Where Did They Go? Rethinking Talent Development in Gaelic Games | Rob Mulcahy PhD(c)

Yeah, some points I've spoken to other people about before there was around that particular Tony Forrest.

When Miner was under 18, was it no team ever won a Tony Forrest at 14 and won Miner four years later, which just shows the up and down nature of what performance is and the various things that impact it.

But sometimes within that, there will be commonalities like around...

I think the current, you know, that recently strong Offaly-Harland team that won a minor in 20, did they make a Tony Forrest final, I think? But that's probably an overperformance by Offaly in previous years, which suggests they are strong.

Whereas in like your more traditional counties, it's so hard to tell who is going to ultimately be a good minor team from who is good under 14, I think.

Was it even Cork said, years before he did, we're not entering because we have too many players the same.

If we pick a 24, we're just kind of a nine in another 90 players.

Yeah, I suppose the big thing for us was teams don't transition along the way players do.

So it's never going to be a case of success in under-14.

And if you look at any sport, there's no correlation between under-13 or under-14 success and future performance or the transition from those players up to future teams.

So I think that was always the kind of perception.

I remember having a conversation with a fellow inside Clare And he said to me, we've got to win the water for Crystal, which was probably another way of calling the Tony Varsity because if we win it, you know, we'll win the minor and then we'll have a really good senior team.

And they all just had this kind of bias towards doing well under 14, doing well at 18 and then doing well at senior because there's probably a loose relationship there for one or two teams that was just staying in their minds.

And I suppose what we were trying to do was that isn't, that isn't the purpose of the development squads for us or was going to be the purpose of the development squads.

You know, we wanted to have a really kind of robust system where we could objectively stand over the development of players.

So we could say they came into us under 14 and they had these skills or these skill sets or these proficiencies at under 14 we're going to focus on this under 15 we're going to focus on this it's going to build a way up that we're going to develop players across I suppose a litany of areas and not just be fixated on can we pick that team to win the Tony Farris because then we don't really know what we did or how we did it, you know, and then that team's going to go on and be successful afterwards, you know? And I think if you can get people to take a small step back from the winning side of things, and we did do that because we did pull out of the Tony Farrisville back in 2017 or 2018, one of the first years, and it was met with, like, huge disdain in the county that, like, how could you do this? How could you pull out of this competition? It's so important.

And I suppose the...

The point was we're far more interested in the overall development and trying to remove ourselves from that winning element as the be-all and end-all because that impacts everything.

It impacts your selection decisions.

If there's a competition at the end of the day, you're going to try and pick the team to win the competition as opposed to you're going to try and focus on certain areas of development to ensure that they're actually getting better as opposed to they're just going to win, you know.