University Challenge

The 2011 season may be just behind us but already we must start to address some of our failings of the year gone by. One of the biggest has been our efforts in recruiting players. For whatever reasons, we struggled to even breakeven in terms of players in / players out. We are in the red and have become somewhat complacent.

The result was that we could not field a third team on any occasion (we did twice in 2010) and failed to field a second team on two occasions. From the panels in Limerick, we will lose at least seven ahead of next year and whilst some guys didn’t travel, we don’t have nearly enough players at the moment to be sure we can continue to field a second team next year.

When we got going in 2008, we quickly realised the importance of giving as many guys game time as possible. It’s important from many viewpoints; numbers at training, overall club numbers, supply people for committee positions, ensure you can travel with two teams to tournaments so everybody can get game time etc. If we hadn’t persisted with a second team, we may well have struggled more in the Championship this year as we wouldn’t have had the supply coming through.

Our 2012 drive starts on Monday night in VUB (Brussels’ main University). The opportunity sort of fell into our lap but has great potential. VUB will become our home ground as of next year and the college contacted us about offering Gaelic Football to their students.

They offered us the pitch for half price for nights where we would invite their students to training. After discussing with Colin, we thought it would be better to start with the students during our off season and get them up to speed before integrating them in with the other lads when we restart in February.

So on Monday night, myself and a couple of others will kick-off what will be a series of seven training sessions prior to Christmas. There will be three additional nights, starting December 1, where we will play an intra-club league, integrating the VUB players with our own players.

We will treat it as a pilot exercise but I’m already thinking of its potential to be developed after Christmas. The idea would be to extend this to two other Universities in Belgium initially; Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve where we know there are Irish Erasmus students who we could work with to get it off the ground.

We could run a kind of ‘Celebrity Bainisteoir’ competition where we would allocate two/three of the lads to each University and train the students up over ten weeks, culminating in a three-way tournament over Paddys weekend.

The icing on the cake would be if you could get some MEP involvement to provide the ‘Celebrity’ to the management teams. It would help raise the profile of the initiative no end and give us a potential source of new players.

That is a little further down the road so for now we will concentrate our attentions on the VUB and hopefully we will get a good response in the coming weeks.