Carlow working hard to maximise hurling potential

By John Harrington

Carlow’s ability to punch above their weight as a hurling county is impressive.

They’re the third least populous county in Ireland and have just five senior hurling clubs, and yet they more than held their own in Division 1 of the Allianz Hurling League this year.

The passion for hurling that exists in some Carlow clubs is a big driver of those standards, but so too is the holistic approach of Carlow GAA’s Coaching and Games Development staff.

Spend some time talking to Carlow GAA Games Development Administrator, Brendan Hayden, and you quickly get a sense of a county doing a lot of good things at various stages in the player pathway.

Hayden himself is steeped in Carlow GAA. His father, Brendan Senior, scored 33-266 in 113 appearances for the Carlow footballers, a record that stood for many years until it was overtaken by Darragh Foley.

Brendan Jnr hurled with Carlow for 13 years and was also a very talented footballer himself back in the day with Éire Óg Carlow. It says something about his total immersion in Gaelic games that along with his day job he also managed the county’s U20 hurlers this year in his spare time.

He’s just as passionate about developing the grassroots as he is operating at the elite end, and to that end he was the driving force behind the ‘Hurling Nua’ initiative with nursery age players in Rathvilly GAA club this year.

The Carlow club are one of 45 new hurling units to avail of hurling starter packs in the last two years.

“We contacted the club and outlined the plan about how it would work and they came on board with it and we got the local national school involved too,” Hayden told GAA.ie

“I think I've done over 54 coaching sessions in the national school between 1st and 6th class. We have very good support there from the principal, Helen Molloy and her staff.

“The children really enjoy it. It's something new for them. It's new skill acquisition.

“For the summer then I ran two sessions a night every Tuesday night in the club and we had upwards of 60 between boys and girls.

"The initiative is off the ground now and there are a couple of parents out there interested in taking it further. Our plan is I'll finish in the school in the next couple of weeks and we'll go back then in the springtime.

“What we'll hopefully do is get a team at under 8's and U10s for Go Games next year that'll be parent-led and club-led and we'll continue to support them with coaching initiatives and keep pushing it in the school.”

If you give children the opportunity to play hurling or camogie they’ll quickly fall in love with it, but ultimately all the Hurling Nua initiatives will live or die by the enthusiasm or lack of it from parents and club coaches.

Quite often parents and coaches in clubs where there has previously been no hurling will feel like they don’t have the expertise to teach the children how to play it and are inhibited from doing so by this fear factor.

Hayden cleverly addressed this issue by insisting that every child who came to Rathvilly’s Hurling Nua training sessions were accompanied by an adult who also had a hurley of their own and took part.

They were instructed to simply make sure their child’s writing hand was on top of the hurley and were asked to hit the ball to their left and right so their child worked on striking off both sides.

The parents also took part in 2v2 games with a parent and child on each ‘team’ where only the children could score and stop goals.

In this way even parents who had never held a hurley before in their lives got a feel for the game and realised that it maybe wasn’t as complicated as they thought it was.

“It’s important to take that fear factor out of the game for parents,” says Hayden. “Some of them might have been watching hurling matches on television during the summer and say, jeez, how am I going to coach all that. They're striking it out of their hand and they're doing this and that.

“But an eight-year-old child doesn't need to know that. For me, as a coach, if they have the grip right, everything else will follow on

"Every time a parent touched it to the right hand side of the child I'd get them to touch it to the left. So unconsciously the child is striking off both sides.

"Then we did a bit of lifting and catching and beanbag solo runs and things like that. We just tried to keep it simple and fun.

"You have to get the parents involved because they’re the ones who will be leading it when the club moves on to participate in Go Games. The equipment, the hurls and helmets, are there for them now, but the club and the parents have to take ownership.

"We got a great response in Rathvilly and I’d say there were 15 to 18 children there who were not footballers. They’re there with their parents so it brought a lot of people into the club one night a week who weren’t footballing people.

"What we might do next for them is to help with a little nursery programme on Saturday mornings where I’ll ask them what they would like to be able to teach their child, and then I’ll teach them how to teach the child and then they can tip along from there.

“They don't have to be top-class hurling coaches, they just need to keep it simple and fun."

Starting young hurlers on the player pathway is one piece of the jigsaw, retaining them is another.

In a county as small as Carlow it’s especially important that as many players as possible are brought all the way through to adult hurling and that those with the potential to play at the very highest level are identified and given every opportunity to develop.

To that end Hayden is currently busying himself running an U15 hurling tournament sponsored by Cental that’s made up of three regional Carlow teams, a Kildare south regional team, and Barrow Rangers from Kilkenny.

The matches are played every Thursday night in the Carlow Centre of Excellence in Fenagh with one game a week livestreamed.

Each Carlow team has an independent manager with no link to any of the clubs involved with that team to ensure there’s parity of selection.

“It’s going really well,” says Hayden. “The main aim of it is to give them extra games at this time of the year.

“A lot of our development squad players are involved but it also gives other lads who are not currently on development squads the opportunity to showcase themselves.

“It gives fellas who might be playing in Division 2 in Carlow the chance to play with and against players from Division 1 teams. In every club there's a gem and he never gets to play a higher standard. It gives these lads a chance to play with and against better players.

“In this age-group you can see players suddenly make big strides both technically and physically. A player who might not have made a development squad the previous year might have come on an awful lot since so this is an opportunity for them to show that and for coaches to see if there is somebody out there that we missed.”

Carlow as a county seem to be maximising their potential so is there much room for further growth and improvement?

The county’s small population probably means it’s finite, but there are positive signs that they will at the very least continue to punch above their weight.

Naomh Bríd are doing a lot of good work and their Intermediate Championship success this year means the Carlow senior championship will go from five to six teams in 2026.

Burren Rangers are another club making good strides and may also join the senior championship in the not so distant future which would help rise the tide some more.

“There's a lot of good work going on in the clubs,” says Hayden. “What we're finding is, we're seeing four or five in every club capable of playing at that county level.

“It is moving along and schools are putting in a bit of work there as well. We find at 15, 14 maybe even 12, the standard of coaching is improving. And young lads now want to play more than they used to.

“That's not casting aspersions on lads who played before, but getting on those development squads is now a big deal, it carries a bit more weight in the last couple of years than it previously did.

“The profile now of the county senior team makes it easier to promote the game and the Carlow GAA coaching staff have an unwritten rule that when we’re coaching we talk more about our own lads than we do the likes of TJ Reid and lads like that from other counties.

“We continually talk about Marty Kavanagh, James Doyle, Brian Tracey, Paul Doyle. We say to young players, look, if you want to see a really good free-taker drop down to St. Mullins there on a Tuesday evening and see Marty.

“Or we say go to Fenagh to see the county team training on Tuesday and Friday nights and you'll see Paul Doyle, James Doyle, Chris Nolan. We kind of promote our own because they can see our own, if that makes sense.

“In fairness to that group of players, to have risen the profile of senior hurling in Carlow.

“The population base is small in the county itself. But there are a lot of passionate hurling people who are constantly trying to make in-roads into trying to get senior and trying to get the best players through to the senior inter-county level.

“They'll continue to work and progress and try to develop the players to the highest standard that they can.”

And so will Brendan Hayden and his fellow hard-working colleagues in Carlow GAA’s Coaching and Games department.