TO THE FUTURE

age years are not going to get a chance to perform or make the grade against stronger counties if you’ve only one team, Wicklow Schools, playing Senior football ‘A’, you’ve one school in Carnew playing ‘B’ football, Senior, four schools at ‘C’ and four at ‘D’. That’s what it looks like. That’s the picture. In hurling, nobody at ‘A’, nobody at ‘B’, Senior hurling at ‘C’ there’s one, and the rest are in Senor hurling ‘D’.

“There’s one team at Junior, looking ahead ot next year, at under 16 and a half, at Junior, which is the preparatory competition at schools level for the Minor for 2018, there’s only one team playing Junior ‘B’ and the rest are at ‘C’ and ‘D’.

“And I don’t think we’ll be allowing group teams into the Junior competition from next year. So, what do we do?

“At third level, there’s 560 players registered on panels of 35. In Sigerson and Fitzgibbon, there’s four players from Wicklow registered on panels in Sigerson, five in Fitzgibbon.

“You’ve no under-21 club competition here in Wicklow so the point I’m making is that there’s a lack of opportunity at club, schools, and third level and inter-county level for talented players to be exposed to a higher standard of hurling and football in this county.

“So, you have a gap when the club season stops here for your Minor and even your Senior, Wicklow have a gap probably from October all the way to April for Minors.

“The issue here is, when you’ve other counties who are playing in compeitions at senior in schools ion ‘A’ and ‘B’, some counties have a lot of under-21 competitions at club level, maybe under-17 (competitions) at club level, there’s lads playing at a high stadard in Freshers, Fitzgibbon and Sigerson, there could be a five-month period here in winter where the players ye want to push through to play inter-county Senior hurling and football are not getting the opportunity to be tested.

“And that to my mind is the most important slide here if we’re to talk about what Stratford-Grangecon are talking about in the context of under-performance. We’re not giving lads a chance.

“It’s not anyone’s fault per se, it’s the structure, and you need to manipulate and manufacture ways and come up with innovative ways of how do you get around that.

“Dublin decided in the late 90s, they decided to come up with a group team in Senior hurling ‘A’.

“They went from one, then to two, then they got Coláiste Eoin and Coláiste Eanna up to Senior hurling ‘A’ as well, so they worked at it.

“They came up with innovative ways of how to get up here (to ‘A’ level).

“I would suggest that, from the point of view of participation and standards, that you need to look at something at under-19 or under-20 during the winter, and you could look at a Kerry championship model or something like that; club group, give lads cut and thrust games, three or four games, and you could use it then by way of trial or something like for under-20 inter-county.

“In my mind that’s crucially important in terms of where we need to go.

“I suppose, the availability of inter-county players, that needs to be looked at, as a recommendation. And then we had club or group under-21 competition to help break through. We’re talking about reviewing the Junior and Intermediate competitions.

“They were, in a broad sense, what came out of the work that we did last year, and a lot of things have begun to move and chance in fairness.

“What we’re talking about doing now is a more consultative process where we meet with clubs like yoursleves.

“I met with Hollywood just before the meeting about a motion they supported for Congress and it was enlightening and I heard a lot about fixtures and numbers and that sort of thing. We need to get into the nitty gritty here. I can’t just come back and say, “Do all this”, and it’ll be perfect - it won’t.

“We need to get buy in from everybody.

“So, looking forward to that, in terms of what Stratford-Grangecon wanted, they wanted to look at the reasons why teams appear to under-performing at all grades and devise a solution.

“What we’re looking at doing is looking at the game at child, youth and adult level, looking at participation.

“From the surveys back so far, participation seems to be very high at under-12, low either side of that, and particularly low when you get to under-19.

“I also looked at the club membership system and it’s a little bit worrying that clubs are waiting until players are under-12 before they register players but it’s a little bit concerning the trend over the last number of years,te number of players being registered, say at eight for the start of the Go Games.

“So, we need to find out why that is.

“We’re going to look at the coaching, competitions, facilities, resources, education, the people and above all the support structures around that to help players develop.

“The group, including myself, Michael Dempsey, Tim Healy, James Devanne provincial games manager, Fintan Fahy, Dave Tutty and I’ve one other person who I hope to announce early next week who has the business acumen that was mentioned, who has huge experience with regard to inter-county teams as well, that will compliment what we are all doing.

“Liam O’Neill is Chairman of Leinster Coaching and Games and Liam will also have an input.

“We also sent out a survey to those involved in the inter-county academies and football squads and only seven came back which was disappointing.

“In terms of feedback and maybe things that need to be explored and identified further. Fixture planning and scheduling. As I said to you, a huge amount of cancellations, that’s not good enough.

“Competition from other sports, lack of success making inter-county attractive for both players and coaches.

“When I asked the question is there a clear vision or a strategy in the county, it’s fairly obvious that there’s not and that has to be looked at, and that’s a shared vision.

“Recruitment and volunteers, participation as regards rural and urban, the drop off from under-14 up, and the big thing there was, fixtures are excellent, the Go Games are excellent, everybody talked about how positive the Go Games was, and that’s a big plus in the survey, but obviously then there’s a drop off at under-14 and up and obviously that has to be addressed.

“Support and education, and I mentioned it earlier on, in terms of games development personnel, again, maybe we need to be more focused.

“There’s lots of toehr things that would have came out of that (survey), like 90 per cent of clubs have a nursery programme, 90 per cent of clubs are providing club-school link, most clubs felt that coaching in the clubs is good or very good, people felt that it was beneficial to have their players involved in county teams and development squads, they felt that one of the big positives at the moment would be the GCA and the county teams, and they felt that we need to get more players involved to show them that it is a good product.

“I have to say that the feedback in general would have been generally positive and constructive. That’s the initial feedback we got.

“What we’ll do, in terms of next steps, is to review the survey, we’ll look at other documents, we have a document on fixtures from 2008, we’ll have that survey out to academy, Minors, 21 and we’ll also have the Senior coaches (surveyed) as well, focus group meetings with the County Board, club officers, in a follow up to the survey, schools, inter-county coaches, sponsors, and players.

“And the plan would be that, I’d say April 12 for the first focus group meeting which would be with clubs.

“What I’ll do that night is put up more detailed feedback that we got, come up with the mani themes that came out of it and we’ll talk constructively around where do we go with these things and what needs to happen.

“And I hope that between the group we have, if not the end of May, probably June, we’ll have something ready that will be clear actions following which we will have the bones of a plan in place that can be implemented going forward into 2018,” he said.