A coaching session during the All-Star tour of 2015, in Austin Texas

LAST week I had the privilege of being invited down to a small club in the south of Ireland to take a hurling club session.

Obviously in the lead up to the session I was very apprehensive as my experience of coaching hurling is limited to a handful of sessions with our school team a few years back and added to the apprehension was the fact I have never played hurling before competitively, as I didn’t want to destroy my good looks when I was younger.

However, I wasn’t there to deliver a pass or take a score, I was there to deliver a message and as any good coach knows your confidence comes from being prepared and after a few phone calls to some hurling coaches the same resounding message was circulating in my head, a good Gaelic football coach should be able to easily transfer their coaching skills to other codes, be it hurling, camogie or even another inon-GAA sport such as soccer or rugby.

The key word in all this though is “coaching”, in my opinion good coaching is an art form, as I have said numerous times before, it’s not just science or something plucked out of the latest magazine, fitness website or latest fitness fad doing the rounds, coaching is much, much more than that.

As I prepared my session I thought about hurling having basically the same key game principles as Gaelic football or most other games, invade the opposition’s territory and gain a score, rules are slightly different but the same skills and situations will apply; attacking, defending, transitional play, break ball, tackling, maximising scoring opportunities, multi directional running, decision making, creating angles, 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 situations, the list is endless.

The session in total lasted for one hour, started off with a dynamic warm-up with multiple ball/stick contact and a huge amount of multi directional game related movements.

This was followed up with some skill refinement drills with increased traffic and an emphasis on support play and timing.

After the warm-up we went straight into some crossfield hand-passing and striking activities, which were high intensity with little recovery followed by a shooting exercise which initially allowed players to maximise scoring opportunities before introducing pressure and, finally, into a game scoring simulation exercise.

After the scoring games, we then moved straight into some individual and group tackling looking at side on tackle, frontal tackle and the defending tackle from behind which tends to tally up the most fouls, a popular drill I would use with Gaelic football but still produces situations that are similar to those you would encounter in a hurling game also.

To say the tackling was intense was a understatement, sticks were cracked, cuts were had, some thumbs and fingers severely disjointed but not once was there a complaint, the lads just dusted themselves down, give the player they were tackling against a pat on the back and continued to display a terrific attitude throughout the whole session.

After the tackling we moved into some same sense work, conditioned games the order of the day.

I ran two conditioned games, one focusing on break ball awareness, a game I watched Kilkenny perform a couple of years ago while I watched one of their intense sessions in Carlton House under the watchful eye of Brian Cody.

I then finished the session off with a transition from attack to defence game which had an emphasis on movement, hard work and adding acceleration to the play.

Overall though on an extremely cold night it was the tremendous attitude, application and intensity that the panel brought to the session which made it a pleasure to coach. I always say as a coach you never stop learning and last week I gained another valuable piece of coaching experience.

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