Tubberclair GAA club are making hay while the sun shines

By John Harrington

Timing is everything in life, and right now Tubberclair GAA club’s couldn’t be better.

In the space of three weeks they’ve won the Westmeath Intermediate Football Championship, the Westmeath U20 Football Championship, and the Athlone Chamber of Commerce Community Group of the Year Award.

All that success has supercharged a fundraising drive that has seen the club collect an incredible €337,000 in just eight weeks which has enabled them to fully pay off a bank loan they took out to purchase an 18.8 acre field beside the club-grounds.

That site will be the home for an ambitious new shared needs community development that the club is planning in collaboration with the Tubberclair Local Action Group, Tubberclair National School, and Goldsmiths LGFA club.

“The whole community is buzzing right now and we’re thrilled to have gotten such a positive response to our fundraiser,” says Tubberclair GAA Club PRO, Grainne Rafferty.

“We went to every house in the parish and asked them for a donation and we had a marketing company behind us who did all the brochures and leaflets and the website.

“People could go online, they could donate directly through the bank, online, check, cash, whatever. A team of 80 of us went around in pairs and knocked on every door in the parish over a week. The following week we did a call back and then thankfully all the money started rolling in.

“We were very, very lucky that we’ve gotten such support. We literally took out the loan only a couple of months ago and thankfully that cleared so there's no interest.

“But that's just the start of it, that's only paying for the land. The next part now is to develop it and we're hoping to build pitches, an astro pitch, a community centre, playground, and walking track.”

Tubberclair GAA club are located right in the centre of Ireland on the shores of Lough Ree and draw their players from the rural villages of Tubberclair, Glasson, and Ballykeeran.

There’s a nice serendipity to the success they’re currently enjoying because earlier this year the club held their ’50 40’ commemorative event that celebrated their Westmeath minor championship victory in 1975 and senior championship victory in 1985.

Now they have modern day heroes in the shape of the senior team that will play St. Martin’s of Wexford in the AIB Leinster Intermediate Club Football Championship quarter-final on Saturday, many of whom were also part of last weekend’s Westmeath U20 Final winning team.

The whole parish is draped in green and gold and all anyone is talking about is football.

“The buzz has been amazing,” says Rafferty. “From the bus leaving the morning of the county final to the bus arriving back that night to the reaction of all the kids in the parish.

“My family has always been steeped in the GAA and we have pictures here of the streets of Glasson lined 40 years ago when we won the county senior final and that same buzz came back this year.

“It kind of gave you that community feeling that this was what it's all about. There was loads kids out with flags and a lot of those same kids had won the Cumann na mBunscol themselves last May.

“It was kind of this feeling that everyone was winning and everyone was part of it.”

Winning doesn’t happen by accident. Tubberlclair’s rising graph is down in no small part to a lot of hard work on the coaching field.

They’ve put a big emphasis on underage development and it is paying off in spades.

“The underage is thriving, last year our U10 panel had 54 kids registered,” says Rafferty.

“Everyone knows what's going on in terms of coaching from under 8, 10, all the way up.

“Teams are doing extra nights on the pitch and a little bit of gym work here and there. There's a great overall plan for developing our underage teams, that's something we've really worked hard on for the last 18 months.

“Everyone is kind of singing off the same hymn sheet, you know, and that there's a lot of crossover, coach-wise through all the groups.”

The hope now is that the development they will build on their newly purchased site will be a massive boon not just for the club but the wider community as a whole that will make Tubberclair an even better place to live and play.

“Our current clubhouse is extremely small I can remember my own mam painting it all them years ago when it was built,” says Rafferty. “We've only two dressing rooms, home and away, and an upstairs which really in the current climate is quite dated even though we have loads of other outside groups who go up and use it.

“We have our active age group who use it one night a week. Any matches that we have going on in the evenings, we always try to make a cup of tea and let people come up and just be warmer or, you know. Nothing fancy, tea and a biscuit.

“We have a couple of yoga instructors using it, pilates. They're all the community coming in, but if we can have a bigger clubhouse and a bigger area, the possibilities for the community are endless.

“The primary schools is a kilometre up the road from the football pitch and they use it as well but they could use it more and use the community centre and the astro-turf pitch for lots of more activities.

“That's what it's all about - it's the next generation that's really going to benefit from what we're going to do as a club.”