OFF THE GRID
It may be well under the radar here but Irish American football has a fiercely loyal following...
FOR years, Bill Dougherty didn’t realise that American Football even existed in Ireland. He would travel back and forth from Philadelphia, visiting his wife’s family in Swords, and never saw any evidence of the game being played. It was only when he and Maeve settled here, setting up home in Athboy, Co Meath, eight years ago, that he discovered the local scene.
Dougherty’s two sons, Conor and Liam, were decent High School players back in Pennsylvania – both offensive lineman like their dad had been – and one of them discovered the Westmeath Minotaurs through social media.
‘I had been coming over to Ireland quite a bit down the years and never came across [American] football, so I was shocked when after we moved here, one of my sons found this club in Westmeath on facebook,’ recalls Dougherty, who is now head coach of the Minotaurs as well as being Director of Coaching for American Football Ireland.
The Minotaurs will be one of eight teams in the American Football Ireland Premier Division when this season kicks off on March 3, alongside defending champions Dublin Rebels, UCD, South Dublin Panthers, Cork Admirals, UL Vikings, Belfast Trojans and Belfast Knights. There are a further 10 teams in Division One – the second tier.
A number of things have seen a surge in popularity for gridiron here over this NFL season which ends with the SuperBowl in Las Vegas tonight as the San Francisco 49ers will try to shut down Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Enniskerry’s Dan Whelan became the first Irish-born player in the league for 40 years as the starting punter for the Green Bay Packers while Monaghan goalkeeper Rory Beggan is part of a quartet of Irish athletes trying to become a kicker at the NFL combine in Indianapolis later this month.
And of course, there is the Taylor Swift factor, with the world’s biggest pop singer currently dating Chiefs star tight end Tarvis Kelce. ‘I have been involved in the sport for more than 20 years, my two daughters would come to the games and cheer us on, but they have never been more interested in the NFL or football as this season,’ laughs Alan Lomasney, head coach of Cork Admirals.
Lomasney has been involved with the Admirals since their inception in 2002. This is his third stint as head coach. He remembers how he got hooked, calling to his uncle’s house in Cork with the NFL being shown on television.
‘I started watching it when I was 13. I remember going to my uncle’s house and he had it on. This was back at a time when it was on Channel 4 and Myles Dungan used to present the hour-long highlights package on Network 2, as it was known back then,’ he says.
The Admirals will be one of many clubs hosting a SuperBowl party tonight for the big game, as both a fund-raising venture and a way of alerting the public to their existence. They are always on the lookout for new players.
‘We welcome everyone, it is the same with all the clubs,’ Lomasney says. ‘The thing about football is that there is a place for everyone, the sport caters for any size.’
Like any niche sport in Ireland, it goes through peaks and troughs of interest – they had as many as 22 fully-kitted teams at one stage – but the federation busy setting solid foundations in recent years. There are also 25 flag football teams, the non-contact version of the sport that is part of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 and whose European Championships were held in UL last August.
Eight of the teams, including the Minotaurs and Admirals, now have a youth football programme – to develop the skills of players from 15- to 18-year-olds. As the coach of the Ireland Under 19 Wolfhounds side – who played a Florida High School team last August as part of the College Football weekend – Lomasney has noticed first-hand the increasing number of teenagers playing the game.
‘We had try-outs for the team last month and there were 53 kids there, and there were probably another 15 or 20 who were bubbling under or couldn’t go, so that is brilliant, because that is the future of the sport. For years, we have had the GAA, rugby or soccer lads who wanted to try something different, but more and more kids are getting involved in the youth programme.’
The Pittsburgh
Steelers and Jacksonville
Jaguars were announced as the NFL’s international partners for Ireland last year. And while the Steelers have got the bigger profile – and it’s likely that they will play a regular season game at Croke Park in the coming years – the Jags have been doing their bit too through the Jag-Tag initiative, where they have gone into schools in Northern Ireland teaching Flag Football.
The Donegal/Derry Vipers are the only cross-border team among the 18 in the league. Having recently secured a 15-year lease on a base of their own in Greysteel, the Vipers are also working with the Jaguars to go into secondary schools around Derry.
‘There is a big push with the Jags now to get this Jag-Tag into more schools,’ said the Vipers chairman Mark Gillen. ‘They have already brought it to three secondary schools around here and there are plans to bring it to three more around Derry and Limavady. And because weare a cross-border team, we hope that the scheme will get into a couple of schools in Donegal, too.’
The Vipers are one of those eight teams with a youth football programme, which the Jag-Tag scheme can feed into. Six of their youth players were on the Ireland U19 team that played the Florida school last year. Youth football in Ireland begins at 15, but Gillen would hope to have players experiencing flag before that.
‘By 15, when they can play fullykitted football, most kids are already locked into one sport, whether it is GAA, soccer or rugby. I suppose this is about giving them another choice.’
The Vipers pull from all over the north-west corner of the island, with players coming from Letterkenny, Derry city, Inishowen and even as far away as Gweedore and Omagh. One of their more interesting players is Dan Danowski, their quarterback who was a star in High School football in the US but drifted away from the game when he moved to Derry, only returning to it last year. His grandfather, Ed Danowski, was a legendary quarterback for the New York Giants in the 1930s and 1940s.
There are a few American ex-pats in the league, such as Dougherty and Danowski, although more than 90 per cent of the players are Irish and usually disaffected GAA, rugby or soccer players. ‘There were more Americans in the league during the Celtic Tiger, because they would come over from the US on two or threeyear contracts with their
work,’ Lomasney says. ‘And the thing is they were amazed to see that you could play football here, because unless you go semipro, there is nowhere to play football after college in the States, unless you get drafted into the NFL and less than two per cent get that.’
Ty Henry, the quarterback who led the Dublin Rebels to last year’s Shamrock Bowl title, is one of those ex-pats. He came here because his fiancée, now wife, Rachel was from Dublin and wanted to move home. They had been living in Australia where Henry, who played Division One college football with University of Western Colorado, was playing professionally – and was named the league’s MVP in 2016 and 2017.
Since leaving college, he has played professionally, or semi-professionally, in Brazil, Spain, Germany and Australia. So, he’s in a good position to assess the quality of the league in Ireland.
‘I’ve played all over the world and
was playing in Spain with Mallorca Voltors when Covid hit and Rachel, who’s a Dub, wanted to move home to be closer her family. It’s amateur here while I have always played professional or semi-pro. But I think with the Rebels, we could hold our own in any of the leagues I’ve played in. We have a great core of guys in the Rebels, get a lot of south Dublin rugby guys, rather than GAA lads, because of where we are,’ says Henry of the club who are based at De La Salle in Palmerstown.
Dan Whelan’s story illustrates that those grounded in the big three sports of GAA, soccer and rugby can adapt to American football. Whelan was 15 when playing centrehalf in soccer for his school in California when the High School football coach noticed he had a good leg. From there, he has ended up in the NFL.
‘A lot of the skills of the big three sports here are transferable,’ Dougherty feels. ‘Gaelic players have got ball skills and there is a lot of running in GAA, a lot of pursuit angle running in both GAA and soccer, chasing and pursing an opponent, which is very suited to football. A lot of rugby players make good running backs, not just backs, but the blocking does baffle the rugby guys a bit.’
Joe Kinahan is quarterback for the Minotaurs, having come to flag football at 12 after falling out of love with soccer. He says that even though it can seem a complex game when watching the SuperBowl this evening, teams don’t overload novices with hundreds of defensive and offensive plays and just teach them the basics.
The equipment can be quite expensive, upwards of €500 or more for helmets and padding. ‘So, teams would have spare equipment that people can borrow for a season to see if they like the game,’ Kinahan points out. ‘We want to encourage as many people as possible to play.’
If you are passing through Mullingar or Palmerstown some evening next week and see floodlights shining at the local rugby club, there’s every chance that it is a team preparing for the upcoming Irish American Football league.
If some Mahomes magic inspires you tonight, there might be a place for you there.
In football, there’s a place for everyone... the sport caters for any size