By John Harrington

A bit later than he originally planned, New York football captain, Jamie Boyle, will finally visit Tullamore on Saturday for the Tailteann Cup Quarter-Final against Offaly.

He was meant to drop by Tullamore on a holiday trip with his parents four years ago but so crammed was their itinerary that they ended up bypassing the Midlands town.

Boyle is a born and bred New Yorker but very proud of his Irish lineage and has holidayed regularly here.

His grandparents are from Donegal town and moved to Manhattan in the 1960s where they had nine children and were heavily involved in the Good Shepherd Gaelic Football Club.

When Boyle’s parents then moved to Orange County in upstate New York, his father helped establish St. Brendan’s Gaelic Football Club which quickly became a powerhouse of underage football.

“There was no Gaelic football club up there, so my dad had to start one with some other guys up there,” says Boyle

“Seán Reilly, he's on the panel as well, he was my best friend growing up. Me and him ushered in the St Brendan's Football Club upstate. That was pretty cool because nobody knew who we were. My age group never lost all the way up through U16 - a lot of us stopped playing after that.

“The heart of it would have been a lot of the Irish second generation kids playing. My Dad was the coach, he was driving around the neighbourhoods picking up anybody he could just to field the 15 - so we had basketball players, hockey players, basically anybody we could grab. I don’t think we had anybody who was Irish-born on the team, everybody was American.

“It was a mix, a lot of the players played soccer growing up, so that we found that translated pretty well, worst case scenario somebody coming to their first game, just keep the ball on the ground.”

Boyle played Gaelic Football up to U-16 level with St. Brendan’s but then his natural aptitude for other sports took him away from the GAA for a number of years.

“I played soccer growing up and then the American football coach in High School, they were looking for a kicker and I was like, ‘how hard can that be?’

“So my sophomore year at high school I started kicking American football. I had a really good year and I started getting some college interest.

“So I dropped soccer and I kept playing American football. I actually went to college to kick, so kind of continued doing that down in Florida with UCF – Central Florida. I was decent at that.”

Boyle had some contact from NFL scouts after a strong senior year with UCF, but ultimately moved back to New York after four years of college.

He played a bit of Gaelic Football again with the Donegal New York GAA club for a year and a half but by his own admission “didn’t really put a full effort into it”, and then took a complete break from the game again for five years until he was 28 and joined the St. Barnabas club who are based in Woodlawn.

It’s a testament to his latent ability that he quickly became a key player in a the team that has won the last two New York Senior Championships and now finds himself as the New York County team captain in his very first year playing at this level.

The rise to prominence of St. Barnabas is illuminating in terms of how Gaelic Football is developing in New York.

The Covid-19 pandemic meant clubs have had to field more native Americans than they normally would rather than bring in summer recruits from Ireland and this benefited St. Barnabas because their whole team was already by and large native New Yorkers after years of hard work developing their underage structures.

The back to back county titles have further energised the club and Boyle only sees the trend of more and more native New Yorkers playing at a high club level and then graduating onto the county senior team further accelerating in the coming years.

“With St. Barnabas, it's nice, we have our own field here in Woodlawn, so it's very easy for us to get to the training grounds,” he says. “Each night you go to practice there's about 100 kids on the field before us that are training.

“So you just see the youth movement and the way they're promoting it and the numbers of kids that they're getting. It's the reason why the strength of the New York team is kids that are aged 20 to 23 years old.

“The ability of some the younger players...like, Shane Brosnan is 20 years old and he was set to start against Sligo but hurt his ankle two days before the match. He is a phenomenal talent. HIs brother Mikey is only a year older and starts for us. It gives you energy seeing that wave of the young Americans coming up and just how good they are.”

Much like Boyle was in his youth, these emerging New York footballers have dabbled in a lot of different sports and this has helped develop the sort of well-rounded skill-set that makes them even better Gaelic Footballers than they might be if they just played GAA.

“To be honest, I find the Americans and young kids like that who grow up playing basketball and some of the sports where you're dribbling and maybe have a little bit of a wiggle, it's totally different than guarding someone like Adrian Varley in training.

“Adrian is phenomenal, but then you switch off him and go with like a MIkey Brosnan who grew up playing basketball, it's a different type of cover. They're both equally as good, but hopefully as Americans we keep using that to our advantage and hopefully it maybe becomes a tougher guard for some of the Irish kids because they just have not seen it.”

Travelling to Ireland and taking on Offaly in their own back yard looks like a daunting task for a New York team that has its greatest ever representation of New York born players and very little experience of playing inter-county football.

But they proved in the Connacht quarter-final when they ran Sligo to four points that they don’t lack for either skill or self-belief, and Boyle is adamant they’re not coming to Ireland for a holiday.

“We had training yesterday up in Rockland then we did kind of like a team workshop after and the main focus of the talk after was that this is a business trip.

“A lot of the guys haven’t been home in a few years, I’m sure they’re going to have family coming out, there’s going to be distractions so just the whole team talk yesterday was about limiting that.

“It’s blinders on until Saturday and then after that, you know, Saturday night, Sunday and whatever you have on Monday to kind of do whatever you need to do and I know some of the kids are staying on even longer. They’re going to stay a few days after so yeah, we’ve been talking about that.

“You can talk about it until you’re blue in the face about, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it won’t be a distraction’ but everyone’s got to stick to the plan and this is a business trip.

“There’s a lot of money going into this. There’s a lot of eyes that are going to be on New York GAA so, not to be cliched, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for us.”

They’ve come very close on a couple of occasions, most notably when they were pipped by a point by Leitrim after extra-time in 2018, but New York have yet to win an inter-county championship match.

It would mean the world to Boyle and his team-mates if they could be the ones to ink that particular chapter of history.

“Yeah, it’s all anybody ever talks about over here and I think it would change the narrative,” he said.

“We saw it a little bit from our point of view with London this year in the League. They started winning. I think they won the first three games.

“I don’t know if the narrative is the same with New York and London over there but at least to us, it felt like it was us and them, the outsiders and we’re almost… it was nice to see them winning.

“Teams have to respect them now when they come in. That’s what we’re hoping to do. We’re hoping to change it from whoever draws us and has to come out here, they think it’s just a vacation and it’s a trip to go see New York and have a good time so we’re trying to change that so it’s, ‘Shit man, we’re in for a serious game here when we go out to New York’.”