The science of hurling

AS Clare senior hurling trainer, Joe O’Connor talks to The Clare Champion, a bevy of aides bustle about the UL dressing room. It was just after 6pm and training is not due to start until 7pm. Already every player’s training top, complete with his name on the back is hanging above their neatly laid out training gear and towels.
Joe O’Connor, who has lectured on the health and leisure course at Tralee IT for six years, arrived for training at 5pm to oversee some rehabilitation work with Diarmuid McMahon, who is recovering from an ankle injury.
Normally the Tralee-based Limerick man arrives an hour and a quarter before training. 
His background is in steeple chasing and he is an Athletics Ireland tutor. In fact, he once worked for that organisation as a regional development officer. O’Connor isn’t unknown in Clare. He worked with the Clare minor hurlers in ’05 and ’06, while he has also worked with the Waterford hurlers and the Kerry senior footballers.
“I’ve been involved in athletics all along. I’d have applied a lot of what I learned and tried to make it applicable to hurling and football. That main thing we’re looking for is specificity to hurling. It has to be hurling specific. There’s no point in just making guys big,” he explained.
Due to run the Barcelona marathon next March, O’Connor retired from his favoured athletic discipline last year although he has since taken up competing in triathlons.
“Some of the basis of my own training, the lifestyle side of things: proper eating, proper sleep, trying to stay off the drink, that you could apply; the actual training techniques you couldn’t,” when asked how he links up his athletics expertise with physically preparing a hurling team.
“I’d be using a lot of the principles of athletics but still not using athletics as a coaching course,” he added.
Clare have been working on individual gym programmes for several weeks and recently have trained regularly at 6am on Wednesday mornings, along with regular evening sessions. Joe O’Connor has learned that, in his experience, players appreciate feedback from management. They get plenty of that from him.
“I think what really drives most players and particularly this group of players is feedback. I’d monitor heart rate a lot. They get their report at the end of training. We also use GPS a lot as well so we can tell every player how far he covered in every game. More importantly from my side, how many sprints were close to his maximum speed,” he explained.
He doesn’t believe in imparting opinion to players, when their personal statistics cannot be queried.
“It’s one thing I try to avoid – opinions. I’ll never tell a fella, ‘I think he’s good.’ I’ll just say ‘that’s what the normal acceptable level is and that’s where you are.’ I think it works well because there’s a mutual respect then. Rather than me, for want of a better word, telling him that he’s crap, he’ll come to me looking for help, rather than stabbing me in the back or slating me,” he said.
O’Connor accepts that not all hurling people would be enamoured with an overly scientific approach to preparing a team.
“That’s the beauty of sport. If people didn’t have opinions, it wouldn’t be as exciting. There’s a lot of people who say ‘you should be doing more of x and less of y.’ I never take it as a personal thing. What worked for one person may not work for another. Sometimes people say ‘I did this and I won that. So I want everyone to do that.’ Some coaches say they did this 30 years ago and won x,y,z. My answer is that the game is considerably different now than what it was back then,” adding that a succinct summation of his approach to training involves ‘specificity and individualisation’.
He feels that this Clare panel must be given some time before they hopefully flourish.
“They’re a young squad. The average age of the team is 22. So it’s somewhat foolish to think that we’re going to achieve massive things this year. We’re putting things in place that some players will be achieving quicker than others. We’re getting there. I’d be hopeful that we’ll make improvements this year. Inter-county hurling, particularly in Munster is so competitive, it’s more of a medium term goal that we have, than an immediate term goal,” he said.
As he speaks, the signs that high standards of organisation prevail are quite clear. The dressing room flutters with crease-free training gear, long before the session is due to start.
“If you request high standards, it’s only fair to meet them half way. I think the idea of the towel, the shirt and the names is it doesn’t matter if you’re number one or number 40 in the squad. Any fella that comes into the squad is treated the same. It’s up to him. We come half way, you come half way,” he said.
What players eat is also closely monitored. “We score their diets. Everyone is ranked according to their diet score. Once again it’s a number; it’s not an opinion and they’re given feedback on how to improve. The doctor is involved in that as well. From time to time if a players diet is really poor, we suggest a blood test to make sure there’s no deficiencies. In fairness to the county board, they’ve discussed this with chefs and companies providing food after training and it has been top notch,” O’Connor acknowledged.
Intriguingly Joe is not only responsible for the strength and conditioning of the Clare senior team. He oversees the welfare of the Clare minor and U-21 panels in that respect as well.
“We’ve Kieran McCabe looking after the U-21 hurlers’ strength and conditioning. He’s a past student and we have Ian Fielding involved with the minor hurlers as well. Part of my role there is that I’m overseeing all the strength and conditioning for minors and U-21s,” he said.
The minor and U-21 panel have completed the same strength and conditioning test as the seniors. O’Connor says that by working with young players long term, an accessible database can be built up. This information could decide if a player is physically ready to play inter-county hurling even if it is clear that he has the necessary hurling skills.
“If you look at professional sports like American Football, NBA, the AFL or Premiership soccer, that’s what they do. They bring in the talent at 14 or 15 and work with them on a five year plan, rather than bringing them in at the equivalent of minor level,” O’Connor pointed out.
Clare senior football trainer, Micheál Cahill, is another former pupil of Joe O’Connor’s at Tralee IT.
As for how he gets on with Davy Fitzgerald, O’Connor says that they talk nearly every day and have the odd run-in.
“The great relationship I have with Davy is that we both know where we’re coming from. I’d say there isn’t a day we don’t talk for at least 20 minutes. We don’t agree on everything. We do row a lot but we row for the right reasons. In fairness it’s great working with Mike (Deegan) and Louis (Mulqueen) as well,” O’Connor said.
The Clare trainer has a six-month-old daughter to fill any spare moment he might wrangle from his day job and his hurling involvement so he doesn’t have time to burn. When he is working with players though, he tries to keep it positive rather than accentuating the negative.
He regularly asks himself what he terms the three Ws: What Went Well?
“You have to have two w’s and you have to have two peaks. A peak is a personal improvement goal. I’ll do that after every training session or game for myself but I’ll be trying to get the team to look at it like that as well. If you know what you did well, it’s much easier to be constructively critical. Whereas if you don’t know what you did well, it’s just going to turn into a negative situation,” he said before reaching for his stopwatch and whistle and heading for the cone strewn training field.