Rounders at the heart of Carrickmacross Emmets community

By John Harrington

The Carrickmacross Emmets Rounders story starts in 1990 when a teacher by the name of Brother Gregory Fox introduced the sport to St. Joseph’s Primary School.

In the following years Carrickmacross Juvenile Rounders teams had great success in the Community Games, winning five gold medals, but when Brother Gregory moved back home to Galway the game died off in the town again.

Until 2015, when some of Brother Gregory’s former pupils decided they’d like to try playing a sport as adults that they’d loved so much as children.

“Myself and a couple of the other lads who are also still playing now kind of just said, ‘look, we’ve always talked about maybe having a go at this at senior level so let’s give it a go’,” says Carrickmacross Emmets Rounders club founder, Ronan Kiernan.

“We put in the senior team into the championship and the first year was rocky enough, we got a couple of hidings.

“But by the second year in 2016 we made the senior men’s final and it has just sky-rocketed from there.”

In the last 10 years Carrickmacross Emmets have gone from having one team to six teams competing in the senior men’s, senior women’s, senior mixed, junior men’s, and junior women’s divisions.

In 2023 they made history by becoming the first club to win three All-Ireland titles in one year (senior men’s, Intermediate mixed, and junior women’s), last year they were named Club of the Year at the GAA Rounders All-Stars, and on Sunday their senior men’s team will bid to make it back-to-back All-Ireland titles against Erne Eagles of Cavan.

As well as being very successful on the pitch, perhaps their greatest achievement is the extent to which they’re such a vibrant presence in their local community.

Rounders tends not to have the same profile as the GAA’s other codes, but in Carrickmacross it’s regarded as a very important member of the family.

“When we started it we made an effort to make it very public that we now had a Rounders team,” says Kiernan. “We weren’t afraid to promote it and make it very visible.

“In Carrickmacross we're very proud now that we have every sport in the GAA - football, Ladies football, hurling, camogie, handball, rounders, the whole works.

“We try collectively as a club now to make sure that everyone feels a part of it. A lot of the Rounders players are past footballers and past hurlers as well, and it’s brilliant for giving people an outlet in team sport that they otherwise might no longer have.

“It is a good template for any club that was ever thinking of doing this, to have a look at how it works in Carrickmacross.

“We would have maybe 80 or 90 Rounders members now just at adult level so it definitely brings more people into your GAA club which is a great thing.

“That was a big help when all the codes in the club came together this year to fundraise for our Platinum Tanks Park development of three new pitches.

“That was probably something we'd never ever seen before. The sheer volume of community that was involved in it from every club in Carrick - handball, football, rounders, ladies football, hurling and camogie.

“It was a huge effort by everyone to come together to develop a hub where all the codes can play.”

Since 2020, the number of GAA rounders clubs has more than doubled and there’s no sign of that growth slowing down.

It’s a very inclusive sport because men and women can play together on the same team and it provides the opportunity to continue playing a team sport at an age beyond which that might be possible in other codes.

Those two factors make it a very social sport, but for players like Kiernan just as big a draw is the fact that it’s also a keenly competitive sporting outlet.

Carrickmacross are one of the most successful teams around because they make no bones about the fact that every year they’re out for All-Ireland silverware.

“Rounders is very social but with our club there's a two-way street with it,” he says.

“You can do it properly, have good teams, and be social as well. We kind of look for that balance. We're not just there for the craic.

“We take it quite seriously and are very competitive. We look to develop players at junior level with the hope some of them can come up and join the senior team.

“There's a young lad this year, he's played junior men's for two years, and he's in the starting line of the senior men's team now. We use the junior teams for development, and I think you have to have that.

“There's no point in going all out in senior and having nothing coming. All of us on the senior team are pushing 40 but when we're gone there's plenty coming after us.

“We do a lot with the juveniles as well. Our U15 boys won the All-Ireland two or three weeks ago in the community games. The girls got to the finals as well in the U13. So there's a lot of work being done at juvenile level through the club in general.”

Carrickmacross edged out Erne Eagles by a single run in last year’s Senior Men’s All-Ireland Final and Sunday’s re-match against the same opponents is likely to be another tight battle.

Erne Eagles are the most successful club in Rounders history and will be slight favourites to wrest back the title, but this Carrickmacross team has a happy habit of rising to the occasion.

“Over the past seven or eight years, these have definitely been the two best teams in the country,” says Kiernan. “They've thrown up a few cracking games.

“In this decade it's three All-Irelands apiece. Sunday's an important one for both teams when you look at it that way.

“Cavan (Erne Eagles) have been unlucky with injuries in the last year or two. I know Darryl Dolan missed the final in the last year and that would have been a huge loss for them. He's the David Clifford of Rounders I suppose in many respects.

“We’re an experienced team though and the way we're looking at it is we're just hoping to get a great performance from ourselves and then we'll see where it takes us.”

Sunday, September 6

GAA Rounders Senior Men’s Final

Carrickmacross Emmets (Monaghan) vs Erne Eagles (Cavan), Offaly GAA Centre of Excellence, Kilcormac, 3.30pm