Cork Con offering alternative road to the top

The pictures on the wall of the Presidents Bar at Cork Constitution mean a lot. Not only the recognition of past glories at the famous Temple Hill club but also in more than a few of those images the promise of future success.

Three Under-20 teams since 2013/14 have found their way onto the wall and some of the faces among them have earned their individual spots in the clubhouse as Ireland U20 caps, the likes of Rory Burke, now in the English Championship with Nottingham, Narbonne’s new fly-half Tomas Quinlan, Munster’s Liam O’Connor and current provincial academy members Shane Daly and Alex McHenry.

It is finding that sort of potential that is exercising Con in their quest to build a squad that can contend for a senior All-Ireland League title year in, year out, and to that end, the club has ramped up its Under-20 structure in serious fashion, backboning that age group squad with a 12-player Emerging Talent Programme.

If that sounds suspiciously like an academy, then the people behind Con’s new venture are quick to disabuse that notion. This is not a rival to Munster’s academy and the programme’s players are not paid.

Rather it is a scheme to fill the void between school and the professional development pathway, offering an alternative for those not keen on uprooting from Cork to Limerick straight from school or wanting to pursue a degree course not offered at the University of Limerick and also acting as a safety net for those not quite meeting the requirements and demands of academy life but wanting to continue developing their rugby skills.

“We have been in the situation over the past four or five years where we’ve seen, increasingly, kids coming out of school having to make a very big decision to go up to UL (where the Munster Academy is based) and get access to really good coaching, strength and conditioning, and nutritional advice and so on,” explains Con’s deputy president Kevin Fielding, a member of the Emerging Talent Supervisory Board.

Meanwhile their parents are there not wanting that to happen. They offer a structured, supportive environment in their homes and they say to their kids, ‘we don’t mind you doing this (the academy) in second or in third year but this is an enormous transition in your first year out of school.

“We’re in the middle of this. You can see where parents are coming from. They want their lads to stay at home in Cork but not fall behind their peers and so we’ve put a lot of effort into this programme and rather put all our attention into one or two guys, let’s put a programme together where we can actually pick a dozen guys that we want to give this opportunity to.”

Putting the programme together has been no small feat, with Con recruiting former Munster, Aurillac, and Agen hooker Denis Fogarty as head coach after the Tipperary man spent two years post-retirement running the Espoirs, or academy, at his final club Provence Rugby, in Aix en Provence.

Fogarty found his time with the Aix Espoirs invaluable and he has brought home plenty of experience for Con to take advantage of.

“I think structure,” he says of what he has brought from Aix Espoirs. “A whole structure. To look after 45 French people was difficult in itself, so a discipline and a structure of training. I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of years, especially from retiring and going into coaching, it’s not easy.

So a structure of how an academy works and putting it into a club environment. Some of these players have never been exposed to an academy or involved in them so to give them the opportunity to have this at a club level.

“For me, if you don’t get picked for an academy out of school it’s not dead and buried. You now have the opportunity to keep progressing. It might not be the exact same as what you’re going to get in Munster but bloody close to it, I firmly believe that.”

Fogarty has a four-man dedicated coaching team at his disposal for the U20 squad and that is backed by an off-field support structure focusing on strength and conditioning, led by former Connacht and Munster S&C coach Ciarán O’Regan, nutrition looked after by former Munster out-half Jonny Holland and a professional wellness counsellor, Hugh O’Donovan.

“We said if we’re going to take on that, we’ve got to replicate the kind of skills development, coaching, S&C programmes, the nutritional advice — all of the things that they would get if they were in the academy or even peripheral to the academy, and that’s what we’re trying to do this year,” Fielding said.

In Fogarty, 35, Fielding believes they have a head coach with a “perfect background” to help the club excel at U20 level and provide a steady stream of players into the senior AIL side.

That two of the players signed up to the programme are also Munster academy players, centre Sean French and full-back Jonathan Wren, also says much about the standards on offer at the club. Both French, who has been playing for Munster A in the Celtic Cup these past two weeks, and Wren meet their weekly commitments with the provincial academy before returning home to Cork to train with their club’s U20s on a Thursday evening.

For Fogarty, the emerging talent programme is a win-win for Munster rather than a rival, an opportunity for those who have missed out, dropped out or opted out to stay in the game, to develop as players and make a crack at making the grade at AIL level, from where they may still find a route into the professional game.

I think it’s a good thing,” Fogarty said. “Some fellas might fall through the cracks, or mightn’t get noticed and that’s nobody’s fault but at least now they’ve got this little back door that they can hopefully get noticed when they’re playing (AIL division) 1A next year, which is where they all need to be playing at.

“So people are asking ‘who’s this young guy, 20 years of age and playing 1A? Let’s give him a chance’.

“That’s what we’re working towards. We’ve put it all in place. It’s been really positive and it’s really exciting.”