Costello: ‘Our motto that we’re giving to them now is to focus on next week’

IT must have had a real feel of the last supper about it. The Thursday evening after the lock-down was announced, the Kerry minor footballers had one last training session planned before the GAA collective training ban came into force in a couple of hours’ time, at midnight.

For the minor management team it provided one last opportunity to get their panel of players together before the gates swung shut at GAA grounds throughout the country. It was a chance for Kerry minor football manager James Costello to reassure and explain and start the process of getting his players to adjust to the new reality.

If you think that a bunch of fifteen to seventeen year olds might have been struggling to take the enormity of it all in, however, think again.

“The thing that surprised me and it’s boys, they just take things as they come, they don’t get too stressed about anything and they just deal with it and get on with it,” the St Pats man explains.

“I think they’ve been fantastic. Initially they were saying ‘what’s happening here?’, but they just accept it and deal with it and once you keep it to the bigger picture for them and it’s all about the bigger picture of what’s happening and that we will be playing football at some stage and we have to get through this first.”

In their last collective session, Costello and his management team began to put in place the foundations for what was to come with players being relied upon in a lot of ways to take responsibility for their own training regime.

“There was two phases to it,” Costello outlines.

“We sent them home at first and the guidelines were just no collective training so at that stage then our priority was that they were all on good strength programmes. So the first thing was to maintain the gym programmes and the first thing was to make sure they still had access to gyms.

“Then we gave them running programmes, but obviously it all changed last week when the gyms were closed and last week all the club gyms were closed so the programmes then were kind of thrown up again and they got sent out home gym programmes and even the running programmes were based on a

GAA pitch. So you run from one line to one sixty five or whatever and that’s gone out the window again. It’s just constantly changing.

“I suppose the one advantage we have had in Kerry is that the County Board have had a bit of foresight that they set up, all the county teams are using this app, it’s called RYPT, so we can send all the training programmes out to the lads through that and they can implement that then so we’re able to monitor it then and keep an eye on what they’re doing.

“This week now we’ve started with Google hangouts doing a bit of video work and those like that and you’re just doing video sessions with them online. I suppose the main reason is to keep them motivated to train on their own at home, but also just to give them some information as well.

“Suddenly all this technology is forced onto you whether you want it or not and you had to get familiar with these apps and you had to get Google hangouts and all these things like all the teachers. You have to adapt really quickly to get on top of the technology to maintain your links with the lads.” The support offered by the County Board has been top notch according to Costello. “It’s really good,” he confirms. “Obviously Jason [McGann] sat down with all our S&C guys to devise the programmes with us and we had to modify and things like that. Communication has been really clear. Christy Kileen is our liaison officer and Peter [Twiss] and Tim [Murphy] and all the officers are talking regularly and it’s coming back to us clearly and any time they get an update on what the Munster Council are thinking or what way things are coming nationally it comes down to us really quickly.” It came as no surprise to the Blennerville man when the start of the Munster Minor Championship – which was due to get underway next week – was delayed.

“I think they’re talking mid-April now and realistically that’s not going to happen either,” he says. “This is a long haul thing and we’re not really thinking at all about when the games are going to be on if you know what I mean, because we can’t control it you know?”

One thing that could become an issue for Costello and some of his players is the Leaving Cert. With a number of panellists due to sit the state examination, there’s a very real chance that it will clash with the Munster championship with it also being pushed later into summer due to COVID-19.

“Last year we’d only a couple of Junior Certs and a couple of Leaving Certs,” Costello explains.,

“We have the full spectrum in that some of the smaller schools don’t do transition year so we’d have lads who were seventeen doing the Leaving like a lot of us were in the old days. There’s still a few Leaving Certs and they’re the guys asking ‘what happens if the Leaving Cert is pushed back?’ and ‘how will that effect it?’ and all of that. It’s very fluid at the moment.”

Costello’s approach to the minors has been responsibly holistic. There are more important things than football and, yet, football can provide a focal point for people to cope in trying times.

“We left it alone for the first week or ten days just to catch a breath,” he says.

“We’d a really good batch of training done then and the thing is you don’t really want come down hard on top of them because it could be a long haul. Our motto that we’re giving to them now is to focus on next week, take it one week at a time.

“So in terms of their running sessions for the week, their conditioning for the week, don’t even think about when they’ll be playing, they will be playing again, let’s just deal with the six inches in front of our face, which is next week’s training programme and to avail of the opportunity to get on top of the books.

“We’re very conscious too and this goes out on all our communication to them that we’re aware that a lot of families are under pressure with this thing; whether that be health pressure, financial pressure or work pressure. Their parents have invested hugely in them so it’s probably pay-back time now for them to invest in their families.

“Another thing then that I would really see is probably the gap we’re all seeing at the moment is the groups of young lads hanging around together. We have to say really strongly to the lads that they’re leaders in their community and amongst their peers because they’re playing minors and there’s a responsibility on them, in their towns and villages, to really drill home on all the guidelines, because they’re probably more influential in their own group than people like you or me talking or Leo Varadkar or Simon Harris. If they [young people] see guys like them it will filter through a lot faster than other messages.”