Malachy Clerkin: If you’re coaching kids with your county in mind, you’re just as transactional as Aussie Rules

On Thursday evening, the rains came. Big, gloopy vats of rain, spilling down as if the sky had just remembered the words to its favourite song and was screaming every syllable of it. For our under-11 girls, it was the second night back training after the summer break. This was not the music they had been hoping to dance to.

The first week back is always a bit of a scrabble in the dark anyway. Everyone feeling their way back in, trying to get used to the grammar and syntax of the game again. A handpass is the simplest piece of ball movement in the game, but when you’re 10¾, and you’ve just finished your first day back at school and the rain is coming down like each bucket is aimed at you personally, it takes a bit of getting.

So balls went askew and catches were dropped, every station collapsing into squirty, wonky disorder at one stage or another. As the session wore on, you could only laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. The wetter we all got, the gigglier we all got. Everybody walked off drenched at the end and what anyone learned about handpassing or anything else is debatable. But it was great to be back at it.

This is such a brilliant time of year to be in and around a team, no matter what the sport is. In every town in every county, the same scene is playing out night after night, session after session. All ages, all abilities, girls and boys, women and men. The weather is neither too hot nor too cold. The pitches are generally in decent nick.

There’s a sense of purpose in the air, of something shared. Where it will all end up, nobody knows. Somewhere in the ether there are goals and targets and plans and all of that stuff matters. But in the here and now, you’re all creased laughing because the coach slipped on his ass trying to demonstrate how to do an instep kick. You’re living.

Let’s spin the tape on a decade or so. We have 90 girls, give or take, in our 2015 group, and we haven’t a clue what the future holds for any of them. Some of them might play senior football or camogie. Some of them might play both.

Some of them will play soccer or hockey or tennis or Irish dancing or a million other things and we hope they always see the club as something they can come back to when it suits them. The statistics say some will fall away from sport altogether – our big job for the next few years is to try and buck those trends.

But let’s say one of them is good enough to one day play for Dublin. And maybe somewhere along the way, she ends up with an offer to go and play in Australia. Let’s say a dozen years from now, she’s 23 years old and suiting up for a team in Melbourne or Sydney or wherever. How will we feel, as the coaches who were there in the rain on Thursday night?

If you listen to the voices who are looking for Aussie Rules to start paying compensation for taking young Irish men and women to the other side of the world, the answer should be obvious. We’re supposed to feel hard done by, aggrieved that the fruit of our hard work has been borne by a big-time professional sports franchise.

That’s how these things are always framed. You know the way of it by now – well, obviously you wish the young person all the best and hold nothing against him/her for making the best of a great opportunity, etc, etc. But what about all the work that has gone into these players? What about all the time put in by the volunteer coaches? How can it be right that all that was done just so an Aussie Rules club can benefit?

But there’s a flipside to that line of thinking. Follow that argument to its natural end and you’re basically saying that all the work put in by the coaches had nothing to do with your relationship with the player. That it was all a means to your own preferred end, whether that be the player improving the fortunes of your club or lining out for the county or, ultimately, winning All-Irelands.

When it becomes transactional like that, the GAA is no better than any of the professional sports. You might even argue that it’s worse – at least the pro sports pay their athletes suitable restitution for being a link in the chain. The GAA prefers to impose a guilt tax, payable for life.

To be fair to Jarlath Burns, the GAA president has been firm in warning against going down the road of looking for money from the AFL, doubling down on it just this week on Colm Parkinson’s podcast. But there are plenty of voices making the opposite argument too, particularly with an increase in Kerry and Dublin players in the mix. They weren’t too annoyed when it was happening to Kildare in the mid-2010s, funny enough.

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