GPA want financial support to protect ‘overwhelmed’ student players

PJ Fanning reckons he’s one of the lucky ones.

He has an inter-county manager in Waterford, Davy Fitzgerald, who has a strong affinity, through LIT, with the Fitzgibbon Cup. His manager and coach at Mary Immaculate for this year’s Fitzgibbon Cup success were cousins Jamie Wall and Podge Collins, who put no pressure or expectation on him during the campaign.

And at weekends, when he’s trying to fit in some part-time work at SETU, one of his employers is a fellow Mount Sion member, giving him more flexibility.

But the challenges of keeping pace with inter-county preparations in Waterford and balancing that as a final year primary school teaching student in Limerick while finding time for some part-time work is still difficult. Those challenges are at the core of the Gaelic Players’ Association’s latest ‘Student First’ report, which has found that almost two in every three student GAA athletes (63pc) feel “overwhelmed” by their commitment to their studies and sport and the time and financial pressures that brings.

There are weeks, Fanning (right) says, that he will travel 12 hours from Limerick to Waterford and back for training (including weekends), especially if there is a Tuesday-Thursday schedule to meet the demands of a Saturday game. It doesn’t always play out like that, and in that respect, it’s “beneficial” to him that Fitzgerald understands the demands on third-level student athletes. “Just to lessen that burden a slight bit is huge,” he said.

Some62pc of the 967 respondents to the survey felt county managers apply most pressure in January and February, with 53.2pc of the view that their inter-county manager is “supportive” of their involvement with the college team. That’s still only a little over half.

Over one in three GPA members are students, a sizeable cohort that the association’s chief executive Tom Parsons says are “most vulnerable”.

“They have most teams, most competitions, education, work and being an inter-county player,” he said. “You would need to be a seriously high performer to do this, but you need to have supports around you. There are so many stakeholders at play. Everybody needs to be aware of the challenges. There isn’t going to be one solution that will solve everything.”

The GPA want to put forward three main recommendations: to mitigate the impact of sport on academic studies, safeguard members’ experiences of playing third-level Gaelic games and provide better financial support. Currently, the GPA provides a circa €1,000 grant (898 students received €985,000 in scholarships in 2023 as part of an overall €1.7m education investment) to its student members, but with part-time work opportunities so limited because of weekends taken up with inter-county training, Parsons wants to see that increased.

Parsons is also advocating a “subset of rules and guidelines” for students within the various associations. “We don’t have a framework that inter-county managers are looking at and saying, ‘This is best practice’.”

As a member of the GAA’s Amateur Status Committee, convened by new GAA president Jarlath Burns, the ‘Student First’ report will likely find its way into their deliberations. The survey found that 62pc felt they didn’t have time for parttime work, while 84pc had to turn work down because of sporting commitment.

One of the report’s co-authors, Dr Aoife Lane (her co-author was Mayo footballer Dr Fiona McHale), suggested at its launch that a hardship fund could be established, such was the extreme nature of a few of the financial pressures they encountered. Dr Lane also suggested that students caught between inter-county and college team activity would prefer to have “decisions taken away from them”.