballincollig basketball as we know it. Their two-most decorated players, Ciáran and Adrian O’Sullivan, have lived their whole lives in Ballincollig, that is when they haven’t been either playing high school ball in America or in Adrian’s case, playing professionally on the continent.
But their father Francis and their uncle and team coach Kieran are proud sons of the northside and its great basketball clubs.
While there are now several generations of Cork and Irish hoopsters who only know Francis O’Sullivan as being a coach with Ballincollig, in a previous lifetime he played national league with each of the old Big Three.
He still perceives himself a Mon boy, first and foremost, probably because of its commitment to coaching and taking as much pride from the trophies its B teams won as its A sides.
“At this stage, I’ll coach more B boys than A boys,” he says. “That’s where I want to be. I don’t know if it’s that my competitive juices have waned but my love of being around kids of all abilities is still there. And that comes from my days with the Mon.”
He won a league with Demons in 1989 while coaching several of their underage teams.
And although it’s often forgotten that he briefly played with Neptune, that 1979-80 season with them was among the most formative in his career as it exposed him to the coaching of Pete Strickland, who remains among his greatest friends and influences to this day.
As his days with Demons were winding down though, he could see his basketball future being in Ballincollig. He and his wife Grace, another great servant to the sport and an international team coach, were by then a decade living in ‘the Village’, not far from Wilton where his parents had relocated in his early teens (“Back when we got married, people couldn’t give away a house in a place like Ballincollig,” he muses. “Now you can’t get one.”)
Grace was already involved in the ladies club. George Meade was manfully keeping the male section on the road, its adult teams most commonly operating in Division Three of the local senior leagues. By the summer of 1998 when his own children let it be known they wanted to try out the sport, Francis was soon giving more than a helping hand. Almost immediately it was all hands on board, consuming every part of their heart and soul.
“I still have a photograph from our first match down in Carrigaline,” Francis muses. “An U11 challenge game. Ciarán (his own son) and Daniel (his nephew) played that night. Adrian was hovering around too though I would have been arrested if we had played him that night. If I had known then it would take over our lives the way it has… Because it has become all-encompassing. It has dominated our lives.”
Ciarán for one was fine with that arrangement. “There was always a car-load of us brought along to the Neptune-Demons derbies, especially the ones in the Mardyke with it being so close to Ballincollig,” he says, though with his level of articulation, tone and knowledge of the sport and its history, you could sometimes mistake him for his old man.
“And we always wanted to go. That’s what we grew up on: going into see the likes of Shane Coughlan and ‘Stodser’ [Stephen McCarthy] and learning how to watch and play the game.”
Their own team and love of the game kept growing. In first year in school they picked up a few bigger lads who played football and rugby. By U15 a few of them were making not just Cork squads but Irish squads. By U17 they had won the prestigious Billy Kelly national invitational tournament. They reached both the U18 and U20 National Cup finals, titles they might have won had a couple of O’Sullivans not being studying and playing abroad. The two schools in the area, Ballincollig CS and Coláiste Choilm, were also contesting for national honours. By the time Ciarán returned from his year in the States in the summer of 2010, it was obvious the core of those U18-20 teams were ready for adult national league basketball.
But their club wasn’t.
And so four of the lads in the picture from that U11 challenge game in Carrigaline – Ciáran, Adrian, their cousin Daniel and Emmet Murphy — moved to UCC Blue Demons, just like Kieran O’Brien a decade earlier had gravitated to the city’s other traditional superpower, Neptune.
The move worked out magnificently for both Ciáran and Adrian. Along with all-time greats like Colin and Niall O’Reilly and Shane Coughlan, they and Kyle Hosford would form the core of a side that dominated men’s Irish basketball in the middle of the last decade, winning two Super Leagues, two Cups and four Champions Trophys.
But others who made the move crosstown that season and in subsequent years struggled. If it was 50:50 between a homegrown player and a player from somewhere else like Ballincollig, the homegrown player would invariably be favoured.
By 2017, Kieran O’Sullivan, Francis’s brother, decided he’d had enough of Ballincollig being a feeder club and seeing its top young players being chewed up and then spat out by others. While he himself hadn’t been averse to moving clubs to progress his own career — a Mon boy himself, he’d win Super Leagues with Demons and even Tralee — intuitively he knew there was no place like home, especially for the next generation of Ballincollig players. Dylan Corkery was graduating from U18. He was undoubtedly a future Super League player, possibly even an Irish senior international. But playing for a Demons or a Neptune wasn’t the best fit for the lads. Staying with Ballincollig with its family-like environment was.
Francis was initially hesitant. He’d seen from his time with the Mon and even Demons how national league basketball could devour a club with all the cost and energy it demands. But in the end he was swayed. “I remember Timmy Murphy [a driving force behind Glanmire both entering and dominating the women’s league] saying to me, ‘There’s never a perfect or even right time to go [national league]. You’ll always find an impediment or excuse.’ And most of all Kieran was insistent. He told me, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m driving on with this. We can’t keep giving away our players. This has to end.’”
Eventually Kieran would not only win over his brother but even his nephew. Kieran hadn’t even dreamt that either Ciarán or Adrian would come back over and drop down to playing Division One basketball; after all Ciarán at the time was not merely a Super League player but an international. But that summer Ciarán found he’d hit a wall.
“I was just burned out mentally,” says Ciarán. “In the space of 24 hours I left Demons and dropped off the Irish team. It was only a couple of weeks later that the Ballincollig thing came about and I decided, ‘Yeah, maybe I can just play at this level and do a bit more coaching.’”
Just like it was with his father, coaching had been a passion of his from his late teens; his day job is as a development officer with the Cork local sports partnership. Even when he was playing and winning all those honours with Demons, he’d still coach underage teams in Ballincollig “though I’d never put myself in a position where I’d be coaching an U16 team against Demons in the Hall”. The Ballincollig National League experience was a chance to experiment with a few ideas he had. While Kieran would coach the team on game-day, he’d drive and design their training sessions.
From his time studying sports science in MTU Cork, he has been a fan of the constraints-led approach to coaching, even converting others like his father.
“There’s no doubt about it, the way we coach in a games-based and a non-instructional way is one of the reasons we have so many kids with the club today,” says Francis. “Instead of going straight into a drill where they make hardly any decisions, we’ll set up a warm-up game we call NFL where they pass and move and get a touchdown if they catch the ball with a jump stop and place it down along the baseline. So they’re coming into an environment where there’s nobody with a whistle telling them what to do. We just stand back and let them play and then the word spreads among their parents and to their buddies.
“I hardly coach technique anymore. Certainly not something like the chest pass where I used to nearly ask someone to take a photograph: look at that, look at me, thumbs down: isn’t that the most perfect, prettiest chest pass?! Tell a Ger Noonan or a Kieran Donaghy there’s only one way to perfectly pass the ball! They’d laugh at you! In a way all those American coaches who came over to Dungarvan and taught us in the 80s messed us up! ‘Line up. Here’s the perfect way to execute and teach the pass.’ But how we really learned to play was scrimmaging in the park. Making decisions. The game taught us.
“And the way Ciarán coaches us is all constraints-led. Say they’re doing a 3v3 transition game; he might set it up that the constraint is you can only score in the key. There’s a misnomer that you can only do something like that with kids but we use that and even the NFL game with the Super League team. Will it win us more games? I don’t know but I’d hope so. But does it attract and retain more kids to play our sport? Absolutely.
“Covid has brought so many kids to us we don’t know where to turn. In every housing estate in Ballincollig there is a basket, if not four or five, so during lockdown they got a touch of it and now they want to play. As well as that, Ballincollig is a big place. It’s no longer just a ‘village’. Tralee would be about the same size and it has two or three clubs. So has Killarney. By right so should we and at least three GAA clubs as those other towns have.
“And the other thing we’ve found is that the community has noticed that we’ve minded the kids that could be described as ‘challenged’. We’ve studied and taken CARA courses and learned more about autism to cater for kids with it, and the great thing is that they play with the rest of the kids. It’s inclusive. We’re inclusive.”
And now they’re in the Super League, just four years after entering the national league. They actually wanted and expected to be here earlier.
They won three consecutive National Cups in the first division but in the league itself it took a third attempt to win promotion outright, and then because of Covid, their first game in the top flight was delayed by a further 12 months.
But some things have made it worth the wait. Adrian, after staying with Demons a couple of years after his brother left and then another couple of years playing pro in Germany and Spain, is back; today’s game against Neptune will be his first competitive game with his home club since he was an U18.
Other relationships have consolidated. Like that between the club and team sponsors Tradehouse, a popular bar and restaurant in the town. And that between both local schools, although the club naturally has ambitions for its Super League operation to link up with nearby MTU. As well as that between the club and their S&C coach Kevin Mulcahy and Andre Nation; while most Americans in the Irish league this millennium tend to be one-and-dones, this will be Nation’s fourth consecutive campaign playing with the Village.
They’re fully aware that Super League is a significant step up. “In Division One the talent is top heavy,” says Ciarán. “The top two or three players on every team are of Super League level but if you can look after them you can take chances and leave other guys open. But on Saturday against Neptune if we make any silly mistakes or miss any rotations we’re going to get punished, no matter who they have on the court.”
To compete they’ve had to raise more money to pay for more professional Bosman players but they feel they owe it to their homegrown players to do so: they don’t want to just exist or stay in the Super League but challenge in it. So it’ll be worth it. Everything so far about the national league experience has been worth it. The images and memories of awestruck kids watching an Andre dunk or a
match-winning buzzer-beater for the first time. The memories for the players themselves.
“It has been incredible,” says Ciarán. “I loved playing for Demons with the success we had and to play alongside players like Niall and Shane and Colin but this has given me a new lease of life.”
Today he now goes up against that same Colin; like O’Sullivan, O’Reilly has gone back to his old club to both coach and play for them. Today was always going to be a landmark for Ballincollig: the first game back since Covid, the first game in the Super League, but the fact the opposition is Neptune makes it that bit extra special.
“There’s no doubt about that, because of who Neptune are and the respect we have for them and their history,” says Francis.
“It’s only when you step into this space that you properly appreciate what the Neptunes and Demons and Killesters and Marians have done; I mean, they’ve been doing this for 40, 50 years. What we’re doing is easy because we’ve the benefit of youth and novelty and enthusiasm. Now, we want this to be sustainable. We don’t want to be a flash in the pan. We want some of our 12-year-olds to be able to play Super League for us, maybe in a bigger venue. We’d like to think we’re a flagship for other clubs, that you can go from being a non-competitive local league club to Super League within 20 years, though it has taken over 20 years.”
Something else will make it even more poignant an occasion for them. In recent days they were rocked by the passing of their close friend and old Mon clubmate, Ronnie Hurley, the former national league coach and administrator.
“It’ll be an emotional day for people like me and Kieran,” admits Francis. “For years we’ve talked about a match like this and now it’s a reality. But for the players the moment they step onto the court it’s game on. Doesn’t matter to them if it’s Neptune or Tolka Rovers; these are competitive athletes and they just want to win.”
He might be right. Most of those players might have no idea just how special or significant today is. But one does.
“Coming from the family I do, I’m very aware of the history involved,” says Ciarán.
“Teams might pop up and go away again in Dublin. Cork is unique in that for so long it has been Demons and Neptune, and before that there was the Mon. But we’re very proud that we’re not separate from that lineage. My dad and Kieran were so immersed with the Mon. They won that league with Demons in ’89. There’s how my dad’s love of coaching stems so much from his interaction with Pete Strickland from their time with Neptune. Adrian and myself have our own fingerprints on some of those trophies Demons have won.
“And I think what’s cool about us being now in the Super League ourselves with Ballincollig is something Kevin Mulcahy remarked when we were driving down to Tralee for a preseason game a few weeks ago. He said every one who is on our committee, everyone who is committed to this, it’s not like they jumped on board this past year. The likes of Colman O’Flynn, Marita Murphy, Donal O’Sullivan, Mike Moynihan have been here for years. It’s not like they’re here only because we’re now Super League. They’ve been here for years. The culture, the seeds for this were sown 15, 20 years ago.”
So for one player at least, today is more than just a game. Just like it’s long been more than one for his family.
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