CARRIGALINE GAA underage chairperson John Dineen believes that the new ‘one club’ approach to strength and conditioning will reap rewards, on and off the field.

In conjunction with Carrigaline-based KJ Strength & Performance, the three entities – camogie, ladies’ football and GAA – will work towards an overall improvement in the area of athletic development.

The initiative has been carefully planned over a long period, as outlined by Dineen.

“The kernel of it is that, around 18 months ago, the club set up a coaching committee under the stewardship of Kevin O’Driscoll,” he says.

“Kevin has been very proactive and has come up with many an initiative. He’s a former chairperson and he’s heavily involved on the development side of things, the pitches and the buildings and things. He’s a fantastic operator and we’d be lost without him.

“He made a conscious decision that it would a ‘one club’ effort, so he gathered 10 or 12 people from across the three sections – camogie, ladies’ football and GAA.

“Early in that process, we identified a significant weakness within the whole strength and conditioning approach across the groups and wanted to look at how to improve that, on a pathway from juvenile right through to the adult teams.

“Over the last 18 months, that coaching committee has done a lot of work on different initiatives in coach education and various events. All the while, we were working on this too – we knew it would be a major investment and wouldn’t be easy to put together. 

We were lucky to have Wesley O’Brien as part of the group, a former player and an expert in the field.

“Last year, we drew up a job specification and circulated it to a number of strength and conditioning business and shared it on social media, with the hope that people would contact us.

“We got responses from a number of companies and had an interview process and we ended up joining with KJ Strength & Performance, a company based in Carrigaline. They had experience with some of the teams in the club, both juvenile and adult, and they were a good fit for what we were looking for.”

As well as O’Driscoll and Dineen, among those involved in bringing the programme to fruition are club coach Brendan O’Driscoll, Claire Dillon, Michael Kirk, Nicholas Murphy, Shirley O’Mahony, Jan Foster, Peter Casey and Seán Mellett.

Along with their expertise, the input of KJ is invaluable.

“They’ve come with a proposal that there are three strands to the thing,” Dineen says.

“The first one, and probably the biggest one, is educating our own coaches in the area of athletic development we’re calling it, as opposed to strength and conditioning.

LAYERS

“They’re going to be holding multiple workshops throughout the year in educating the coaches as to how to bring this training to their players – building layer upon layer as they get older.

“As well as that, they’ll be coming in and having a hands-on approach so that every team will have access to qualified strength and conditioning coaches. Twice monthly is roughly what we’re looking at, a session before the lads go training.”

Ultimately, what will make the operation a success will be constant monitoring. However, should all go to plan, the benefits will be widespread.

“It’s very much a learning process,” Dineen says, “and we’ll be reviewing it monthly with the partners KJ and with the executives of the three clubs.

There has been significant investment from the three sections into this and we’ll be looking for the buy-in from players and parents.

“This is very much an investment in the overall physical wellbeing of the players. We’re convinced that making them healthier and stronger people will benefit their lives. The payback to us as a club is that it will benefit their playing.

“We’ve spoken to other clubs who have done similar and some of the stories have been that it has changed kids’ lives. That sounds dramatic but they’re seeing huge improvements in all aspects of their lives, just after taking this thing on and going with it.”