Derry GAA unveil ‘vision of the county’s future’ with new development plan

The thoughts of Damian Cassidy, Ulster and All Ireland winning player, championship winning manager at clubs in three counties and now the man charged with overseeing a five year development plan Derry GAA hope will revolutionise football in the Oak Leaf county and place it back among the game’s top performers.

The Bellaghy native, alongside fellow sub-committee members Bobby Farren (Coaching and Games Officer), Chris Collins (Games Development Manager), Philip Kerr, Sean McGoldrick, Danny Quinn, Chris McNicholl and Brian O’Donnell took their investigation to the country’s top performing counties, meeting with Dublin CEO John Costello and the All Ireland champions’ Games Development Manager, Ger O’Connor, as well as Stephen O’Shaughnessy (Football Development Officer in Dublin) and Kerry’s Coaching Officer, Terence Houlihan.

Their remit was simple. Discover best practise and apply it to Derry. With the COVID enforced lockdown providing plenty of spare time, the group spent the best part of eight months interviewing, discussing and reviewing how football is run throughout Ireland before last week presenting their findings to clubs for consideration.

The result? An exciting and wide ranging, bottom-up plan that focuses clubs firmly at the centre of its strategy. It’s a ‘help us help you help yourselves’ mantra that aims to provide more opportunities to players of all grades. The emphasis on Junior and Intermediate grades is a refreshing approach aimed at increasing competition at every level, as well as widening both the player pool and with it the standard of player available to the county managers by exposing the best from every level to the senior club championship.

There are no shortage of points to consider in a wide ranging document which seeks to overhaul the county’s current league and championship structure, place Games Promotion Officers in every club, look into short term transfers for struggling Junior clubs, create regional district teams and expand the current Go Games structure.

Cassidy and his committee insist this is no short term solution, no magic pill to cure all problems and admit the success of the proposals will depend largely on the buy-in from the clubs

“We weren’t given targets as such. We were asked to carry out a review of adult and juvenile games in Derry, that’s just the long and short of it,” explains the former Derry manager,

“Hurling had put in place a senior programme two years ago which seemed to be positive so we had to look at everything else. The undercurrent strategy is that it’s pitched at club level from start to finish. It’s about helping clubs to improve what they are doing, to upskill coaching within clubs on a regular basis, to ensure there are strong relationships built within each of the feeder primary schools and get as many children as possible from those schools tied into clubs so that development continues on within the club.

“I’m not going to turn around and say all the senior clubs are operating at their optimum as regards coaching because I don’t know. There’s no point me saying that because I simply don’t know. One of the recommendations is that there is an audit carried out within each club to identify their strengths and weaknesses and put a plan in place around that.

“We asked ourselves a very simple question: If you are a club and you haven’t produced a senior county player in the last 40 years, then there is something fundamentally not right. It cannot just be a case of numbers and people, i.e., a rural club has a small turnover. It has to be something else that isn’t happening if even one player hasn’t come through to play for Derry at senior level.

“The other element that was a measure was Derry Junior clubs who, unfortunately, at provincial level in the Ulster Club, have had a really rough time. We have had no teams holding their own in that environment. Even our Intermediate teams have been sparse in terms of holding their own.

“If you use Tyrone or Donegal as a barometer, they are having teams dominate Intermediate and Junior levels in Ulster so therefore it is a wider pool of players. “There’s no doubt there are pockets of areas where they would like to have a bigger impact in terms of the population but for us, you can clearly see that the areas of the county, areas that produce a significant percentage of the population, where we are not getting players of the calibre we need.

“The responsibility of the County Board is to help those clubs to become better clubs in terms of community, infrastructure and coaching so this bit is trying to address the coaching element to improve what is happening.

“This is certainly not a document that is designed to tell clubs what to do and say, ‘We know better than you’. It is not like that. The document is there to say we are prepared to help. It is a partnership approach in terms of the coaching revolution that we are proposing, a 50/50 approach. You cough up half and we match that half and make sure your elite coach in that club is getting upskilled regularly.

“We will put a structure in place in terms of accountability to make sure that the targets we are setting are starting to be achieved over a five to 10 year period.”

Cassidy said the committee were confident the plan could deliver for Derry but said to do so it must be implemented in full and with patience.

“Anyone who thinks they are going to get something out of this in 12 or 24 months are not looking at it properly,” explained Cassidy, “This is a five, 10 year strategy.

“The way we have set this up, and we are absolutely confident in saying this, you can’t cherry pick this. If you cherry pick it, it will collapse, it won’t work and in 10 years you will come back and you won’t see significant change. It is all inter linked to ensure we can get the outcomes we are hoping to get at the end of it all. Anyone going into it and cherry picking from it is setting themselves up for failure.”

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