Outside The Zone

Looking a bit special during one of the exercises

Bring an assortment of random G.A.A. people into a room together and you can be sure it won’t be all handshakes and smiles initially. There’s a fair share of ‘scoping’ going on. Fellas looking you up and down trying to figure you out; age, build, gear. They all give clues. Maybe you will have come across one of the participants at some other event and you’ll warm to them slightly more easily but not the others!

There were over twenty of us on the recent Tutor training course run by the Leinster Council and held in Maynooth College. The initial meet and greet pretty much went to form.

The tutor trainers are good at what they do and within the hour the atmosphere had relaxed. This was aided by suitable energizers and ice breakers to break down any barriers. One in particular sticks out. We were all given a typical greeting from a country and had to quickly go around the room greeting everyone using it. There was a lad called Christy from Wicklow on the course. He’s bald, well built, basically not someone you’d mess with. He came up to me and eyeballed me and started moving his head back and forth towards me. Eventually I said ‘what?’. He replied, ‘eskimo’! His greeting was to rub noses.

I was there thanks to the European County Board who organised for four people from Europe (Tangi from Brest, Anna Marie from Rennes and Olivier from Liffre) to join the course and supported financially to make it feasible.

The aim of the course is to develop tutors, who will then go and deliver Foundation and Level 1 courses to coaches. The main skills which are developed on the course are presentation, listening, questioning and feedback. This ties in with learning the syllabus by making everyone do five presentations over the four weekends based on the course’s content.

The first night was intimidating enough to be honest. Coming from Europe you always feel you have to prove yourself a little more. You are away from mainstream G.A.A. and in many people’s minds, there is only mainstream G.A.A.

In the group was a mix of current and former inter-county players as well as lads working as Games Development Administrators for the G.A.A. Naturally you wouldn’t feel so comfortable sitting amongst such experience. However, it quickly became evident that everyone in the group had insecurities. In one of the first exercises, we had to list a few things which we were apprehensive about. Presentations, knowledge, ability to coach coaches were all listed as things which worried fellas. Once those were put out there, everyone felt more at ease.

Over the four weeks there must have been ten different tutors brought in to deliver different modules. The variety of styles was excellent and kept things constantly fresh.

We had five presentations as I mentioned. Mine were; Experience as a coach, Teaching the punt kick, The OTu Coaching Model, Effective use of playing facts in the half-time team talk and finally, tactical prowess (decision making). The punt kick and tactical prowess were practicals.
Through practice and feedback, we were all very comfortable delivering presentations by the end of the course. What I liked about the assignments was the individuality you were encouraged to bring to them. There are existing presentations to deliver on the courses but as long as you meet the desired outcomes, you were given a free reign to make your own. The fact you could test things out in a controlled environment really encouraged you to experiment.

I’d be at my most relaxed in a pair of runners and tracksuit so boarding the Brussels-Dublin flight for these weekends in such attire was a pleasure. Spending a weekend in them and amongst other coaches was like a dream come through. We learned as much off each other as we learned off the tutors and there was near non-stop discussion about coaching and G.A.A. over the four weeks.

We were broken into sub-groups and I had Colm Browne in our group. He’s the newly appointed Games Development Manager in Laois and the only Laois man to claim a football All-Star. He played in the Compromise Rules in 1987 and went on to coach Tipperary, Laois and his club Portlaoise.

However, Colm, like everyone else on the course, had no ego. There was a huge amount of knowledge and experience in the room and everybody respected each other’s opinion and freely shared theirs. Still, you can’t but feel a bit self-conscious when you are delivering a practical to fellas like Colm about decision making!!

Typically Irish, once the barriers are down, it was easy to make connections with people. I got a lift to the airport one weekend off James Devlin from Swords. He’s a club mate of former Paris Gael player Dave Lennon. Shane Flanagan is working for the Leinster G.A.A. and oversees many of these courses. I’d have met his brother Ronan when he was living in Brussels in 2005/2006. A new face, that I will see again is Eddie. In February he will bring his club over from Wexford for a weekend in Brussels.

One of the highlights was a workshop with Paudie Butler, the G.A.A.’s #1 hurling guru. The man has incredible presence. Initially he pretty much struck fear into us with his intensity. For the first time on the course, I was completely tongue tied when he asked me a basic question. I wasn’t alone.

We grew into his style though and he was drilling into us the need to be concise and cut out unnecessary words. He did this by repeatedly striking a tyre with a hurley, each time with the exact same technique. He went around the room one by one and you had to describe some part of his action, explaining with exactly the right words.

Paul Gallagher failed to find them when he said, ‘you stepped into the tyre’. Paudie duly stepped into the middle of the tyre and asked Paul whether he had really stepped into the tyre?! The point was that it you wanted to ‘spot and fix’ a players technique you had to be very precise about your instruction for the player to understand. You’d probably have had to be there!

You get a great sense of achievement during the course because you are constantly tested with the tasks and the situations you are put in, leaving you looking from the outside in at your own comfort zone the majority of the time.

As we finished up on Saturday, it was clear we had built a good rapport and fellas really enjoyed bouncing ideas off each other over the few weeks. We learned constantly off each other and I think most would say they left the course having learned a huge amount about being an effective tutor as well as becoming a better coach.
The tutor’s reckon it was the best group they’ve put through the course. Hopefully that means we all passed and can get going at delivering the courses in 2012. It certainly was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in a long time.