By John Harrington

If you’re the social type, there’s a good chance you’ve come across members of Tipperary GAA club Upperchurch-Drombane in your travels of late.

They’ve literally gone the extra mile raising funds to develop their grounds by selling raffle tickets for a top prizes of a John Deere 6140M tractor or €100,000 depending on your fancy.

As well as being a fixture at club matches in Tipperary, they’ve made it as far as the Tullamore Show, the Ploughing Championships, and Garth Brooks’ recent concerts in Croke Park.

Enthusiasm comes easily to the ticket-sellers because this is a pretty special time if you’re an Upperchurch-Drombane supporter.

The small, rural Mid-Tipperary club has achieved the considerable feat of reaching both the Tipperary senior county hurling and football semi-finals this year.

That’s all the more impressive when you consider they’ve done so with essentially the same group of players – 16 of them played in the county quarter-final victories in both codes over JK Brackens.

The senior hurlers have already won the Cahill Cup this year, their U-19 and U-13 Hurlers won Mid-Tipperary Championships, the Junior A hurlers will contest a county semi-final next weekend, and the Junior B footballers will contest a Mid-Tipperary Final this weekend.

For a club that has sometimes shivered in the shadow of neighbours like Thurles Sarsfields, Clonoulty-Rossmore, Drom-Inch, and Borris-Ileigh, these are memorable days indeed.

“People are getting a bit excited I suppose,” says Upperchurch-Drombane Chairperson, Michael Griffin.

“We're in two county semi-finals for the first time. We've got to the football semi-final for the first ever time and it's 13 years since we were in a hurling semi-final so they don't come around very often.

"All we're doing is concentrating on the next match, really, taking it game by game. What's up for us next is the football on Sunday against Loughmore and we're trying to achieve something we've never achieved before by getting to a county final.

“We’ve a very committed bunch of players. They're very tight-knit, they're brothers and cousins, and all of that, all intermingled on a really united team.

“We even have an uncle playing with his nephew on the team - Colm Ryan is a uncle of Sean Ryan. That all creates a bond and basically they're mad keen on both hurling and football and they want to do the best they can in terms of winning games and representing Upperchurch-Drombane.

“We're just a small, rural parish in the middle of Tipperary caught between some hurling clubs that are really steeped in the tradition of winning titles. So we're trying to emulate those clubs around us as best we can.”

Upperchurch-Drombane mightn’t have the same track-record of winning silverware as some of their illustrious neighbours, but the club has been tracking a steadily upward curve for some time now.

A combination of really well-run underage structures, a vibrant club-school link with Scoil Íosagáin, and an ambitious redevelopment of their club grounds has seen them rise through the grades at all levels and produce a generation of very talented dual players.

“We have very good facilities now,” says Griffin. “Just under 10 years ago we built a new club-house which is really good. One of the big benefits there was we put up an indoor astro-turf facility upstairs, 26 metres by 10 metres wide.

“Now we have an external astro-turf, we put in a walkway last year, and we put floodlights on the pitch this year, the job was just finished a couple of weeks ago.

“The facilities we have, we've maximised them, and now we want to basically expand those now and that's what the fund-raising effort is for.

“We're buying more land to facilitate the underage structures of both Upperchurch-Drombane GAA club and Slieve Felim Raparees Ladies Football and Camogie Club.

“They use the facilities as well and we want them to be able to use them more often and get better access to the field. So that's what the fund-raising effort is for.”

Upperchurch-Drombane teams have long had a reputation for the spirit with which they played the games, but what makes the current generation a cut above those that have gone before is they now combine that quality with a high level of technical ability in both codes.

They’ve a mentally tough bunch too, because they’ve had to deal with no little adversity in recent years.

Winning a first ever Mid-Tipperary hurling championship has long been an obsession in the club, and they’ve fallen agonisingly short in recent years, losing finals in 2019, 2017, and 2014, all by a single point, and another in 2009 by three points.

Most of the current panel played in at least one of those matches and a good chunk of them more than one, but those missed opportunities haven’t drained their collective drive.

Even this year when many though their time had come after they defeated Thurles Sarsfield in the Mid-Tipperary quarter-final only to then lose to JK Brackens in the Mid Semi-Final, they displayed impressive bouncebackability by beating the Templemore club in both the County Hurling and Football Quarter-Finals.

“It's a case of you can't play the matches that are already played,” says Griffin. “We're looking forward now to the next match, that's the most important match that we have.

“Losing games like that, we were never too far away in those games, and I suppose it forms your character in relation to what you're going to do next and how you come back from it.

“At the moment we're going well, we're looking forwards, and hopefully things will go well for us over the next couple of weekends.”

First up is this Sunday’s County Senior Football semi-final against reigning champions Loughmore-Castleiney.

Their opponents have far more tradition and will be warm favourites to progress to a third county final in a row, but such is the wind that Upperchurch-Drombane now have in their sails they’ll believe anything is possible.

“We haven't met recently in the football championship,” says Griffin of Loughmore-Castleiney.

“It's a couple of years since we met them in the Mid-Tipp championship and our paths haven't crossed in the county championship so far.

“We're looking forward to it. They're county champions and they have a sprinkling of inter-county players across practically every line of the field, so it's a huge task for us.

“But if we can perform to the standards that we expect of ourselves, hopefully we'll be there or thereabouts.

“Our lads will embrace the challenge and see where it takes us.”

That attitude runs right through Upperchurch-Drombane GAA club both on and off the field right now, and it’s serving them well.

This season’s already memorable story might have a twist or turn to come just yet.