Canada LGFA team go the extra mile in prepration for World Games

By Caoimhin Reilly

While the merger of the GAA and LGFA remains incomplete, there are those of us who never considered them to be materially apart at all. In coming from a Gaelic football-obsessed household, attending matches across codes has been a life sentence.

Darragh Ó Sé and Paddy Keenan were childhood triggers of awe but my hero was a heroine. The All-Star, Down LGFA’s greatest and the player who I aspired to be like over any other, my cousin, Michaela Downey.

So, be it a men’s or ladies’ game, a match for boys or girls, the love of the sport and addition to it remains the same. Football is football.

You could say the standards Michaela set in her career, which remains ongoing with Newry Bosco, are the ones which I judged players upon professionally prior to emigrating to Canada in August 2024.

For the best part of seven years, I had been attached to The Dundalk Democrat and, latterly, The Argus and Drogheda Independent as the titles’ sports editor, covering Gaelic games in depth and trying to give greater attention to LGFA than it had previously garnered.

The reality is that players like Michaela aren’t even generational, they’re even less frequent than that, and, so, it can lead to analysis and expectation which people construe to be either unattainable or unreasonable.

When training teams, success is generally relative to the quality of players you have at your disposal. But when you are on to something special, it doesn’t take a genius to sense it. The giddiness and excitement can parallel with the early stages of a romance. The possibility of what might be as the mind wanders aimlessly into the realm of utopia.

At the beginning of a successful club championship campaign several years ago, I recall telling a fellow mentor that I couldn’t see how we weren’t going to win something. He uttered words of caution but we both knew what was brewing.

Of course, feeling confident doesn’t always translate into triumph. And though winning is the objective, and is most certainly the target for the Canada LGFA team that I will coach into this summer’s World Games (July 12-17, Waterford), forming the sort of kinship and respect that lingers long beyond a week in the sunny south of Ireland is arguably of greater significance given how that is the core ethos of Gaelic games.

After spending a summer here and pledging allegiance to Durham Robert Emmets, a few stakeholders had mentioned the possibility of getting involved in World Games preparation.

Knowing the abundance of native talent playing in Toronto, the opportunity of refereeing at the Eastern Canada championship finals in Montreal last September was accepted without hesitance, to see what else was out there.

To say it was a humbling experience would be a mild description. Next to no Irish involved. Instead, the venue heaved with those of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. Some spoke English, others in French. Dual stars aplenty. But, most notably, the quality of play and ability on display was almost unbelievable.

So, when it came to the interview stage, there was genuinely only one team that I wanted to be involved with and, thankfully, it’s the group I will lead to Waterford this summer.

In the four-and-a-half months since the process began, almost 60 players from four provinces and eight cities tried out for a place on the final squad of 14. On crisp, wintry evenings on turf pitches in what felt like the middle of nowhere to dome facilities that would make the designers of the Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence question their engineering skills, the commitment and application levels blazed a trail.

Players travelling hundreds of miles on day-consuming road trips, via planes, trains and automobiles, and then performing to a standard more than comparable to seasoned campaigners back home.

The squad contains representatives from seven clubs and five cities. Hours and, in one case, a timezone apart. A cocktail of different origins and descendancies, knitted together by a natural cohesion, appreciation of identity and determination to go one step further than the Canada class of 2023, who fell agonisingly short in the decider.

There are teachers. There is an optometrist. There is a psychologist. There are fitness instructors. There are educators. There is a nutritionist. There are businesswomen. Serious people with attitudes and standards who have unified in the pursuit of something very unique.

In two tournaments and 10 matches against teams with Irish-only players, we have won all but one. All the while entirely self-fundraising the cost of pitches for training, equipment and, indeed, the trip to Ireland itself.

As a group, we have chosen to abide by a phrase passed on to me by a wise old friend. ‘In life, you can either have the pain of sacrifice or the pain of regret’. We don’t plan on leaving Ireland with regrets, just a treasure trove of memories carved from months of sacrifice.

Coming from small communities on the Emerald Isle, it is easy to take the short distances for training or matches for granted. As a Louth-native, the half-hour trek to Drogheda is considered to be extreme.

But these ladies aren’t even phased by 10- or 12-hour round trips several times per month. Combine this degree of application with their human qualities and performance acumen and it is impossible not to feel excited by what may unfold on the hard, green plains of Waterford.

On and off the pitch, they satisfy Michaela’s standards, the gold standard. And after every meeting, there is a spring to the step; you just feel that bit better about yourself.

That’s worth more than any medal or silverware – but we still plan on getting those too.