‘New normal’ even busier than before
RUNNING a modern-day GAA club was no walk in the park even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit us like a steam train - but a difficult job just got considerably more challenging.
While we all yearned to see the walkways re-open, the kids back out getting some structured and meaningful exercise, or dare we say it, watch a full-blooded Championship match, the work required behind the scenes to make it all happen has been a real eye-opener for already stretched clubs.
Before a ball can even be kicked in anger, new training schedules have had to be drawn up, registration records needed to be updated, online training courses had to completed by all players or guardians of underage members and more volunteers recruited to help out with training sessions.
If anything, following such a prolonged break, the numbers of juvenile players returning to clubs has increased, while the usual ‘thinning’ of numbers due to family holidays just won’t happen this summer.
The demand for Cul Camp places is a big as ever, but many clubs have been forced to put a cap on the numbers permitted to register, pending further easing of Government restrictions.
As chairman of one of the biggest clubs in the county in respect of membership, Brian Cafferty has witnessed the ‘new normal’ first hand over the last few weeks.
‘The restrictions have eased a little bit,’ he reveals. The first set of guidelines involved temperature checking and all sorts of controls, but thankfully we’ve rowed back from that a bit.
‘It’s still time consuming and there’s big, big numbers looking to come back to play and to make matters worse we dug up and re-seeded our second pitch five weeks ago, just before the call was made to start opening up again.’
The closure of the second pitch has meant Brian and his committee have had to phase the club’s return to action, but he feels it may be no harm.
‘It might be a blessing in a way because we’re having to come back bit by bit. We had the senior men back last week and then the senior ladies in the middle of the week and the minors on Friday night.
‘We haven’t got to the underage groups yet. We know everyone wants to get straight back out there, but it’s all about doing it safely.’
Geraldines use a smart phone app called ClubZap to organise their club communications. It deals with everything from membership tracking to sending messages about training sessions.
The club also use it to distribute the GAA’s mandatory health questionnaire to members and when training takes place COVID reps use it to record exactly who turns up for training, should contact tracing ever be required.
‘The first thing is your membership has to be paid and up to date or you’re not allowed into the grounds,’ Brian continues. ‘Then you have to do the GAA online induction course and fill out the health questionnaire each week. Unless all that is up to date in ClubZap you cannot train.
‘It’s a lot of work but it just has to be done. I think I heard that there was a one in a million chance of an outbreak in a club, or something like that, and then you hear of a club in Kilkenny with a cluster after the first week [of re-opening].’
With 27 club fixtures already made for a nine-week period, and training sessions ramping up all the time, McGeough Park, like every other ground in the country, will be at maximum capacity, even when the second pitch is back in use.
But Brian feels it’s all worth it. ‘Oh yes we’re glad to be back and hopefully it will get a bit easier as we go along. I have to say the COVID officers are absolutely crucial to it all and they’re doing a great job.’
As well as all the matches and training sessions, the Haggardstown venue will host a Cul Camp in the first week of August and it sold out in an eye-watering 16 minutes.
‘We’d normally have between 220 and 250 but we’re limited to 120 this year. We usually run another camp later in the summer so if we can get that up and running this year it might make
up for some of the disappointment.
‘To be fair to the GAA, they gave us the exact time they’d be opening the Cul Camp registration, so that we would inform our members and prevent non members from signing up and the limiting of numbers is understandable at the moment.’
It’s all part of the post-COVID era and for the Geraldines and every other club around the country this ‘new normal’ is even busier than the old one.