Winning Minor All-Irelands: Strength & Conditioning for Young GAA Players | Jamie Dalton & Diarmaid Carr

year.

We'll use some of your soccer experience there, so we were in the academy for the few years you did and that was a range of 14 to 18-ish or was it 14 to 20? When I started the youngest age

group was 13, so you committed 12s as fast as you could.

introduced me the last couple of years to the pre-academy so you'll actually have kids that are 11 and 12 coming in as well so that's like an unofficial age group but it's essentially to try to get them in give them a taste of what League of Ireland kind of academy football looks like they still play for their clubs but yeah really the youngest age groups that I would have been coaching for is probably 12 and up would say I would have been in for or not full-time but as full-time kind of academy players in terms of their training at all

And the stuff you were doing at the academy, how much of that did you first of all expect to bring across to the minors and ultimately how much did you actually bring across but had to change a

bit? I probably brought across the majority of the way that I would approach it.

a lot of times coaches talk about their philosophy in a way sometimes in college they're told to draw up your philosophy but my philosophy I would say is somewhat fluid in terms of like I will try fit the team that I'm with so For me, I knew working with the Waterford FC players, I'd be their S&C coach with some of those players from the time they were 11 or 12 years of age until they were 20, sometimes beyond when I worked with the first team.

But the approach of the minors was that coming in at 16 years of age, and although there had been good work done before, it wasn't with me.

So I'm kind of going, I'm not totally sure in terms of... their level or standard or what they've been exposed to because I probably have a different approach and coaching method to what's come before so I think in terms of you know I would think my approach to actual programming is quite simple and I think we've spoken about this a little bit in the past I don't like to make things overly complicated I think just doing the basics well over time consistently is kind of what I try to get from them um but it's more i did take we you know touch on that later i suppose but i did bring some elements of what i would have done in terms of culturally within football over at the hurling in a way but i also found you don't want to go into a new environment a new sport and try to change the culture i had to kind of meet in the middle to some degree with that too i think

Yeah, I think you can go into it.

I know we're at half planned on doing it later, but I was thinking we could go now.

But I think you can go for now because even like changing the culture, you're also going in with a group of coaches who have been with a group for three years.

So there is probably an element of, well, they all know each other really well to an extent as a background team and as a background team with players and you're new there.

So it's both a new sport and... a group of people who are already somewhat comfortable with each other over time.

So how do you balance me bringing in here what I'm doing while also at the same time trying to figure this group of people out and what are they likely to go with or maybe go against and stuff?

Yeah, I suppose one of the things is the group that I got involved with, the Moyners, I really looked out in terms of they're actually a group that have all gone really well and specifically knew their roles.

So I think one thing for me going in with the Hurlers is like when even in the initial meeting when i met the manager joxer i made it very clear to him the ga is not my background so if he's willing to take me on board he has to understand that i'm not going to be able to run horrid drills from and usually you know that's probably a deal breaker i would imagine for some coaches because they want you to be a jack of all trades but he was very much well i have my coach for this i have my you know my analysis for this i have somebody that works on set pieces put make him strong, make him fast, make him fit, essentially.

I'm not looking for you to do anything else.

And that was music to my ears because it was very much, here's your role as defined.

And even for me, getting to know the way they worked, it's like, that never changed.

So it's all well and good him saying that to me day one.

Six months in, it's he then asking me to do things that I'm not able to do or might be out of that remit that we discussed at the start.

But it never was.

It was very clear and defined.

And coming into a group that that had been on a journey, some of them more than three years because they worked in kind of underage levels as well.