FEATURE: The story of Bredagh’s first Junior Championship title

THE first one is always special. No matter what success follows, nothing is ever as good as the first. 20 years ago, Bredagh experienced that first time feeling by bringing home the Junior Football Championship title.

The club had competed at Senior Championship level before, but come the early noughties, they were pretty much at a low ebb.

In 2006, they formed a team that was good enough to not only compete for championship silverware but to go all the way and win it. Over the next two decades, the club has gone from strength to strength.

They reclaimed the Junior title in 2011 before collecting Intermediate honours in 2016 and 2018. Nowadays they’re competing in the lofty heights of Division One and at Senior Championship level.

“I’ve been involved for a long time, my father was one of the founders of the club and in 2006 I was at the tail end of my playing days, I was 40 then,” recalled one of the club stalwarts and club secretary, Ciaran O’Keefe.

“Bredagh were going through a very difficult time in terms of the footballing side of things, we were in the doldrums at the time. We were in Division Four and we were back in Junior a couple of years later and won it again in 2011.

“It’s really kicked on from then. Once we got promoted and got our underage going, it’s moved on a lot since then in terms of the football end of things.

“We’re in Division One at the minute and have been bouncing back between Division One and Division Two for the last four or five years and we’ve won two Intermediate Championships and our first Minor Championship last year.”

O’Keefe added: “We were in Senior Championship semi-finals three times before and we reached the final in the ‘70s, the club was only founded in 1971.

“We got promoted to Division One and then into the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, we were around Division Two and Three and then a lot of fellas retired, and we fell right down to Division Four.”

There was an influx of fresh talent injected into the panel in 2006 which improved their quality no end. Derry 1993 All-Ireland winner Enda Gormley, along with Jody Gormley, who played for Tyrone in the 1995 All-Ireland decider, both pulled on the maroon jersey.

“Jody lived on the Ormeau Road, and he was coming to the end of his career and wasn’t going to travel back to Trillick but he still wanted to play, and he lived very close to where we played the matches at Cherryville,” O’Keefe explained.

“Enda was something similar and would have known quite a few people in Bredagh. He had given up Division One football in Derry at that stage and he moved to us.

“Those two boys would have set standards, and we also had Mark Diamond who played centre-half back and he was from Bellaghy and he was a tremendous footballer.

“Enda was fantastic in terms of still being able to score at that level and Jody was too. They were extremely fit and we would probably have been favourites for the Junior Championship at that stage.

“Paddy Heaney hadn’t played for a long time I don’t think, and he was definitely an asset too, a big, strong fella but we had some of our own too. Conor Owens was probably the pick of the team from the Bredagh boys, Conall Toland, Kevin Harte and Johnny Cleary.

“You had a number of guys from outside the club that had settled in the area, and we probably had a larger number back then than what we would now.”

With those couple of star names on the team sheet, Bredagh entered the ’06 campaign as favourites to finally get across the line in the championship. But championship titles aren’t won on paper.

Nerves perhaps got the better of them in the championship final, and it took a late Enda Gormley score to force a second go and give Bredagh another shot at Teconnaught.

When the replay rolled around, there was to be no mistake this time and with the championship final stress out of their system, they were able to play their own game and win by six in the end.

“We played Teconnaught in the final and we scored a point to draw the match the first day. Things didn’t really click and Enda scored a point near the end to draw the game, and we won the replay by six points.

“My lasting memory was the last few minutes of the game. We’d been beaten in Junior finals before by Ardglass and Greencastle, we’d reached a number of finals and been beaten so our history wouldn’t have been great in finals.

“We were maybe nervous the first day, but we were the better team in the replay and we just played better. We were more settled and had all the expectation out of the road and we were able to focus the mind a bit better the second day.”

There were deserved celebrations after their historic achievement, but soon Bredagh’s focus switched towards the Ulster campaign and with one cup already tucked away in the trophy cabinet, they set about chasing another.

Goals from Conor Owens (2), Jonathan Cleary (2) and Henry Deazley saw them steamroll Derry side Drum to reach the last four of the provincial competition, where they eventually came up short against Donegal representatives Naomh Brid.

“There was plenty of fun afterwards and the boys enjoyed it as it was the first time that Bredagh had won a football championship,” O’Keefe remembered. “It was great, but it was over pretty quickly, and it was all about how far we could go in Ulster.

“We played Drum from Derry, and we beat them handy enough and it was a very windy day. The next day out was up in Letterkenny against Naomh Brid, and it was nip and tuck, but we came out the wrong side of things in the end.

“That was disappointing because we felt we could have gone on and done better; we definitely could have done better.”

The success Bredagh have experienced in the last 20 years all started in 2006 and Jody Gormley played a massive role in that. Of their four championship titles picked up during that time, Jody was involved in three.

The Trillick native tragically lost his life in December 2024. Later on this year, Bredagh and Trillick are locking horns in a charity game that will honour Jody’s memory.

“He played for us and he managed us twice as well,” O’Keefe continued. “We won two Intermediate Championships and I think he was involved both times, when we won it in 2016 and 2018. Jody was excellent in terms of managing the team.

“It was extremely sad but the way Jody handled himself was just different. It was very hard to take and it was devastating for the family but he faced up to it with immense courage during those last few months.

“Like everything he did, he thought about it logically and just faced it and that’s the way he dealt with it.”