Football

Kicking Out: Discouraging other sports will drive away more kids than it keeps

Picture: Margaret McLaughlin
Picture: Margaret McLaughlin Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

BEFORE Shane Lowry the golfer, there was Shane Lowry the football nut.

Given the family heritage, it was hardly a surprise. His father Brendan and uncles Mick and Sean were among the men that stopped Kerry’s drive-for-five forty years ago this autumn.

When Lowry was a young boy, his life was consumed by Gaelic football.

“I went everywhere - and I mean everywhere - with my Da when I was younger,” he told Paul Kimmage in 2019.

“He trained Westmeath for three years and I would have been with him at every training session; he used to play soccer for Clara Town and I'd be on the bus with him every Sunday and in the pubs on the way home.”

Irish society has a way of preordaining a path for its youth. In this land of family and bloodlines and ‘sure he’s your second cousin’, if your father was a good footballer, that means people expect to get a good footballer out of you too.

The path is seldom so smooth.

Shane Lowry took into golf and by the time his minor playing days with Clara were coming to an end, he was slicing his way through the Irish amateur ranks.

When he won the 2007 Irish Amateur Close Championship, he’d already left the playing of Gaelic football behind him.

His love of it was never discarded though, and his unbending allegiance to Offaly has been backed up by his regular presence in O’Connor Park and financial support for underage development in recent years.

In the same week that Sky Sports did their best to ignore Lowry’s third-placed finish at The Masters, the underage development teams he helps finance have found themselves beneath the searing heat of the microscope.

Four young footballers were dropped from Offaly’s U14 development squad after missing training last weekend to play a soccer match.

The quartet, three from Rhode club and one from Edenderry, had an U14 National Cup game against Shamrock Rovers the same day.

On the most basic level, no child would choose to go to a training session instead of playing in what was a fairly big match.

Offaly handled it badly in one sense. But in another way, they’re just the scapegoat for the same kind of pulling and hauling over players right across the country.

While there were always plenty who sneaked back and across the borders, the lines used to be fairly linear.

Working class rural, GAA.

Working class urban, soccer.

The middle-classes, rugby.

Soccer was particularly popular with run-of-the-mill GAA players who for generations risked a ban for so much as looking over the fence at the garrison game.

The crossover is ever-increasing now. Particularly in the north where sectarian divisions has eased up, youngsters from nationalist backgrounds are regulars on the local soccer and rugby fields that were once alien.

For the children themselves, the widened opportunities they have now are magical.

There are a great many studies that outline how they will benefit from not specialising in a single sport until their late teens.

The three major sporting bodies in the north have grown very close. The great irony is that the GAA in the north treats soccer and rugby with more respect than it treats hurling.

But it’s not a relationship that appears to be replicated in the Republic, where the FAI, GAA and IRFU still feel like acquaintances who run to the same parties but then stand in their own corner of the room all night, eyeing other from a healthy distance.

The GAA has been the winner a lot in recent years, from awakening the sleeping giant that was Dublin through getting its talons into rugby strongholds, none moreso than Limerick.

In his Irish Examiner column in December 2020, Ronan O’Gara wrote: “Every kid has to dream, and they mimic the heroes they see scoring on the biggest stage. When my eldest lad Rua plays rugby now, he is Antoine Dupont firing out a pass or Cheslin Kolbe diving over in the corner for a wonder try. When a young lad in Limerick is looking for inspiration these days, who is he looking to? Probably Kyle Hayes or Gearóid Hegarty.”

The simple fact is that when they’re given the chance to experience Gaelic games, a lot of young people are going to find they love it. There are strengths to our games that, for many, soccer and rugby cannot compete with.

What we don’t want to do is start forcing young people to decide at such a ridiculously early stage as U14.

Look, it’s easy to get. A county like Offaly, doing its very damndest to rebuild after decades in the wilderness, feels like it needs to protect itself.

Yet as one of four counties (Tyrone, Carlow and Leitrim are the others) never to have had a senior Irish football international and with only the odd representative in high-level rugby, the GAA’s hooks are well established.

Any team setting relies on players turning up for training. The premise of a development squad (an elitist one which I’ve never agreed with, least of for kids so young) doesn’t work if a handful every weekend are off doing their own thing.

Even for 14-year-olds, rules are a part of life. No different from school or home, if you don’t abide by them, you live with whatever consequences come as a result of that.

The problem perhaps lies not with the decision to remove the young lads from a development squad, but in ever allowing a black-and-white ruling when it’s clear weekend sessions will clash with other sports.

Some will grow up and choose soccer. Some will choose hurling. Some will choose rugby. Some will choose athletics. Some will drift away from sport.

And some, like Shane Lowry did, will choose golf.

That’s life. You’ll never keep everyone.

The GAA always has to be wary of the attractiveness of other sports to twinkling young eyes.

It has to compete from bottom to top. And just as in any sporting arena, where there is competition, there will be times when boundaries get pushed.

Despite the minute numbers that ever make it into professional sports, the mindset is often still to view anything outside a GAA pitch through the prism of fear, rather than one that will help produce better, more rounded adult players.

Ruling underage squads with an iron fist and pitting GAA training against a soccer match will only drive more away with that than you’ll keep.

We have to be confident enough in our own skin to see the benefits of youngsters playing other sports and know that when they hit adulthood and make their decision, the bigger percentage will still choose Gaelic football.