In the beginning, he was famous for being unknown. When the Wexford footballers needed a new manager at the end of 2007, four others said no, and Jason Ryan said yes. They barely knew each other. Ryan was a 31-year-old Waterford footballer who had just led a team from the second smallest parish in Wexford to their first county title in 102 years. Otherwise, the crossword was full of clues and blanks.
At the time, Wexford were over-achieving underdogs, like Brighton in the Premier League now, or Brentford. The previous manager Paul Bealin had quit after a disagreement with the county chairman and Ryan’s appointment was not hailed as a flash of inspiration. All parties had taken a bungee jump together, hoping the harness would hold.
“There was plenty of fear,” says Ryan now. “To give you an idea of the extent of the fear, I was afraid to meet – I was nervous – to meet the whole Wexford panel together. So, instead of meeting them all together I met them one at a time. I just thought it would be too daunting. I said I’d meet them first and have a chat and be familiar with the faces.
“I started the job in October in 2007, and I played National League against them in February [Waterford won]. They would have had so many players that had far more experience than I had. I was aware of that. But what do you do? A door had opened. I ran through it as fast as I possibly could before the door was closed.”
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County boards everywhere are risk averse, and in any other year Ryan’s appointment would have been a black swan. Remarkably, though, in that same season, Roscommon appointed a 30-year-old manager as an emergency measure. He lasted less than six months; Ryan and Wexford stayed together for five years.
In his first championship match they trailed Meath by 10 points with 20 minutes left and won; by the end of 2008 he had led Wexford to their first All-Ireland semi-final since 1945. Everything about them and him was a sensation.
For their Sports Awards programme at the end of that year, RTÉ filmed a staged tete-a-tete between Ryan and Mickey Harte, loosely cast as the master and the apprentice. Tyrone had just won their third All-Ireland in five years under Harte and they had beaten Wexford in the All-Ireland semi-final.
It was designed as a fabricated chat, but it morphed into an ambush interview with Ryan gently pumping Harte for answers: how did he keep players fresh; how often did he change his backroom team; what was the relationship between ambition and sacrifice. Stuff that he wanted to know and would have asked if no camera had been rolling.
He was curious and he was a sponge for knowledge. How has he ended up as the Ballygunner manager all these years later? That question misses the point. None of the places he has been as a coach over the last 25 years was a destination, or an X on a map. He met new experiences as strangers and got to know them.
Ryan tells a story about a summer spent coaching soccer in California. He was a PE student at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, in London and the college had strong links with a company that provided coaching services aboard. There was a training day in Liverpool and a few months later a troop of young, unfinished coaches were released into the wild. Ryan was assigned to the San Jose Clash, and all the teams in their hinterland that came under the club’s umbrella.
“We got off the plane [from London] went to a hotel and were told, ‘Right, you’re with such and such a franchise, you’re with such and such.’ You were handed your plane ticket [to another American city] and handed your curriculum with the activities they wanted you to do – whether it was with seven-year-olds, 18-year-olds, adults, coaching coaches – it didn’t matter.
“It definitely didn’t come naturally. It would have been nerve-racking. But you were there, you needed to get on with it. It was a great opportunity to make mistakes – and make lots of them. I enjoyed the idea of being away from everybody. Whatever happened there, nobody was judging me. Every week I was in a new town. A fresh start, fresh everything and away you go. There was a lot more freedom to it than if I was doing it at home.”
Ryan spent the guts of 10 years in London. After he graduated, he got a job in a big school in Surrey that had 1,700 pupils. To satisfy their requirements, though, he needed a license to drive a minibus as well as a trampolining qualification.
“PE was an exam subject, and trampolining was one of the areas where it was easier for the students to get marks because it’s very black and white. To do the assessing and to be competent at teaching somersaults you needed to do a course. It was heavy, heavy going, especially when I landed on my head one of the days.
“And being in charge of teams was part of your job. You taught by day, but then straight away when school was over you were jumping in a minibus taking a team to a basketball match or a soccer match, a rugby match, a cricket match, an athletics meet. You were on the go – that was just your job.”
By the time he left, in his late 20s, Ryan was head of the sports department and managing the PE programme with a staff of six teachers. Being a teacher revealed his aptitude for taking responsibility. Being an intercounty manager interrogated it.
In his second year with Wexford, the glory of year one was obliterated.
“In 2009, we didn’t win any games. We went from being unbeaten in the league in 2008 [Division Three] to not getting a win at all in 2009 [Division Two]. If I’m not mistaken, we got a draw. And in the championship, Kildare – when Kieran McGeeney was manager – gave us an absolute lesson.
“And so it was a really tough year – really, really tough. There was a presumption, ‘Well, we did this [last year], so we’ll be able to build from that.’ I definitely would have learned that it’s never a clean build on the previous year. Anything that works in the previous year, there’s no guarantee it’s going to work in the following year. If 2009 had been my first year involved, I’m very sure I would have been getting a phone call from the chairman to say I’m afraid we’re going to have to part ways.”
He parted on good terms at the end of 2012. That group of players were on a different part of the mountain now, further from the summit. When his departure was announced, the players flooded social media with tributes. “Devastated,” said Anthony Masterson, their goalie. “People don’t understand what he put into Wexford football.”
“Gutted I won’t get another year to play under him,” said Lee Chin, who was a dual player back then.
While his stock was high, Kildare were buyers. Within a couple of months, Ryan had joined McGeeney’s management team as a coach; 12 months later he took over as manager after McGeeney was the victim of a county board assassination. Ryan had landed on the frying pan.
“There were lots of things I was exposed to in Kildare that I didn’t have an experience of in Wexford, but a lot of it was maybe off the field. It was interesting working in a county where football was absolutely number one. The public are just football crazy and crazy for success. There was pressure every day. You have to be deaf not to hear it. You have to be thick-skinned not to be affected by it in some way. I developed a thick skin.”
In 2015, his final year, Kildare lost to Dublin by 19 points in the Leinster semi-final and by 27 to Kerry in the All-Ireland quarter-final. A week before they were eliminated they had beaten Cork on a rapturous night in the qualifiers but the respite was temporary.
“It was a massive win against Cork. Kildare hadn’t beaten a Division One team for quite some time in the championship. The scenes in Semple Stadium after we beat Cork were absolutely mental. A week later we played Kerry and it was fairly raw after that. It’s very hard not to hear loads of things that people are shouting and roaring. Kerry really, really, really went to town on us.”
Ryan stepped away from the front line. Clubs still wanted him. He wasn’t stopping. One year, Ronan McCarthy asked him to help with the Cork footballers on a consultancy basis. For the last two years Keith Rossiter pulled him on board with the Wexford hurlers. Another year he did a preseason programme with Wexford Youths in the League of Ireland. That summer Ryan and his family decamped to Boston and he coached a football team over there. Always something.
Ballygunner, though, was different. Here was a seasoned group of players who had seen winning and losing through every lens. They needed something fresh. Ryan was a trusted source. For him, it wasn’t a difficult call. His son plays underage for Ballygunner and the pitch is five minutes from their door. He jumped.
“So, there was a new gang coming in. Manager, coach, S&C, all resigned. It was just that level of what’s new is not necessarily all good and what’s old is not necessarily all good either. You have to be careful because the way things were done in the club had led to so much success. You’re looking at marrying the best of what was there with small tweaks and changes.
“But I suffer less from impostor syndrome now than I would have done in 2007 [when he started with Wexford]. I’m definitely better at being able to use the knowledge that I’m surrounded by. I feel comfortable enough to know that I’m going to make mistakes too. How do you know that you’re a better coach now than you were? It’s not just always results. There’s a lot of people that manage now and they don’t necessarily coach – they bring people with them. I suppose I’m greedy, I like coaching – I still like coaching.”
Still on the trampoline.
