DAY IN A LIFE: GARY KEEGAN, DIRECTOR OF THE IRISH INSTITUTE OF SPORT:Gary Keegan is absorbed by putting in place structures which help our elite athletes reach their potential
THE FIRST thing to catch your eye as you enter Gary Keegan’s office at the Irish Institute of Sport is the large photograph on the wall above his desk of the late Darren Sutherland kissing his Olympic bronze medal.
His big smiley head, holding the medal up to his puckered lips in glorious technicolour. Keegan coached him as a boy, watched him raise a tricolour in the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing as a man and walked behind his hearse 20 months ago feeling like they were about to bury a son.
As he takes his seat behind the desk at 7.45 each morning, Sutherland’s face is the last thing he sees before he turns to switch on his computer. Doesn’t feel like it’s accidental.
Keegan doesn’t really do accidental. Director of the IIS since just after Beijing, he’s taken what was a listing, directionless quango with no particular definable purpose in life to a stage where he can point to tangible, quantifiable results now.
He deals in technical plans and operational structures and all the things that make normal people want to remove their own eyes with a corkscrew. He’s earnest as a letter from the Revenue but is driven by the sight and power of far-off dreams.
Except he wouldn’t call them dreams. He’d probably call them motivational objectives of aspiration or some such.
The job of the IIS is to be the technical arm of John Treacy’s Irish Sport Council. In English, that means going forensically through the systems and structures of each sport in the land and working out how the Irish sportspeople who are sent out into the world are formed and what can be done to send them there better than before.
“Last week, we were reviewing the performance planning process for high performance across the sports,” he says. “Within that process, you have everything contained. It’s a conduit through which every single thing that affects performance is fed.
“From financial investment through to coaching investment, competition plans, preparation plans, science and medicine support plans, the processes that each of the sports use for high performance. Everything is in that. It’s right in at the coalface, aiming at Rio and beyond.
“We surveyed the whole sports community, all the performance directors. We now have a clear picture of where every sport is in terms of high performance. We know which ones are in development zone, which ones are in high performance and which ones are miles away from it.
“We have a clear picture for each sport, not on the basis of guesswork or assumptions but on the basis of what has been fed into us by each sport. That’s very powerful. That was never done in Ireland before to this level.”
He spent this morning in a review and debrief session with “one of the national teams who have just come back from an international competition”.
He doesn’t want to say who it was but because The Irish Times will stop at nothing for truth and information (or at least will read the names written above it in the guestbook when signing in), we can reveal it was Warren Deutrom and Phil Simmons, chief executive and national team coach from Cricket Ireland.
The World Cup was a campfire jamboree and it’s Keegan’s team’s job now to sift through the embers. What went right? What went wrong? What changes for next time? It’s a full-cavity search and it’s the same for everyone, regardless of sport and unaffected by success.
“We go in and we ask what the goals and objectives are. What are the activities that underpin the delivery of them? Those two things are easy. Then we ask what’s the rationale and that’s the critical part. It’s going down another level, deep into the sport.
“Why this? Why that? When you’re clear on the why, that gives you the confidence needed to take an athlete or a team or a sport with potential to the point where they can realise it. That’s the beauty of it and the power of it.”
This stuff fascinates him. There is little in his world that can’t be explained in 15 minutes with a black marker and a flip-chart. And he knows very well it’s about as sexy a collection of logarithms.
“Sorry now, this is a bit boring and anoracky,” he says before launching into a passionate description of a plan he’s devising for an “internal system for performance facilitation I’m trying out on my own team in-house”.
Essentially, he’s going to treat his eight staff as if they were sports team, with goals and systems and all that jazz.
He’d hate that phrase, all that jazz. Too loose, too unfocused. Vagueness is kryptonite to him. Before he became high performance director for amateur boxing, that sport had a vague idea of where it was headed and vague notions about how to get there.
His time in charge was all about crystallising targets and filtering out distractions. Objectives, systems, delivery, results. This job covers more ground but the steps don’t change.
“One of the challenges in terms of my own engagement with this job has been finding a vision for it. I need to be clear on a vision of what it is we’re trying to achieve. Because there’s an element of this job being anything you want it to be. I thought about becoming an authority on high-performance. I thought that might be a nice thing to be. So I asked myself, how would you measure that? Well, people would ask you any time they had a question about high-performance and some day the bigger sports might come asking too. That’s something we’re working towards.
“Then the other thing I decided I wanted for the Institute was that I would be able to look at a national system that wasn’t just a one-off thing for a particular sport but that worked across the sports.
“I want it so that when you speak to people within a sport, they speak with intelligence and articulacy about what the critical factors are in delivering high performance success. And if we as a country can start to talk like that within our sports and be able to implement it, then that’s a really good outcome for me. That’s what our gold medal will be.”
Meetings make up much of his day, very day. They’re the management side of the job and he hates them. Given the choice, he’d rather be elbow-deep in data, putting together a detailed presentation or report to convince a roomful of people that there is a way to turn Irish sport around. He gets most work done in the first hour every morning and later on when everybody leaves in the evening. “There’s such great silence then,” he says.
He and Treacy meet twice a week and talk on the phone every day. The next 14 months will bring what they will bring and you’d forgive him if he was nervous about the closest Olympics Ireland will ever experience. His time in the IIS has been too short for any game-changing effect to be wrought on preparations but that won’t keep the shrapnel from heading his way next July and August if it all explodes. He’s sanguine enough at the prospect though.
“I don’t have control over whether or not anyone brings a medal back from London or Rio so I can’t allow my energy to be around that. I have to work on the tangibles that I face. I believe we have our hands on the elements that we can influence, that can have an impact underpinning the performance of athletes in the future. Now athletes may not see that and may be more concerned with the here and now but that is what we’ve always done in this country.
“In the past, we’ve run to the individual problems as opposed to going back to ask what the cause was. We keep having to go back to firefight and I hate doing it that way because I can’t leave anything behind in a firefight. What I can leave behind here is a legacy. I’m not saying we should ignore immediate problems, absolutely not.
“But our main focus has to be on what we can influence. You won’t find us standing alongside a gold medallist, taking credit for their work. That’s not who we are. At our level in the Institute, I will always be asking what the controllables are.”
And then he will be seeking to control them.
In a systematic way, naturally.
“He doesn’t want to say who it was but because The Irish Times will stop at nothing for truth and information (or at least will read the names written above it in the guestbook when signing in), we can reveal it was Warren Deutrom and Phil Simmons, chief executive and national team coach from Cricket Ireland
Gary Keegan's day . . .
7.45pm – Arrives at the Irish Institute of Sport, part of Sports Campus Ireland in Abbotstown, the next building over from the FAI headquarters. The IIS has been in the building for just over a year, having moved from a politburo-style office around the corner in early 2010.
It consists of both offices and training facilities, including the country’s largest treadmill.
9am – Meeting with Cricket Ireland delegation to review the performance at the recent World Cup. Session will last the whole morning, right up until lunch.
2pm – Meeting with John Treacy, head of the Irish Sports Council. Keegan and Treacy meet twice a week to go through issues arising day-to-day as well as discussing strategic plans. Tomorrow afternoon, he has another meeting in the Sports Council, with Finbarr Kirwan the High Performance Director.
3.30pm – Often, he will use the afternoon to work, analysing data from the comprehensive review and preparing reports for presentations. “The ideal is for you to come to me and ask how that performance came about and for me to be able to take out the report and say, ‘Well, let me show you exactly how.’‘
7.30pm – He works late most evenings, enjoying the peace when everyone has gone home.
