Locker Room: I know, I know. There's sunsets and there's the gummy smiles of newborn babies. There's puppy dogs with wagging tails and there's Scarlett Johansson. There are fields of sunflowers and there's Ivor Callely losing his seat. But honestly, there is no sight that gladdens the heart quite as much as that which greets you when you pull into a GAA club on a Saturday morning.
The mini-leagues! Little kids in hurling helmets covering every blade of grass like a happy and unco-ordinated army of ants. It's great to see. It's so great to see that I like to get out of the car and nod towards the frenetic activity and profoundly say to all and sundry that it's great to see.
That it is great to see would seem to be a fairly incontrovertible assertion, but every once in a while you will meet the hard chaw who demurs and shakes the head and says that mini-leagues don't win championships and that all we are actually watching is a sophisticated form of mass babysitting.
The hard chaws who cleave to this dismal, contrarian view of things make my blood boil to the extent that I often find myself saying, yeah, I suppose, and then bitching about them later.
I am convinced that the older you get the more appealing the sight of the mini-leagues becomes. I notice that although the kids in the mini leagues, bless 'em, get no bigger from year to year, the equipment and paraphernalia they use these days requires a crack team of Nepalese Sherpas to tote it to the pitch of a Saturday morning. They have ladders and poles and little hurdles and sliotars attached to string which is further attached to a peg in the ground so that the poor, bewildered mentor doesn't spend the morning chasing the ball after each clashing exercise. This is the true meaning of progress.
And they have those outsize sliotars for touch work. What an idea! I am convinced that had some enlightened soul introduced the large, soft sliotar to junior hurling during the brief period when my performances as a large, soft player at junior B level were instrumental in creating the need for a junior C grade my life might have been very different. I was born too early but that's a personal tragedy that we won't dwell on even if it touches us all.
The mini-leagues grow ever more sophisticated and these days there is a satisfyingly Aryan tingle to be had from watching the choreographed activities of the little postulants. That contrasts starkly with the charming scenes I remember when my own two superstars, Les Misérables, were passing through the mini-league grades. (One of them had to repeat a year. Oh the shame of family tradition.)
Back then a lap of the little Scoil Mhuire pitch behind the Christian Brothers residence in Marino was the height of athletic ambition and the poor mites would set off on their epic circumnavigation of the little pitch in fear that they would never return. They would actually hold hands as they went off huffing and puffing.
(I proudly recall my youngest artfully avoiding the gruelling business of The Lap by engaging Bríd, the woman we still know as the acceptable face of St Vincent's, in some banter as to who exactly lived in the big house beside the little pitch. That's where the brothers live, said Bríd. The Brothers? asked the youngest. How many of them is there? I think there's about 30 of them, said Brid. Aw God! Their poor mam! said the youngest, eyeing the progress of the lapsters and fumbling desperately for another question with which to keep the chat going.)
The first challenge of mini-leagues after the marketing pitch is crowd control. The second challenge is proceeding beyond crowd control to teach something useful and enjoyable. Maybe that something won't win senior championships but it's culturally unique and it keeps the club at the centre of the community in a time when communities have no centre. So that teaching, those Saturday mornings, are the necessary investment in the present life of a club and the future life.
The challenge is quality. I was watching our own mini-leagues on Saturday morning and was kind of stunned by the quality of work being put in and the sheer energy which seems to push the whole club up from the foundation. I can recall other Saturday mornings in other clubs standing waiting for matches to start and looking at the mini-leagues going down on a neighbouring pitch. Having passed the standard observation about how great it is to see mini-leagues in action I can recall being slightly depressed by what I was actually watching. It's not hard to get parents involved in helping with mini-leagues, and their involvement is a necessary corrective to the inbuilt clannishness of clubs.
The trouble is getting parents involved who know what they are doing - and then, when you get those parents, handing them enough confidence to go and do it. And if you can't find those parents how do you go about teaching parents the skills necessary?
I'm sure this applies with football but it is an acute problem with hurling and camogie, subjects which stock huge, recondite areas of expertise accessible only to learned gurus of the game. You need only stand on a sideline and pull a brand new hurley from a bag of sticks to get a sampler taste of that feeling which tells you everything you thought you knew about hurling is wrong. The stick might look perfectly serviceable to you but the gurus must go into committee session to assess the reputation of the maker, the weight and length of the stick itself: its weight and length, its grain and the size of its bos. These things must all be parsed and analysed. They must consider the balance of the stick, the age of the ash it has been cut from, the pattern of the cut, the type of nails used in the hoop, the criminal implications pertaining to your failure to pamper the stick with linseed oil or other exotic balms, and the stick's clear unsuitability for use as anything other than kindling. By the time they are finished and waddle off to hand the stick to a seven-year-old you will feel like a tuneless drunk invited to perform an open-mike spot at La Scala.
And so we segue into the paid commercial, the element of this column which pays for other more worthy but less-lucrative columns in the main paper. Help is at hand for clubs and parents everywhere. This help was presented to me last week by the Sports Editor. Normally one regards Greeks bearing gifts with less wariness and suspicion than one views sports editors offering freebies, but the FunDo Learning Resource Pack for Football and Hurling turns out to be an extraordinary production filled with drills, skills, tips and resources for coaching kids from the age of six upwards. The accompanying DVDs are the equivalent of buying your matriculation exam to the College of Learned Gurus. Each skill is introduced and displayed with well chosen footage from big-time summer Sundays at Croke Park or Semple Stadium or Fitzgerald Stadium. Then there are repeated slow-motions displays of intercounty stars performing the skill on a training ground.
Even if you look at hurling most days of your life there is something startlingly wondrous about seeing a skill you take for granted broken down into its component parts in slow motion.
There is a gratifying pleasure in discovering that the little truisms you grew up hearing (and now find yourself shouting) have a basis in fact.
One of the pleasures of the kit is the What Not To Do section which accompanies every skill. Get in close when you pull, two hands on the hurl, left hand down the stick for the lift and bend your sappy back, and so on . . . The illustrations to build your case are everywhere here.
There are too many facets to the whole package to enumerate here but the work of engaging and training kids in the six years or so from the age of six onwards just got a whole lot easier.
On Saturday morning there are few things more enjoyable than to watch the-mini leagues unfolding with all their delicate dramas and ambitions. There's no excuse anymore for seeing groups of kids being handed over to mentors who clearly have no idea what they are doing. Ladders, hurls, oversized sliotars and resources like the Fundo Resource Kit. I was born too soon. I cudda been a contender.
