In Galway, Titans basketball proves it's the broadest church
REMEMBER THE TITANS: Joe Coughlan, head coach of the Titans in 2010. Pic: Brendan Moran / SPORTSFILE
It says something about the broad church that is Titans basketball in Galway that Tommy Tiernan is part of its congregation, yet could hardly qualify as either the most comedic or cerebral of its brethren.
Joe Coughlan for one would have him beat on both those counts, to the point it’s a wonder the researchers on Tiernan’s show haven’t yet had Fred Cook reveal him as one of his surprise but familiar guests to absorb and entertain the nation.
In a former life Coughlan briefly enlisted in the Franciscan friary in Killarney where he was known as the Dunking Monk but life would soon lure him back to his native Galway where he’d go on to spread the word of a different kind of gospel.
He’s still preaching it. On top of coaching the club’s U13 and U15 girls and the U18 boys with his son Joseph during the season, last summer he and a host of the club’s coaches, including Tiernan’s son Jake who is an assistant with the club’s U20s, spent a month coaching teens from Palestine, South Sudan and Nigeria staying in a local international protection agency. “The Palestinian kids were great. Would dive on the ball like Dennis Rodman.”
This week they’ve ran an Easter camp for current and prospective club members, including a kid who joined them this season. “I asked him when he first joined us where he was from. He said, ‘Azerbaijan.’ I said, Excellent. That makes 49.’ We’ve 49 nationalities in the club.”
It’s reflected in the names that feature across the three teams the club will remarkably have in this weekend’s National League basketball finals up in Tallaght. The U18 team that Coughlan himself will head coach on Saturday morning features two Irish internationals, Nathan Gbinigie and Michael Cunningham Smyth. Playing in both the U20s and the Division One men’s deciders are Irish internationals Fortune Igbokwe and Viktor Tashev as well as Gbinigie’s brother Declan.
But here’s the thing. They’re all homegrown. They’re all Titans. “We’re the only one team in the league with just one pro,” says Coughlan. “Umar [Rachid] is our only pro. Having a team in the national league is a costly business but in this case it’s not a vanity project. It’s a community one that particularly reaches out to the city’s rapid neighbourhoods – Ballinfoyle, Westside.
It all started back in the early 2000s with what Coughlan calls the BLTs – no, not some variety of sandwich but the Big Lithuanians, most of them doormen, that he used to coach in a local men’s league. One day while shopping in Dunnes he spotted a group of 14 or so kids, all foreign nationals, playing on the nearby basketball court. A few weeks later there were only four of them. He went over and asked where the others. They told him some local soccer lads had beaten them up and without adult supervision their parents wouldn’t allow them hoop anymore. “I said, ‘Why don’t you just join a club?’ They said ‘There is none.’ And they were right. Maree was 12 miles away. Moycullen, 10 miles.”
No car, no basketball.
Shortly after that Coughlan flew over to the States with Joe Bree to see Joe’s brother Michael play for Davidson College and on the plane they spoke about forming a club. They started talking to others. The doormen said they’d coach the kids if Coughlan would coach them to be coaches. They brought on board brilliant volunteers like Frank Cashman, later one of the country’s leading administrators. In a short time Cashman had set up a leading wheelchair basketball programme, the doormen were playing in the national league and the club were in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing the longest game in the sport’s history – 40 hours and three minutes – to raise funds for a suicide bereavement foundation.
By the mid-noughties though the BLTs were aging and the club dropped out of the national league. The club needed some regeneration and innovation.
“When we started out people would say, ‘Oh finish the basketball by Paddy’s Day – it’s all GAA after that.’ But we soon found that a lot of our kids had nothing else on. So we provided some basketball for them over the following two months but after a few years found we were wrecked from it, having no break. So we brought in other coaches to do the coaching.”
Guest coaches. Top coaches. Like James Weldon. Francis O’Sullivan. And in recent years Erin Bracken.
“They’d all ask what as a club did they want us to teach them. With Erin it was to help us finish in contact. We were leaving too many scores and games behind by not being able to finish in contact. And she was brilliant at showing us that.”
Last summer, when the club was months out from its third season back in the national league, it spoke to her about possibly becoming their coach, the only head female coach in the men’s game. She was interested – but this time she chose the subject of emphasis.
“She said ‘I’m going to stop the bleeding. You’re bleeding on defence. I’m here to stop that.’ She loved our stetup, she talked about how we had all the steps on the stairs with how strong our underage section was, but for us to get over the line we had to stop the bleeding.”
Now here they are, a club with probably the best underage male section in the country outside of Dublin, on the brink of promotion to the Superleague, having held crosstown rivals Maree to just 55 points in the semi-final.
Like a line in a certain film, they’ll remember forever the night they played the Titans.
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