Kildare GAA taking the fear factor out of coaching hurling

By John Harrington

One of the biggest barriers to the growth of hurling in the developing counties is the dearth of people with the confidence to coach it.

Those who never played the game themselves often don’t believe they could possibly teach the younger generation how to.

Even if they played Gaelic football and so know a lot about fitness and team-play, the prospect of coaching the technical skills of hurling can be daunting.

Kildare GAA have tackled this phenomenon by rolling out practical hurling workshops for parents and potential coaches over the course of the last 12 months.

It’s proven to be a big hit. Many of those who participated subsequently signed up for the GAA’s Introduction to Coaching Gaelic Games Course and are now actively coaching hurling to children in their club.

“With the number of kids participating in hurling and camogie growing all the time we obviously need to get more coaches, but when we talked to parents we found out that the fear factor around hurling was a barrier to them getting involved,” says Kildare GAA Games Development Administrator and former county hurler, John Doran.

“They just felt out of their depth and felt they were almost being challenged by kids as to whether they were doing the right thing so they felt uncomfortable.

“Because of that we came up with this idea of doing a session with the parents to take the fear out of coaching hurling.

“I suppose if you were asked to help a kid play the piano and you had never played it before yourself then you'd be going, 'Oh my God!'

“But then if a piano teacher taught you scales that you start with, shows you this is how you do it, then you'd feel a lot more confident about it.

“It's something similar with breaking down the fear about teaching children how to play hurling. This is entry level we're talking about, it's U8 level, so you're talking about the very fundamentals of the game, the grip and the swing, and if they're starting to lift the ball a couple of bits and pieces around that.

“Even teaching them the different parts of the hurl, the toe and the heel, what are they and why you use the toe rather than the heel to rise the ball. When they're then helping their own kids at home they find it very useful.

“It's a one-hour session and it's done while their kids are on the pitch training away. By the end of it they feel quite happy with the skills they've learned and we put them in to small-sided games doing them as well.

“It just takes the fear out of it and once they experience doing the skills for the first time and we explain why we do it this way then it's like a Eureka moment for them and that fear factor is taken out of it.”

It’s a good time to be recruiting hurling coaches in Kildare because this year’s Joe McDonagh Cup success and the prospect of playing in the Leinster SHC next year has really raised the profile of the game in the county

“It has, yeah,” says Doran. "Hurling in Kildare is much more to the forefront now. Even if a parent never played hurling themselves, they can see it everywhere now.

“There's a lot of people talking about the fact now that Kildare will be competing in the Liam MacCarthy Cup next year. There's a buzz about the game which is great.

“The numbers are increasing at underage level. You can see that in the Go Games, there are more teams entering, there's more divisions being created, and that's been a trend over the last number of years.

“At the teenage youth level you'd now have four or five divisions whereas in the past you would have only two.

“It’s grown at senior level too. You now have some clubs fielding three senior teams instead of one or two.

“It’s not just the numbers that are growing, the standard is improving too. It's fantastic to see how far it has come from where it was even 10 or 15 years ago. It's hugely rewarding for everyone involved in the GAA in Kildare at the moment.”

With the numbers of young people playing hurling and camogie in Kildare rising steadily year on year, giving parents and coaches the self-belief to coach the game will remain a high priority for Kildare GAA.

“We've gotten a very positive reaction from this initiative over the last 12 months and we're going to keep pushing it because we know from talking to clubs that they're finding it difficult to recruit parents to coach hurling and camogie,” says Doran.

“We can say to those clubs now, look, we've done this in a few clubs and it has worked well, we can come down and do it for you as well.

“In that way we'll try to get into more and more clubs and I'm sure that even in some of the clubs where we've done it already there could be a call to go back and do it with a new group of parents because there are new people coming into GAA clubs every year through the nursery.

“It's one of those things that there should always be a need for going forward.”