Ballincollig basketball has surfed a tide of passion to carry them to a SuperLeague final
DUAL ROLE: Emporium Cork Basketball's Ciaran O'Sullivan shoots past Enrique Melini of Griffith College, Templeogue, in the InsureMyVan.ie Men's Super League at Ballincollig C.S.
Because, you see, one of the biggest days in the history of both the Ballincollig basketball club that his family have given so much to and the Maree basketball club that his in-laws the Rockalls have likewise devoted so much of their lives to, coincides with a huge day in the lives of that same Rockall family.
At lunchtime Mike Rockall, twin brother of O’Sullivan’s wife Claire, will marry Ciara McKenna, from Cavan.
Which will mean Claire, though she just helped Glanmire to another Superleague title last month, will miss out on playing in their Champions Trophy final against DCU Mercy that should be into the last quarter around the time the bride will be going up the aisle. And that Eoin Rockall, though he captained Maree to a Superleague Cup only a couple of months ago, will, being a groomsman of his older brother, have to forsake the chance to lift further silverware in the Arena and complete the double.
Rather than going up against his brother-in-law on the hardwood in the National Basketball Arena, the next time Eoin meets Ciarán will be at a wedding reception in the Farnham Estate Hotel on the outskirts of Cavan.
They’re not going to blame it on TV; they know well how good it is for the sport to have the first Superleague final broadcast live in a decade and that TG4, with all their national football league commitments as well this weekend, could hardly move their schedule around to accommodate a wedding party.
And it’s not like they can really give out to Mike either. After all when he and Ciara set the date last year, Maree had never been within a sniff of making it to the finals of the Superleague. Was he supposed to have factored in when the Superleague final would be on account that Maree could be in it? What did you take him to be? An April Day’s fool?
What Ciarán can also appreciate is how much the two clubs have in common beyond the familial links. “I think they’re very similar to us. A non-traditional club on the outskirts of a major city, propelled by coaches and parents who played national league basketball themselves elsewhere back in the day,” he says.
“It’s been mentioned how no real blue-blood bar UConn have made it to this year’s [NCAA] Final Four,” adds one of those parents and coaches, his father Francis. “And I suppose that’s what we kind of have here with this final matchup.”
It’s only 18 months ago that Ballincollig played their first-ever game in the Superleague. Six years ago they weren’t even in the national league. Thirty years ago or so when Francis first started helping out in the club nearest to where he and his wife Grace were living and his own national league career with Blue Demons was winding up, Ballincollig were operating in the third tier of the local leagues.
“When the kids came along you had a choice — do you stay involved in the community you’re living in or do you keep travelling up to the northside? I’ve said it before that if I knew it was going to take over my life the way that it has, I would definitely have kept travelling up to the northside and dropping them at the door! But that’s not true either; I was hardly going to be that.
“So we started working on the juvenile section of the club. The vision was never to become Superleague. It was just so the boys and their friends could play and enjoy basketball and maybe grow the sport in another area.”
He still has a team photo of the first game his boys played: An U11 challenge game against Carrigaline in the autumn of ’98. Ciarán is in it, Francis’s nephew Daniel too. His other son, little Adrian, stuck his head in as well — though if he’d been let play, Francis would probably have been arrested.
Ten years later the club was in an U18 National Cup final, against Maree actually, but while it would build on that to establish itself as one of the leading underage programmes in the country, it was still essentially seen as a feeder club to the true bluebloods on Leeside.
In the summer of 2009, the three O’Sullivans joined Blue Demons where they would go on to win a glut of national titles, just as Kieran O’Brien had won a Superleague with Neptune a decade earlier. The tipping point — or rather Kieran O’Sullivan’s breaking point — came in summer 2017 when Dylan Corkery was out of minor.
“The way Kieran [Francis’s brother] saw it was if we lost Dylan, we would never recover and have enough of our own talent to go national league,” says Francis. “He was very forceful about that. The time was now, it’d never be perfect or better.”
Their first two years in the national league, they won the First Division Cup each time — yet still failed to gain promotion; in 2019 they went 22-2 in the regular season only to lose in the semi-final of the playoffs. But they stuck at it and stuck together with their spectacular and charismatic American, Andre Nation, sticking with them and, in 2020, they won everything in sight, including promotion to the big league.
“To me the loss to Neptune was very simple — they had two Americans, we had one,” says Francis. “And our American [Nation] had three fouls in the first half. Didn’t matter that they had 10 fouls and we had just five — game over.”
But that didn’t necessarily mean going getting another American. When they’d failed to win promotion from Division 1, they identified the need for a really good Bosman. Last summer they decided to pursue an exceptional one. They weren’t going to blow the budget on a second American who’d just be backup to their first in case he’d get into foul trouble or need a little breather.
“Ciarán and [his assistant] Daniel were very strong on this when others were wobbling: we had to trust our Irish players,” says Francis.
“The beauty to me about Tralee is that with all the trophies they’ve won and for all the imports they’ve had, it was still their Irish players that came through for them in the crunch.
“The fact we’ve been playing in Ballincollig Community School and being able to fit in only 200 or so people in there has meant we don’t have the budget of other clubs. Their capacity to put bums on seats is superior to ours. But the word I continuously use about our programme is sustainability. When I’m well out of this there should still be national league basketball happening in Ballincollig. What we have is great but can we be like Demons and Neptune and still be doing it in 40 years’ time? And to do that we can’t break the bank on a whim.”
Their choice of Bosman proved to be inspired: A Spaniard called Jose Jiminez who’d played in the same league as Irish pros like John Carroll and Jordan Blount. “The first time I saw video of him, I thought ‘This guy can mark Jordan Blount,’” says Ciarán. “He was face guarding, not letting his man catch the ball, rebounding, everything. It might have been the third division in Spain but Spain is still Spain, the top basketball country in Europe. He’s just brought a presence and physicality we really haven’t had.”
They also signed a new American. They loved Nation, his game, his personality, how he’d grown as a man (in college he’d been suspended for disorderly public conduct). But a bit like Sting, Francis had always been of the philosophy that if you love somebody, set them free. At the same meeting where he first said hello to Nation, he also told him there’d be a time where they’d say goodbye, that he was too good to stay in Ireland and the money would be too good elsewhere. Last summer Germany came calling.
“You ask me what have been the pinch-me moments since we’ve come into the league,” muses Francis. “For me it was having a coffee in the Tradhouse and seeing Andre walking through the town. That was always the vision: Having that basketball presence in a mid-Cork town like Ballincollig, especially someone with the exuberance and charisma of an Andre.”
Nation has been back over a couple of times to take in and see his old buddies as well as his replacement John Dawson; he blew out his achilles lately after impressing in his first season in the German second flight. It’s a team that has had to continuously renew itself, having again had to take some lumps. In January they fell to Éanna in the semi-final of the National Cup while they had to win their last game of the regular season to secure the fourth and last playoff spot going in the southern conference.
But they won that last regular season game, which happened to be their first-ever game in the new state-of-the-art MTU Arena; next season they’ll be routinely playing there on the biggest main court in the country with room to fit in close to a thousand people. In the quarter-final of the playoffs they avenged their Cup loss to Éanna, winning up in Dublin after double overtime.
“In the cup semi-final we went seven for 36 from three-point range,” says Ciarán. “So there was huge reflection there: how can we go deeper into the shot clock? That’s something we’ve really worked hard on the last six or seven weeks: you might be half-open but if I penetrate again another teammate might be fully open.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned this season is with all the depth and talent teams have, they’re not used to going deep in the shot clock. I mean, if I’m a pro with Éanna and I’m coming off the bench, the first thing I’m going to do is to try to score and take a shot to prove myself to the coach who has been sitting me. In training it’ll be the same: Just up and down.
“And I think we’re fresher. Probably our downfall last year was guys getting tired because they were playing all the time in training. We’d be big into the games-based, constraint-led approach so lads are continuously playing, there’s very few lines or drills, but our S&C coach, Kevin Mulcahy, is great to challenge groupthink and has gone to me, ‘Ciarán, you’re overdoing it. Pull back from that. Get them doing free throws. Maybe shorten the session.’”
Last week they completed a reverse of last year, taking down in the semi-final in a packed Mardyke Arena a UCC Demons team that had been on an eight-game unbeaten run. After the game they were warmly congratulated by a series of Demons stars, past and present; Francis took particular joy from a photo with his two sons alongside 1980s stars Gerry Wheeler and Seánie Murphy.
“It was a great day, huge day, really,” says Ciarán. “Going head-to-head with Kyle; I mean, the two of us would have been co-captains of the Demons team that won the 2016 Superleague and Champions Trophy, the last men’s silverware to come to Cork though hopefully that changes this weekend. Then meeting the likes of Seánie and Gerry. There was huge goodwill there.”
That wasn’t lost on Francis. From even back in his North Mon days back in the late 1980s he’d heard the jibes that there wasn’t a place for a third top-flight team in Cork. But this season, last weekend, has shown there is.
“I was saying it to a few Ballincollig people after the game, we have so much to learn from the likes of Demons in how they ran an event like that. The half-time entertainment, the people they had on the door, and the organisation and authority they exuded. Look at the show Neptune have put on and the crowds they’ve been getting this year.
“But I also think all our neighbours have to accept that for the long term, this is now a three-team Superleague town. I think before there was a fear that there was only so many people who could go and watch basketball and only so many players who could play it. But we’ve changed that.
“The people who are going to Ballincollig games would not have experienced national league basketball before. So we’ve added to the population. We haven’t taken away from it. Our players are mostly homegrown. They haven’t taken away from anyone else’s.”
And now they’re 40 minutes away from taking the biggest prize in the sport, led by three of the heads from that photo of the U11s in Carrigaline back in ’98.
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