By Cian O’Connell

For much of the past decade Liam Mellows have been busy planning for the future. While the 2017 Galway Senior Hurling Championship success brought glory to the city club it was simply confirming the work being carried out in Ballyloughane everyday.

With a commitment to evolve on and off the field several projects illustrate Mellows efforts to spread the hurling word.

This weekend 140 coaches from several clubs in the west will gather for a workshop with Paudie Butler, Pat Moore, Damien Quigley, and Jeffrey Lynskey.

Skibbereen native Gordon Crowley has served Mellows in a plethora of roles, while also working as part of Jeffrey Lynskey’s Galway minor backroom team in recent years. Crowley has noticed that there is a huge coaching interest. “We have 140 registered, Galway Coaching and Games are also running programmes that weekend also so you have 350 coaches in Galway are attending workshops,” Crolwey says.

“There is about 110 in Ballinasloe on the Friday night and 100 in Tynagh on the Saturday. We are running our workshop on that Saturday. The thing that has blown us away is that there is a massive appetite for coaching knowledge and self improvement among coaches.

“We started off this process as something Micheal Duffy, myself, and Jeff Lynskey saying we should run something for our own coaches, but then we thought anything we could share in terms of best practice was important.

“We would feel we are part of a hurling community and a community of coaches. So we wanted to throw the doors open to let whoever was interested to come in.

“I certainly was blown away by the level of interest that was there. It is just showing in the numbers. Coaches in hurling and Camogie really want to improve and are willing to take part in these workshops.”

The passion to promote the game and assist others is something Crowley has been struck by throughout the years. “Micheal and myself have similar experiences, I would have worked as part of Jeffrey Lynskey's minor management for the last four years and would have been involved in a couple of the Celtic Challenge panels under the Academy structure Damien Coleman has,” Crowley explains.

When you are in that community of coaches you start sharing information and knowledge. You have resources at your fingertips with people who are just willing to help you. When you see the power and benefit of that you think we should be all doing this.

“I meet Micheal once or twice a week for lunch and he'd have been at a tutoring course where he'd have built up a relationship with a coach from another club or county. Suddenly they are bouncing ideas off each other on Whatsapp.

“A coaching community is there, we just need to look after each other because a rising tide will lift all boats.

Mellows currently employ Clare native Micheal Duffy as a full-time Coaching Officer, who is encouraged by the reaction within club and how so many are striving to assist. “I'm from a very rural club at home, I was lucky to just get anyone to do any help when I came in,” Duffy states.

“The biggest thing that hit me was that there was no shortage of help from people from boys and girls. The kids love it. When the players show interest in the club it makes it organic and it brings a family element rather than it just being a club that you play for. It is a club you belong to.

“We had 20 in the summer camp between 15 and 25 all coaching. We had a head coach and an assistant coach and some groups might have had three coaches so the ratio was about maybe five to one at our own camp.

“It is great to have your own coaches involved because it shows they are keen on the development of the club from the ground rather than just worrying about them when they turn 18 and looking at who are the adult players now.”

Crowley stresses that is a key message for Mellows and that a coaching culture has been developed in the club. “A lot of it grew organically,” Crowley remarks. “A number of years ago we started running our own camps. Jeffrey Lynskey, who is the current Galway Under 20 manager, and Sean Morrissey brought in the younger coaches to help at those camps.

“What we have seen is that almost a coaching culture has developed where young lads and girls are happy to come up to coach kids. When we went through the county winning panel 15 of those guys would coach regularly at our camps or would be involved in a team.

“It has changed in the sense it is now seen to be the done thing. People just help out. The knock on effect is that all of the Camogie teams at 14s, 16s, minors would have two lads, who are hurlers helping them. Micheal is able to pick up the phone if he is running a mid term camp to have five or six young coaches available to him.

“Realistically they are the role models. Young lads look up to the Tadhg Harans, Adrian Morrisseys, Sean Morrisseys, the Ross Byrnes more so than the older coaches. We are very lucky in the club that we have those role models and ambassadors.”

It is why Duffy is currently investing time and energy into Coaching Tutoring courses because that is one area Mellows are targeting in 2019. “That is something this year we want to do more work on,” Duffy admits. “I hadn't any tutoring experience done, but I'm currently doing a tutor course with Munster GAA. From doing that I'm really learning the whole teaching people how to coach is more important than doing it for them.

“We really want to put a big push on improving the level of our coaches. Anyone who has done the foundation getting them to do the Award One or any parent that has a child coming can we get them doing a foundation course where they feel they can help out a bit more. That is our big push for 2019 and the workshop is the start of that. We will have 30 or 40 of our own Mellows coaches.

“Every team in the club will have a mentor at the course so that means every child will be better off because of the course we are running. Every child that has a mentor from any other club will benefit too. We are really looking forward to it.”

Mellows are roaring again and the learning continues.