Tattan relishes onerous task
Re-building process in hands of keen east Cork native
AFTER A disastrous 2019 campaign which saw Wexford narrowly avoid relegation to the All-Ireland Intermediate camogie championship, it was clear that the County Board needed to change course and think a little outside the box.
They set their nets out wide enough to snare something a little different, as that recruitment process ended when they chose Kevin Tattan, a Corkman taking his first steps into the management game.
However, it’s not like his appointment was straight out of left field, as Tattan had polished a smattering of strings to his bow in the years beforehand, both on and off the playing field.
Tattan completed a degree in Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Limerick, which sent him on his first adventure.
‘In my final year in UL I went to Australia for a season and worked with the West Coast Eagles, that was in a sports science capacity,’ he explained.
‘So it would have been looking at the GPS workloads, looking at the player workloads and trying to prevent injuries, so you kind of get a holistic view of what a high performance setting is, because the AFL (Australian Football League) is probably far in advance of anything that’s going on at the moment in professional sport.’
Tattan came back after the year down under and started exploring his interest in strength and conditioning. A Masters in Sports Science specialising in S&C followed which gave him the opportunity to develop his skills in another professional environment at Derby County.
He came back home to take up an all-encompassing position with Cork City, which saw him take charge of ‘all the high performance elements of the club in terms of strength and conditioning, sports science, nutrition, and then feeding that back down into the academy age groups as well’.
At the same time, Tattan was competing on the pitch with his home village club, Russell Rovers. The Shanagarry side in east Cork didn’t have much of a history of success but have been building in recent years and made it all the way to this season’s All-Ireland Junior hurling final.
‘We’ve had some good coaching the last couple of years,’ Kevin explained. ‘Frank Flannery [ex Oulart-The Ballagh] was involved with the team in 2018, then Noel Furlong, who will be the Cork Minor manager next year, coached the team last year (2019).
‘I think that kind of came together this year. We had a very strong county championship campaign, we were pretty convincing enough in all our games up until the semi-final of the All Ireland when we were most tested.
‘We ended up having a poor last 15 minutes and it went to extra-time, and we kind of blew them away in extra-time but it was disappointing in the end [the final], it’s something you maybe look back on in ten or 15 years.
‘It’s kind of a bitter taste now, especially when you don’t perform, it’s a disappointing note to end the year on.
‘I suppose what it meant to the community was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was all anyone could talk about.
‘There was people travelling home from the States, from England, and from all over the place just to get to games, so it was a very special year that way.’
While competing with Russell Rovers over the last few months, Kevin had been preparing Wexford for the year ahead. He is keen to point out that it’s been a team effort so far, with no stone left unturned in getting a quality backroom team together.
As well as Neil Cullen and Cathal D’Arcy coming on board from last season’s Minor team, Tattan has added a string of others to form a cohesive unit including Niall Cafferty, Richie Hendrick, Shauna Harper, Ann Marie Kennedy, Lenny Browne, Amanda Bolger, Louise Mulhare and Mary O’Reilly.
Their tasks range and vary but it’s clear that Tattan spent a lot of time making sure he had the right people involved.
The Cork native is keen to explain that, as important as it was to get professionals on board, it was also critical to get good, genuine people.
One who has been critical when it came to getting to know the available players is Junior manager Alan Brennan. As well as scouring hours of video, Tattan has leaned heavily on the Oulart-The Ballagh clubman’s knowledge.
‘Alan has been unbelievably helpful to me,’ Tattan said. ‘Alan would have a really good grasp on all the players that are available, he would be very in touch with the club scene in Wexford, and he was able to help me in terms of collecting that database of players.
‘There was probably a certain amount of players I knew from seeing videos that would be in our senior group, but the extension of that was that we needed to see everybody. So there was a trial period where there was a few games and we tried to see as many people as possible.
‘I got to see over a hundred players in that period from video or from our selectors being very familiar with the players, so what we did was just start off with that and work our way down then.
‘We are still working off an extended group of, I think, around 45 players between the Senior and Junior teams.
‘So where we have quite a large numbertoworkwith,wefeelifwe can develop as many players as possible and feed that back into the club system, that will help develop some of the club players so that will feed back into the whole ecosystem of Wexford camogie.’
Without a Junior team in the league, Tattan has managed to keep all those interested.
In fact, the way it has worked out, those initially in the second panel, without league games to prepare for, have had more game time than the first string.
‘We didn’t see the value of travelling with 30 players and potentially only 18, 19, 20 playing game time, and the other players sitting on the bench and doing a little bit of running at the end of the game.
‘We didn’t see value in that, so what we had set up was a lot of challenge matches and, in actuality, because of the cancellations to our Senior fixtures, which would have been in the Intermediate league, the girls that were not involved in those games ended up getting more game time. It worked out funny in the end.’
While Tattan admits that it was frustrating to see game after game postponed, he was delighted to finally get under way against Kerry a while back, and was pretty happy with how it went overall.
‘Yeah, the first game was always going to be a bit jittery, a bit rusty, trying to get that chemistry between players in their position,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was never going to be perfect, we were very happy with the application.
‘There was some really good things that we worked on that were implemented, so we were happy with a lot of it.
‘We did identity things that we did want to improve on. Unfortunately, with the current situation and how that developed, we haven’t been able to develop on from that game.
‘Look, it was a good starting point for us, it was a comfortable win in the end, we would have liked to do some things better but we were very happy with how things went.’
Unfortunately and unavoidably, that has turned into Tattan’s only game so far. Like the rest of the country, he has no idea what’s coming next and when it will happen but, given the amount of work done so far, many in the county will be interested to see how the side shapes up if they do return to action in the summer.