** By Denis O’Brien**

Stanford University have been crowned California college hurling champions and in the process collect a fifth title in a row.

The Stanford students defeated University of California Berkeley, in a deciding match played at San Francisco GAA’s grounds. The game was the last one in a series between the two colleges with the result an emphatic 4-10 to 1-4 victory for the Stanford students.

The California Colleges Championship is held between the two university sporting, and academic rivals, each spring in a best of five series. In the early part of the competition reigning champions Stanford looked on course to capture another title but Cal Berkeley came right back into the picture taking with the next two victories where Game 4 saw take the win on total points amount of 27 to 20.

Game 1 was a close affair all through with a more clinical Stanford the difference in the end when coming away with victory on a scoreline of Stanford 5-8 to Cal Berkeley 5-5. Just a goal separated them at the final whistle and Cal captain, Jack Alperstein, felt his side could have pulled out the win and blamed himself for some wayward shooting.

“We held Stanford very close the entire match. If just a few points went our way, I easily missed 4 or 5 frees to name a few, and it could have been a different result,” he enthused, before highlighting certain positives.
“I took Game 1 for us as a huge success. We were playing a lot of that game with guys who had never played in a real match and they all far surpassed my expectations,” the Berkeley captain stated.

Alperstein spent two months studying at UCD and interning in Dublin last summer. He wanted to play while there, so he contacted Clanna Gael Fontenoy, a club in east Dublin, and trained with their junior team twice a week. Observing how training was run in Ireland he said, “helped me significantly when running practice back in Berkeley.”

From a Stanford perspective their defense conceded some rather easy goals and would have to work on that for the second game. Game 2 went the way of the defending champions once again and this time they returned a clean sheet when it came to defending against goals. The margin of victory too was more pronounced with Stanford hitting seven goals and four points to Cal’s 0-7. The scoreboard, however, did not reflect several goal chances by Cal with the Stanford keeper pulling off some fine saves.

“I would say the game was not as lopsided as the score reflects. Their keeper made some brilliant saves that would have given us some momentum but each possession we seemed to come up empty,” reflected Alperstein.

Stanford also had some new team members who had never played before, and California College GAA Chairman, Irish native Eamonn Gormley, was frank in his evaluation of the rookies, one in particular.

“Stanford had a completely new player who had only seen his first hurley a week before, but he had a Lacrosse background and took to hurling like a duck to water. I've seen this phenomenon before in college hurling. It's a real eye-opener and firmly debunks the old ‘you need to be born in Kilkenny with a stick already in your hand’ myth,” he asserted.

Gormley, though he had stepped away from the role of overseeing college GAA in California, has been a driving force for spreading hurling at college campuses in the state. He is a former PRO of both San Francisco GAA and the North American County Board (NACB governs GAA in the US, excluding New York).

He is also a member of the St. Joseph’s Hurling club in San Francisco whose members over the years have given valuable coaching tutoring to college players as well as officiating at university games.

He believes in putting the word out there and so in 2006 began promoting GAA at the weekends in the city simply by setting up an information booth at a local market. A Stanford student with an interest in Irish culture talked to Gormley at the booth and from that first meeting sprang the seeds of a first ever Stanford University hurling club. The team today has official status as a sports body at the college (as does Cal Berkeley), so it can be offered to students and also qualifies for financial support. The word spread to Berkeley, where a team started up, and soon to other California colleges, though some of these have fallen away for various reasons.

In 2008, Gormley in an effort to get organized and make things official, set up the California Collegiate Gaelic Athletic Association (CCGAA) and the following year the first hurling  championship series between Stanford and Cal Berkeley got underway.

In a bid for development on a national level, for both Hurling and Gaelic Football, the US National Collegiate Gaelic Athletic Association (NCGAA) was established in 2009 with an overall championship competition realized two years later.  Today the game of Hurling has representation at colleges in the western Rockies, throughout the Midwest, with a growing presence also on campuses in the south and in the northeast of the country. 

This year’s NCGAA Nationals will be held in Boulder, Colorado, May 28-29, where young state clubs from University of Colorado-Boulder and Regis University will have players in action in both codes.  The NCGAA is the governing body for all of the US and it allows co-ed players with a basic eligibility that a student must be enrolled on a physical campus in the United States or on a university approved study abroad program, or be a member of staff, employed at least 20 hours per week. The rules also allow for two alumni players and restricting teams to one player on the field at any one time that has played at Inter-County Senior, U21, and U18 level within the past 10 years.

The GAA colleges body is affiliated to the North American County Board (NACB) who provide player insurance coverage, and access to coaching from their Games Development Administrators. The young organization also receives grants for equipment under the development programme.

In California, University of California-Davis, had taken part in the state championship series over the past few years but dropped out last year. Efforts to reignite things are in the works with a planned ‘Beginners Workshop’ in the coming months. Trying to maintain interest amongst a student body that is constantly changing is a challenge going forward. Getting former players involved would be a big help says Gormley.
“I'd like to see more alumni getting involved with the running of things, but that can be hit-and-miss because of the way students move around so much after graduation, particularly Stanford students who tend to be from out of state,” he said. "You can't blame the students for prioritizing their work."

“There are limits to what you can do with an amateur volunteer-run organization. I'd say if we had more investment and we were in a position to offer scholarships, you'd see a lot more interest in the game and it'd be easier to get new clubs started.”

After wins for Cal in games 3 and 4 it was down to the final game to decide this year’s championship. Ahead of Game 5, Stanford captain Isaac Caswell, said it would be good to win a fifth on the trot, but for him personally, it’s all about the game itself.

“What would it mean to us if we won a fifth title in a row?  In a sense it would be nice, because there is always some part of a person that enjoys winning,” he remarked.

“However, to me, winning or losing is to a certain extent epiphenomenal: I hurl because I like hurling.  Competition is not important to me in life in general.  I'm not sure how much my opinions reflect those of my teammates, but I'd say they're moderately representative.”

Berkeley captain and coach, Alperstein, though disappointed at the championship, feels his side can take positives ahead of the national championships at the end of the month.

“It was a disappointing result from our end. It is as close as I could have hoped to get in my first year as coach and wished our last match would have been a little closer. It was great motivation for our guys and we look to keep the momentum up heading into Colorado at the end of May.”

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