Kieran Shannon: performance coaches like Keegan helping our athletes win mind games

Sport psychology should remain the obvious discipline in performance coaching but others can bring lots of value to a set-up too.

BOXING CLEVER: Ireland rugby's mental skills coach Gary Keegan. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Just as he has a knack of helping teams improve and win almost everywhere he goes, Gary Keegan has a peculiar habit of using the term “that space”.

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SIX NATIONS RUGBY CHAMPIONSHIP 2025

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In one interview with me back when he was the director of the then Institute of Irish Sport he used the phrase 52 times, only interchanging it with the expression “that place” which he used 25 times.

More often than not “that place” he was referring to was high performance, somewhere to him you either were or you weren’t (“We can’t be half-pregnant on this,” he’d say with striking intensity in that interview. “You’re not going to compete at the top end unless you’re fully in.”)

Keegan finished up with Sport Ireland shortly after the Rio Olympics but continues to operate in and be intrigued by “that place” and the pursuit of excellence. As well as being the founder and CEO of a corporate consultancy company called Uppercut, he has worked closely with various leading sports setups, from the Dublin footballers that won five consecutive All Irelands during his collaboration with Jim Gavin to the Tipperary hurlers that won the 2019 All Ireland to in more recent years the Irish rugby team since Andy Farrell’s appointment as head coach.

You’ve likely heard some of the superlatives that have been thrown his way by the Grand Slam champions. Johnny Sexton has described both his work with individuals and the group as “great”. To Caelan Dorris he’s been “class”, to defence coach Simon Easterby, “excellent”.

James Lowe was particularly effusive in his praise. “He’s a very, very smart man who is able to identify and break down things, or put things into a perspective that you understand as to how to make you better,” Lowe told The42’s Ciarán Kennedy recently. “He’s obviously studied the mind and how people think. It’s taking away some of that cloudy, foggy mindset that you can get in when the pressure comes on… with 60-odd thousand people screaming at you and baying for blood, He’s pretty good at that.”

Often such work “would be designated and attributed to a sport psychologist but Keegan doesn’t refer to himself as such, not least because he isn’t one; for all the qualifications he has, none are in that discipline. Instead he prefers to use the term ‘performance coach’, someone who isn’t necessarily an expert in sport psychology but, as he might say so himself, works in “that space”.

Interestingly though his latest success comes at a time when there’s been an increasing clamour from fully-qualified licensed sport psychologists that only they should work in this “space”.

Last autumn in a piece published on the RTÉ Sport website, Dr Ciarán Kearney questioned the rationale and role of a spate of ‘performance coaches’ that had been signed up by inter-county GAA teams without any recognised qualification in sport psychology. He went on to advocate for a professional registrar of sport psychologists that were duly qualified, accredited and legally licensed, just as would be in place for “a solicitor or a doctor”. Afterall, he would rhetorically ask, “would teams seek expert legal or medical advice from unregulated persons?”

To further advance his case he cited a couple of anecdotes, the first either apocryphal or an extreme outlier. “A performance coach is asked by a manager to help an inter-county hurling team prepare for championship. Moments before the game he asked them to circle and close their eyes. He walks around, hurley in hand, angling the heel towards the sternum of each player. ‘Mind over matter,’ he chanted, as he struck each one in turn. One player sustained a rib injury and had to be replaced.”

The other was the example of the IRFU advertising in the wake of their disappointing 2019 World Cup performance for a new post of head of psychology, seeking a fully qualified, accredited and legally licensed practitioner, “the right approach” according to Kearney. Only, as we know, the position was filled by Keegan, eminently qualified in many regards but not in sport psychology itself.

Kearney in that article and in other forums makes several valid points. The term ‘sport psychologist’ should not be bandied about liberally and there is merit in it being a protected term. Teams and setups should be wary and mindful of who they bring in to work in the mindset “space”. Any performance coach should be qualified in some discipline related to “that space”, not that they should need a piece of paper to know you shouldn’t ever angle the heel of a hurley into the sternum of a player before a championship match.

But it does not necessarily have to be in psychology or sport psychology. Keegan is just one obvious example of that. There are plenty of others. You only have to have read one of the many Kilkenny player autobiographies, from Henry Shefflin’s to Jackie Tyrrell’s, to appreciate the impact and influence of a Brother Damien Brennan in his one-to-ones with them. Shefflin in particular was taken by how Brother Damien was anything but a sycophant.

“What marks out of 10 would you have given yourself out of 10 for the Dublin game?” he once asked Shefflin.

Shefflin gave himself a five.

“I’d have said three!” scoffed Brennan. “I saw something in that match I never saw before from you. I saw a man just playing for himself!”

Br Brennan never did a masters in psychology, but would a twenty-something who has have challenged Tyrrell like Brennan did? Would they have had the same ability to ask questions the way Brennan would from his experience as a pastor and just from life in general?

During Covid Dr Kearney, who has both plenty of life as well as academic experience himself, appeared on the RTE GAA podcast with Liam Moggan, discussing the whole area of performance psychology.

Both were excellent contributors.

Kearney rightly highlighted the importance of every setup having an obligation to look out for the mental and emotional well-being of its players and to point anyone struggling in that area to duly qualified personnel.

Moggan noted that he himself wasn’t a psychologist or even a sport psychologist, even though he has worked on the mind game of everyone from Ken Doherty to the 2014 Kerry team that won the All Ireland. He was a disciple and graduate from the first class of PE students in the old Thomond College before coaching consumed him and especially the importance of connecting with players and their hearts and minds. He now saw himself as a ‘facilitator’ which the dictionary defines as “someone who makes things easier”. Whether that was as a father, teacher, or what would some would term as a performance coach. “Someone to make it easier, maybe dampened own any anxieties that might be there and having an empathy for the person going into the unknown”.

Sport psychology should still remain the obvious and most common go-to discipline in the performance coaching “space”. But by the same token it and sport psychologists do not have a monopoly on wisdom or something as complex as human and high performance. Just as everyone from a Dr Kearney to anyone else shouldn’t have to have a degree in journalism to pen that piece for the RTÉ website or every novelist doesn’t have to have a degree in English, other disciplines and backgrounds have a contribution to make as well.

Call them performance coaches or call them facilitators, but the likes of Br Brennan, Keegan and Moggan have made things easier for some of our finest athletes and teams.