Connacht? There's massive potential there
They won plenty of friends with their tournament debut last season, giving their pool a rattle with near misses against Gloucester and Harlequins and leaving an impression on rugby aristocrats Toulouse before finally registering a first and deserved victory in Europe in the final pool game at home to Conor O’Shea’s Quins. Even Eric Elwood’s announcement has not shaken their belief.
It is not just Dan Parks, the former Scotland fly-half, and Leinster prop Nathan White that have brightened Connacht’s door to bring even more optimism about prospects in the West. Enter Tom Sears (above) as the province’s new chief executive following the retirement this summer of lifelong Connacht servant Gerry Kelly and a man with a proven track record in sports administration that has taken him from the communications departments of the RFU and Northampton Saints to chief executive of Derbyshire County Cricket Club, and Head of Business Development for New Zealand Cricket.
It was while Sears (43) was perched on a bar stool in Nairobi on the last lap of his most recent tenure as head of Cricket Kenya that the Englishman saw Connacht’s dream of a return to the Heineken Cup this season become a reality. He was watching Leinster lift the siege of Clermont Auvergne to reach their second successive final and make it an all-Irish affair with Ulster that guaranteed a place in the draw for Connacht. It was a moment that sparked the imagination of the province’s new CEO to even greater heights.
“I think there is massive potential there,” Sears said of Connacht. “You look at what has happened in the last two or three years, things have started but we still have a long way to go, and I really do think we have the potential to do something quite special there.
“There is no doubt there is a real groundswell of support in the west of Ireland for a professional franchise and we are confident we can make the strides that we need to and produce what we need to on and off the pitch.”
Sears says he was attracted to the Connacht job precisely because the team was not an established European powerhouse but a club on the verge of something big. “It is the opportunity to be part of something, at the instigation.... You don’t get many opportunities like that.
“If a job came up at, say, Leinster or Bath or Leicester or somewhere like that, you are pretty much a safe pair of hands, but here you are at the start of something very special. You don’t get many opportunities like that.
“The first few weeks have been great, there are a lot of things in place and a few we want to tweak. The first few months of the season will be about finding ourselves operationally and obviously Eric has got the players on board that he wanted.
“But we have already started planning for next year. We have to get ahead of the game and really look at our (player) suc cession and planning where we are going to go next year. I don’t think we have been that particularly strong at planning that far ahead. That is the sort of mindset we want to introduce.”
Whether Sears was ready for this week’s revelation that Elwood will leave Connacht at the end of this season is a moot point. But he has entered the Irish rugby scene a year into Connacht’s rebirth with the IRFU having installed a Professional Games Board at the Sportsground in 2011 to put the province on a sound business footing over a three-year review period.
“The first year was all about establishing the organisation, this year will be one of development and getting to where we want to be and year three will be more progression,” Sears said. “Three years is a relatively short period of time in any sports organisation but we are making good progress.
“We are confident we are making good progress and we are confident that we will achieve what we need to prove to the IRFU that it was a good decision. Already we are looking ahead. I have had lots of meeting with the senior staff of the IRFU, they have all been supportive and helpful. They are keen to see Connacht do well and a strong fourth province will be good for Irish rugby as a whole.
“We want to be in a position where we are playing well enough that our players are getting selected for Ireland. In three or four years’ time we would like guys to be a mainstay of the squad, and we think we have got some players who can do that. There is no doubt there is talent there.”
It is Elwood’s job to foster that talent, Sears’s to provide the resources for him to do so and, again, things are moving in the right direction.
“Results are important but they are not the be-all and end-all, if we can show year-on-year progression. We have recruited heavily this year, but so has everyone else. Our sponsorship has grown significantly in the past few years and so have our season ticket sales.
“We are approaching about 3,500 season tickets where a few years ago it was only about 350.
“We need to tap into the support and its not just the local support in Galway, it’s the west of Ireland, the whole of Ireland and the diaspora all over the world.”
“There are people with strong west of Ireland connections all over the place and we are going to look to try tap into them as well.”
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