Diarmuid O’Carroll on life on soccer sidelines
Killarney’s Diarmuid O’Carroll is making real strides in his coaching career with Motherwell, writes Damian Stack
IT was like something just clicked for him. He couldn’t get enough. He wanted – needed really – more. More information. More work. More experiences and experience. The harder it got, the more he liked it. The greater the challenge, the greater the sense of satisfaction at the end of it.
Coaching is as much a calling as a career. At the upper echelons, you’re either cut out for it or you’re not. The further he went down that route, the more obvious it became: this is what he wanted. This is what he was good at.
Diarmuid O’Carroll started out doing bits and bobs, here and there, while still a player. Dipping his toes coaching underage football as he remained one of the leading players in the Northern Irish League – the Killarney man was the winner of four consecutive league titles with Cliftonville and later Crusaders between 2012 and 2016.
The Northern Irish Premiership really was the perfect place for O’Carroll to be as he prepared himself for the next phase of his career. Part-time football allowed the former Celtic apprentice the time and space to develop his new craft in a way that just wouldn’t have been possible in a full-time playing environment.
It meant the attacker could work with Sport Northern Ireland and the Irish Football Association (the IFA), all the while weighing in with the goals and collecting silverware. It meant he could get a real head start on his coaching badges.
Without that grounding in Northern Ireland would he now be in a position – at just 33 years-of-age – to be the Under 20 and reserve team manager of the side sitting in third spot in the Scottish Premiership table? Possibly and probably not.
Belfast, then, has been good to O’Carroll – and not just because his good lady wife hails from there.
O’CARROLL has said in the past that you should play as long as you want, rather than as long as you can, and he retired relatively early once the coaching bug bit. A playing career that included time with Ross County, Airdrie United, Morecambe and Glenavon – as well as a brief spell in Iceland – gave him plenty of experience to draw on.
It’s still been a long road to Motherwell, however. O’Carroll compares the process of attaining his coaching badges to a college course, in terms of time, commitment and ultimately in cost.
“It’s probably a five-year process to get an A license at least if not longer,” he explains.
“I did mine reasonably quickly, because people take a year’s break in between and obviously the expense of it as well. It’s intensive. Like every qualification there’s assessments and assignments. There’s online content to submit.
“There’s obviously course work when you’re actually on the course as well, and you’re involved in it day-to-day. They can be quite intense alright, especially as you get higher and higher, the expectation and the level that you’d be working at, professional or youths at a professional level.
“Luckily enough I’ve got a UEFA A Licence and a UEFA Youth License, which I got in Scotland a couple of years ago, and a couple of English ones as well. I tried to get as many as I could to give myself the most well-rounded education.”
That diligence and perseverance is precisely what makes those dedicated to their craft and dedicated to making it to the very top stand apart. The difference between a B and an A licence and what it takes to get them is quite dramatic. It separates the wheat from the chaff.
“I think the eyes are opened on a B licence,” he suggests.
“I tutor on the B licence in Belfast for the IFA at the minute. I think you get a lot of insight straight away. People would say ‘I didn’t realise it would be this intense or this tough or this detailed.’
“It can frighten some people, while it can also stimulate other people who want it to get even harder again. It’s like anything. People find their level and in general a lot of grassroots coaches will go to B licence. Then you find the ones at A licence level. They are the ones who are potentially looking to get an income or a career from the sport in the long run.”
For O’Carroll that was the clear destination, and yet he still didn’t rush it. Even with the opportunity to skip ahead in the process because of his background as a former professional football, he opted to build his coaching qualifications and career from the bottom up. He surmised – correctly – that it would stand to him in the long-term – and it really was a long-term project.
The entry back into the professional game – not including the time he spent working for the
IFA – took about seven or eight years, all in all. The former Ireland Under 21 international’s big break in the world of coaching, when it came, took him all the way to Las Vegas of all places.
“I tutored on the B licence with the IFA,” O’Carroll explains.
“One of the casual tutors who comes in – he coached in the league for years – worked with a company in the States as a recruiter, mainly for college students who were looking for three months’ work in the summer kind of thing.
“He mentioned to me a few times that they were looking for coaches to fill high end positions in clubs, basically. Directors of coaching, technical director roles. I had been in the IFA for almost five years at the time and it was one of those things where I felt I needed to leave to jump a level again.
“So it would have been that kind of thing or taking a punt in England or Scotland. It was harder to get in there – there was no opening at the time. So I said ‘why not? I’ll look at any options that come up.’”
The very first offer was a director of coaching role at Downtown Las Vegas Soccer Club.
“The opportunity to live in Vegas is fantastic,” he says.
“A life opportunity. The club was well structured. It was 500odd kids. I had carte blanche on the technical side of things. Over 30 or 40 staff and stuff, so in that way it ticked all the boxes for the next level of experience. I just took the punt.
“The problem with it was that I was probably involved with that move for two and a half years and because of visa things I didn’t get to go over and back a lot. It’s funny because it seems that by the time I got the job I left the job quite quickly afterwards, but I’d been involved with them for a number of years before that.”
The football culture in the States is incredibly interesting and utterly different from what you might expect in Europe. The quality of coaching and of players at youth level is excellent, and the quality of player is exceptionally good too. All the focus, however, is geared towards getting players to college more so than towards a career in professional football.
“It’s a flawed model for producing an international team,” O’Carroll argues.
“It’s a very good model to create a student athlete and people focussed on education as well as sport, but at 21 it’s done. Then they go off and go regular jobs and those players are lost from the potential pool of fellas who would be Under 21 internationals trying to become a senior.”
The chance to live the American dream, to sample life in Vegas was nearly as much of a draw as the coaching role. Possibly one of the strangest things about life in Vegas was how normal – and suburban – it was for the most part, apart from the “madness of the strip”.
That made leaving Las Vegas difficult, but the lure of home was great. When O’Carroll’s move back to Europe coincided with a job opening in Scotland, the timing couldn’t have been better.
MOTHERWELL is in a part of the world the former Killarney Athletic man was more than familiar with: the greater Glasgow area. It meant following in the footsteps of one of his best mates, Darren O’Dea, who had recently departed the role to accept a position at Celtic.
That the two men were good friends – dating back to their time with Dublin schoolboy club Home Farm – was entirely coincidental to O’Carroll’s appointment. As a matter of fact they had previously been in competition for the Motherwell Under 18 manager’s job when it first became available, with the Dubliner winning out.
O’Carroll still greatly impressed the higher ups at the top-flight side, as his appointment in September of last year demonstrated. All the hard work was coming to fruition, which isn’t to say there isn’t a hell of a lot of hard work to come.
Still, it’s the kind of challenge the former striker relishes. Motherwell is a small club and that provides him with a greater opportunity to learn.
“There’s the manager, the assistant manager, the reserve manager and the Under 18s manager. They’re the four fulltime, on-field coaching staff,” he explains.
“Then you have the sports scientists, goalkeeping coach, and the physios and stuff. There’s actually only four coaches, and I’m the fourth-highest coach in the club. You have an awful lot of involvement with the first team.
“Every morning we’d have a meeting and the manager would look for input on players, signings, team selection. We’d come down at half-time [in a game] and give our feedback on what we’ve seen. So the manager has to be involved in it and also has an awful lot of balls in the air.”
All of which means that – with Motherwell flying high on the watch of former Northern Ireland international Stephen Robinson – it’s also a very enjoyable place to work.
“I’m loving it at the minute because I get to see everything – warts and all – with the manager and you get to understand how they make what seem like massive decisions and tactical decisions. You’re involved in everything. There’s no part of it that you really miss out on and that goes down to signings and contracts and everything, which is great.
“At bigger clubs, say at Celtic or Rangers or somewhere like that, an 18s manager might have six staff under him, whereas I don’t. You might be pulled in if there’s a first-team player who needs an extra session.
“Or being the reserve team manager as well as the Under 18s manager, although it seems like you’re doing a lot more work, you’re getting a lot more experience because you’re hands-on with so many things. It’s great.”
In his nine or so months at Motherwell, O’Carroll has already been promoted – for want of a better word – once. He made the step up from Under 18 to Under 20 boss when the club had an internal reshuffle of staff. Still, we ought not be getting ahead of ourselves thinking about him taking a manager’s role any time soon. The man himself isn’t anyway.
“To be completely honest I’m still not 100% sure,” he says when asked if he has designs on being a first-team manager.
“I’m a big believer that there’s certain personalities that are very good as managers and there are certain personalities that are very good as assistant managers or coaches or reserve managers. It’s hard to say right now whether I want to be a manager.
“For example the manager who’s in there at the minute is in his early to mid forties, but he’s only been a manager for two or three years. He was an assistant for years, whereas in comparison I just turned 33.
“I’ll probably know more in five or six years once I progress. I might get the urge to go ‘right I want to be the main man’ or I just love coaching, so maybe I want to be an assistant or a coach at a first-team level. It’s hard to put your finger on.
“It’s kind of like having a midfielder who you know can’t play a long pass, but he keeps trying to do it. That’s ambition, but it’s stupid ambition. It’s one of those ones. Sometimes you have to recognise where your skill set lies and I’m still deciding and working that out for myself.”
For now the focus is where it has to be: on the job at hand. On coaching and developing players. His years at Celtic – where he played alongside O’Dea and another Ireland international, Aiden McGeady, at youth level – gave him a great insight into what the young men in his charge are experiencing. It also gave him a model he’d like to emulate.
“The fella who signed us was Tommy Burns,” he says of the former Celtic midfielder, youth coach and first-team manager, who passed away in 2008.
“He’s very much who I’d look to as a guy you’d like to have been like. He was funny, but also bang on with his coaching and articulate in his message and things like that. He was quite stern and could be quite harsh at times, but at the same time he was friendly and he’d be there for you.
“You look at the people who coached you as a kid and think ‘right, were they terrible? How can I be better?’ Or you think ‘were they brilliant? Can I be like them?’ Even now speaking to players – we have a number of players out of contract and they’re only 17. You’re looking at your own playing career and you’re thinking ‘I don’t want to be lied to’ or ‘I don’t want to be messed about.’
“You just want to tell people straight and try and help them out and not potentially release a player and go ‘he’ll land on his feet, he’ll be fine’. If you’re releasing someone now you really try and help them reach the next stage and help them mentally and everything with it because you’ve experienced the ups and downs.”
At the moment O’Carroll’s career is, like everything else, temporarily stalled by COVID-19. Most of the staff at Motherwell have been furloughed, and the Under 20 boss – who’s back at base in Belfast for the duration of the crisis – doesn’t expect the Under 18 and 20 season to be completed.
“We’re shooting in the dark because we don’t really know,” he says.
“Obviously with youth and reserves stuff it’s a fair assumption to assume nothing will happen... If I was putting a bet on, I’d say it’ll be a fresh start in July or it could be August.”
On his coaching journey so far O’Carroll has already shown ample patience. A couple of months aren’t going to put him off his stride. It’s onwards and upwards for the ambitious Killarney man.