ONE DAY while at a feile match in south Derry, Dr Eugene Young – who is Director of Coaching and Development at Ulster GAA – met an old friend in Matt Trolan.

Dr Young as part of his responsibilities with Ulster GAA, was attending games to see the work being done by their coaches.

Dr Young played for Derry for over a decade, and played for his province as well. So we might expect the conversation to have involved a reverential chat about the Moneymore man’s exploits on the field of play for his county. However, his old friend Trolan, who is from Ballinascreen, had a different point to make.

Young explained: “Matt said to me ‘you could have been a good player’. I said ‘thanks Matt, that’s good of you’. He said, ‘you could have been a good player if you had concentrated on one sport’.

“I know him well enough and long enough to expect that, and he had a big grin on his face. But he’s probably right.”

The point Trolan was making is that Dr Eugene Young, in his long playing career chose to play not one, but two sports at the very highest level. He played Gaelic Football for Derry and Ulster, and Basketball at club, province and national level.

Young admits that at times he wonders if he would have won more as a player if he had stuck to one sport. But if we look at his career, and his attitude, playing one sport was never going to happen for a man who still to this day can be found diving round a court while he coaches basketball.

Young says that during his career, there was plenty of opportunity to play as much as one wanted.

“When I was playing for Derry, we did two nights a week, and then if you wanted to do something else on the other nights then you did.

“I got away with playing couple of sports which I don’t think would have happened now.”
Ironically his sporting career began with no sport to play.

GAA was his first love, but his club Moneymore didn’t have a team so he played with the Loup for two years. Moneymore were not operating in the ‘70s because of the Troubles.

An uncle of his helped to reform the club, and Young got back involved. So Gaelic was his first love, but then he went to school at St Pat’s Armagh as a boarder, and it was there that he discovered basketball.

“Noel McClurg, a Fermanagh man, was the PE teacher. He pushed basketball and he encouraged the transferability of the skills between the two sports.

“He did so much work. I met him in Armagh recently, and said to him that those early influences by teachers in school those are the people put them on their way. They have such positive influence on players.

“We had study periods as boarders and between those periods in the evening he would have come in and taken us and taught us the skills and playing the game. He was doing that bit extra for the players.”

At school, in the GAA, Young won a Corn na nOg and reached a couple of MacRory Cup semi-finals. Basketball was a more successful hunting ground as he won All-Ireland titles.

He was part of the u-15 Ireland team that went on a tour to the United States.

“We went to Providence and Rhode Island in 1976 for the Bicentennial. That reinforced the possibility of being on teams, and the opportunity to travel as well.

“We were housed with families over there for six weeks. We played eight matches and I think we won three. That was fine. Some of the matches were close. A few of our players were picked out and they said that they were good enough to play over there.”

His experience of playing basketball in America didn’t end there as he would go out again as a guest player on a team that would play a series of games against community colleges on the east coast.

“That was an experience. Most of those teams were pretty strong, but we had a good team that included a couple of Turkish players. We were able to hold our own. Then when we went out with the Irish senior team for a tour. We were playing division one colleges and they were just head and shoulders above us. I am 6’3”. People think I am big but I was a minnow next to some of those guys. That tour was very tough.”

When he was younger, long before those trips, he learned that his basketball would help his Gaelic Football. So he played both as much as he could when he was at school.

“There was a great realisation at that school that there are great transferability of skills.

“When I was 16 or 17 Mickey Moran and those lads came back from university and they were talented basketball players. I remember a tournament happening up in Limavady, Mickey was teaching up there. There were six GAA teams altogether and while it was rough and ready it meant players were doing something.”

Young was playing for Dungannon’s Basketball team up until 18, but then when he went to University he moved to play for St Gall’s. They were in the National League. He played for them for ten years.

“Some of my fondest memories were playing with St Gall’s. The craic we had going to games was great. We were going about in cars you see, and the craic up and down to the matches was what was so good.”

He was a PE student at Jordanstown which highlights his passion for sport. He says he tried Waterskiing, Tennis, and he even played Volleyball for the university.

“I just loved sport. During university I was doing work, but I had the opportunity to train and play like a professional athlete.

“When Mickey Moran was managing the county he understood that I was fit. During that time my weekends would be down to Tralee for a National League match with the Basketball. Then I would be over to Waterford or Wexford for a GAA match. I was able to fit the two in because the Basketball was on on Saturday night.”

University was important from a GAA perspective as it exposed Young to playing with, and against, some great players from Ulster. He played with Kevin McCabe and James Devlin from Tyrone. Mickey Sands, Pat Donnan and Mark Turley from Down. Barney Canavan from Armagh.

“They were all county players playing at a decent level.”

That team he was on won the Trench cup and that qualified them to play the Sigerson Cup winners. That was for the Hodges Figgis Trophy. It was played in Croke Park before the National League semi-final.

“Barney Canavan had to strip for Armagh. We played UCG and we beat them. The moral of the story was that you play with a high level of players at third level. I would hate to see that get lost. At the minute it is struggling to keep its place in the calendar. It is a real privilege to play for your college at that level. I would fight to keep that.”

The youthful Young drew inspiration from the Derry legend Sean O’Connell.

“I played most of my county football at full forward, or midfield. I was always the target man. I would sort of tried to aspire to be like Sean O’Connell. If I had have been like Sean O’Connell I would have been a great player, that’s what Matt Trolan would have said.

“Sean would have played with Frankie O’Loan as well.”

O’Loan was an inspiration to Young too.

“Frankie O’Loan’s passion was incredible. He lived opposite my mother. He used to go up and kick frees at our pitch and he would take me with him. He would hit free kicks and I would retrieve the balls for him. He would set the balls up across the pitch and then stroked them over the bar. He hit the frees for Bellaghy, men like that were an inspiration for me.”

By the time Young arrived at intercounty football he already had experience of playing for Derry at minor level.

In 1978, Derry played Down in the Ulster Championship. Young togged out for the minors in what was his last year and then stayed on to play the senior game as a sub in Casement. That highlighted how good he was.

“It was a real honour to be asked to play for Derry. I had followed it as a kid. I went all over the country with my dad and my Uncle Brendan. It was a real honour for myself and the club to be asked on.

“I can remember feeling terrified about going to training. I remember going to training in Bellaghy, and one of the first drills I did was a line up Anthony McGurk and Peter Stevenson and then a third man. It was one of those channels where you had to take the ball and beat all three men. You did well to get by Anthony McGurk, but you did exceptionally well to go by Peter Stevenson. And it says a lot that I don’t remember who was in the third square, I don’t think I ever seen him.”

Young says those men were supportive of a young player coming into the team.

The team included men like Anthony McGurk, Tom Quinn, Mickey Moran, Tom McGuinness, Gerry McElhinney, John Somers and Peter Stevenson.

Playing with higher level of players can improve younger players. For Young it also provided other opportunities to play different sports.

“Gerry McElhinney was playing for Derry then, and Gerry had me playing Soccer up in Dungiven. Gerry went to play for Distillery. Next thing you know I get a knock on the door and Gaby McKenzie asked if I wanted to come and play for them. Of course I thought this was brilliant. I went to Distillery for three or four months. That was over the summer. But when September came the Basketball kicked in and I was playing National League Basketball with St Gall’s. Then the National League with Derry kicked in. Then it became impossible.”

Young’s joining of the Derry team came at a period of transition. Those men who had helped Derry win titles in 1976 and 1977 were coming to the end of their careers.

“Those lads stepped back and new players came in. Frankie Kearney was manager and he brought boys like myself and James McAfee into the team.

“He was a great people person and he knew how to bring people along with him. That is the secret with coaches and managers. You have to be able to bring people with you. You have to be able to get people to come along with what the manager wants to do.”

Unfortunately for Young, when he came into the Derry team it was the start of a lean period.

Young felt that he was hampered in the early days by a lack of competitive action. He was playing his club football with Moneymore, who were a team that moved up and down the divisions. He didn’t get any steady senior football experience and that didn’t help his game at intercounty level.

“When you went up to division one then you were playing against the players like Brian McGilligan and those lads and that would probably have helped. That would have added to my personal playing development.

“In terms of the county, Tyrone and Monaghan were strong. Eugene McKenna was an exceptional player for Tyrone.”

Young admitted that he always had fondness for Armagh. That came from having went to school in Armagh.

“I would have followed Armagh and went to a lot of their matches. I was a boarder at school and my mates are from Armagh. I have an allegiance to Armagh. I would have looked up to Jimmy Smyth and Joe Kernan. They are quality players.”

Young remember being on the Ulster team when he was 20, in 1980. He was called up by Down legend Sean O’Neill. Young reckons that O’Neill, who was involved with Queen’s Sigerson team would have seen him play at universities level.

“I played in the half forward line with Joe Kernan and Colm McAlarney. Peter McGinnity and Liam Austin were middle of the field. It was a huge team. That was huge. Getting an opportunity to play at that level gave me a huge impetus to keep playing.”

He remembers scoring two goals in the Railway cup final. But the delight of that was tempered by the realisation that he was not as big a star as he thought he was.

“The reporter, I can’t remember who it was, wrote ‘Derry’s Christy Young scored two fantastic goals to help Ulster win the Railway cup.’ I thought, ‘there you go.’”

So while success seemed like it was a ways off with Derry, Young realised that perhaps it was not too far away if he could play alongside men of that calibre.

“It was a great honour to play for my province. I remember my grandfather coming down to watch the Railway cup final on St Patrick’s day. He wouldn’t have went to many games but he went to that one. It is a great honour to play for Ulster.”

Young holds the unique position of having played for his province in Gaelic Football but also in Basketball.

“I played for Ulster in invitational tournaments. There was a great bit of traveling which was attractive. With the GAA we didn’t have that.

“I played for Ireland in the home internationals against Wales and against Scotland, and against England.

“The GAA had the International rules which came in and I suppose that was the closest of getting to an international environment.”

The experience was also important for another reason.

“When I started working at the University of Ulster I realised that students who applied to the university who had international sporting experience had an advantage. A student who competes international gets more points towards their admission. So I went to the GAA and I said that the GAA students are at a disadvantage. So we put in place the Ulster player academy and those players come into us over the summer and they get a representative match for Ulster.

“So a player filling out a UCAS form can say that they have played for club, county and province. Hopefully they will get the extra points they need to get a successful application.”

As a young man, it was in county football that Young really wanted to make his mark.

“I was finding my feet. We were up and down. The competition was so hot. That Kerry team were winning All-Irelands with ease. Dublin were tough. We were competitive in our division. We won division two national league but we weren’t at the top table.”

During that period of those early years of county football Young feels like he was developing in strength and skill.

“I was in the gym a lot in Jordandstown. I was getting a bit cuter as well. But the challenge for me was always about how to try to balance the two sports I was playing. The basketball and the football.”

The reason why Basketball was allowed to be played alongside GAA comes down to coaching. He played under coaches like Frankie O’Loan, Art McRory, John Kennedy from St Gall’s and Mickey Moran from Derry coached him as well. The key to these names is that these are all men who understand both GAA and Basketball. So they understood why it was alright for a man to play both codes.

“When I was playing Basketball for St Gall’s the men who were involved were also hurlers and footballers so they understood where I was coming from. It was maybe a bit more difficult the other way, with the Derry management over the years.”

Young was in a position as a player to draw the best from both styles of management. He says that basketball and football coaches share similar passions, but their approach to their games is different.

“The basketball managers are constantly thinking about their tactics. It could be changed every five minutes. Football managers have more players and don’t have natural time breaks to reset their plans.”

In his first three years of county football, there was no big successes at county level to be excited about. The period was one that is a far cry from the modern game.

“But it was a different beast back then. So many people were volunteers, those who were coaching. We were going to games in buses. I remember going to a match in Mayo, and we had to start with 13 players because a couple of cars got lost.

“The referee threw the ball in and we were playing with one player in the full forward line. The players came flying in through the gate, then into the changing rooms. We brought on two subs with ten minutes gone. Everyone was laughing about it at the time, but if it happened now you would get crucified. Even at club level you would get crucified for that.”

Though Young said positive work came in 1984 when the GAA held a straight knockout competition to mark the centenary of the association.

“That open draw gave as an opportunity to have a crack at top teams.

“I remember beating Cork in Ballinascreen, and we beat Kerry, then we got through to play Monaghan in the semi-final in Croke Park. They took us to extra time and they won.

“That win over Kerry was a huge moment for me.

“We thought we had a team then that could be competitive. But then, as it often happens in Derry, the thing imploded. Mickey Moran and Anthony McGurk and Peter Stevenson, who were the three lads on the team, didn’t get the job for the following year. I know that Eamonn didn’t get back (in 1995), the players went on strike. This was a similar thing.

“In 1985 we stepped back and we said to the county what is going on. Sometimes Derry is its own worst enemy. But we felt that we were going in the right direction.”

The team of Moran, McGurk and Stevenson had the players on their side. The team were confident, and they felt that the performances in the Centenary championship were good enough to warrant the county to believe in bigger things.

“People will say it was only the Centenary championship but the teams we played were all full strength. We had boys like Damian Barton, Damian Cassidy, Dermot McNicholl coming onto the panel. They were coming through. We just know that Mickey and Anthony were withdrawn from the management. We all felt aggrieved at it.

“I remember a session in Magherafelt and seven or eight players turned up, we turned up to see who was there. Someone from the county board was there. They said that they didn’t have anyone in place to manage. But we said it didn’t matter who was appointed because we weren’t playing. So there was a bit of a standoff.”

Yet despite that problem, Derry got all the way to the Ulster final in 1985 where they were due to meet Monaghan. Disaster struck for Young though.

“I was playing in Greenlough and Tony (Scullion) and I were marking each other. I went up for a ball and came down on Tony’s ankle. But I busted my own ankle and ended up on crutches and missed that final. I just had an up and down time.”

The clash with Basketball was always coming. Tom Scullion the Derry manager told Young to stop playing basketball and focus on Gaelic Football in the 1987 season.

There was a reason why Young was not going to do that.

“If I didn’t have a chance to play international basketball then I might have done.

“He said to me that I had to stop playing basketball or he would drop me. I said, ‘Tom that’s your call’, and he dropped me. He called my bluff.” Young laughed at that story.

“All the years that I played for the county, that was the one year we got to the final and we actually won,” he said about Derry winning the Ulster title in 1987.

But Young accepts that that was a choice he had to make. Had he dropped basketball then he wouldn’t have been part of the Ireland team that attended the pre-Olympic tournament in Holland.

“Liam McHale (the Mayo player and Irish Basketballer) was in the same boat. He and I roomed together with Ireland because we were the two GAA heads on team.”

Playing for Ireland had been a long held ambition for Young. Ever since the early days of playing underage basketball for his country, he felt that he wanted to be a senior player, and play in an Olympic trial.

“I worked at it for years.”

Young played for Northern Ireland in the Commonwealth championships in Scotland and they won the Bronze medal. They beat three or four teams that they didn’t think they would win.

Then in the pre-Olympic tournament Young got the taste of what he had long desire. A change to play against the best in Europe.

“We played Spain and, my God, they were massive. I was marking a lad who must have been 6”11’. And the only reason I was put on him was because I was a GAA player. It was a case of, go out there and beat him up. But he pushed me round the court like a paper bag.

“But those type of experiences, I wouldn’t have got them in the GAA.

“That’s why when the Aussie Rules u-17s started, I felt that it was good to give the young boys an opportunity to go out there and play. I felt we had to let them have that. Okay, some of them may be targeted. But they are going to go out there some way. I felt that an opportunity to play at International level in your own sport is unbelievable.”

The Derry manager Quinn in 1987 had asked Young to stop playing basketball without really understanding what it meant to the Moneymore man.

“What he was asking me to do, I wasn’t prepared to do. So he dropped me. Which is fair enough. I would have did the same if I was in his position.

“But if I am a volunteer, and I am not getting paid, and people are telling me I can’t do A, B and C, I felt that I didn’t want to be dictated to. I felt that I didn’t want to forfeit the chance to play in a pre-Olympic tournament because the manager decided that I couldn’t play Basketball. It wasn’t going to happen.

“I had worked toward it for years. We had a basketball ring made out of a wheel of a bicycle, and I was out banging balls into it every night in the dark. It wasn’t just something I was doing for the craic. I had firmly fixed my eyes on getting on that Irish squad to get away to experience playing in european and pre-Olympic tournaments. Ireland were never going to get to the Olympics, but the best we could be would be to get to a pre-Olympic tournament and to play against the best teams in Europe like Spain.”

Playing basketball should never have been an impediment to Derry. In actual fact Young always thought that the tactics in Basketball worked well for the county game.

“I always played full forward and it is essentially like the high post in Basketball. That was a tactic we used in Derry for years. They’d get the ball into me, at high post, or full forward and everyone else would be running off the high post. I’d nip the ball to the player in the best position to score. You’d have Damian Cassidy and Dermot McNicholl were the runners off me.

“That was a tactic that (Mickey Moran) used. They said that it used to be just catch and kick in those days, but there were a lot of tactics.”

For the 1988 season, Young returned to the county footballers, but he missed his chance to win an Ulster title as Derry wouldn’t return to the decider till 1992.

His last year playing for the county was in 1990.

“It was the opening of Celtic Park and we played Fermanagh. Donegal beat us in the semi-final. That was my swan song. I was out after that. I enjoyed it. But maybe Matt is right, maybe if I had have focused on it the outcomes might have been different. From a personal perspective all that other stuff I wouldn’t want to have missed.”

His decision to stop playing was not his own though.

“Eamonn put me out to pasture. But I’d probably been playing for too long. I came off with a hamstring injury in the Fermanagh game. I was on the subs bench against Donegal. Gerry McElhinney was over playing soccer with Bolton Wanderers but he came back for that match, but the last throw of the dice that day was to put Gerry on. It didn’t work out. My hamstring was sore that day but I could have played. That was my swan song. I don’t think I could have held on for another year never mind another three years till 1993.”

But his connection to Derry wasn’t over.

“In 1992 Eamonn asked me to come in to do the testing with the Derry team and to do a physical fitness programme for over the winter leading into 1993. I saw a lot of stuff. Eamonn had managed me through to 1990.

“I worked with Mickey after Eamonn left. I saw how Mickey coached. Anyone who works with Mickey will tell you the person he is. You learn a lot from him.

“I don’t think I would change it. I learned a lot about myself from the games I played.”

Young has had some fine managers during his playing days. He felt that Coleman and Moran were a level above.

“They had the perfect mix in management. Mickey is an excellent tactical coach. Eamonn was the man to talk to players and make sure everything was going in the right direction. It’s just unfortunate that things didn’t work out in the county.”

His fondest memories of playing basketball were from his days with St Gall’s. Though the memories were not always positive.

“I remember going to training one night, during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. I member pulling up at Andersonstown Leisure Centre and there was a burning bus outside. A young lad came over to the car, and I put the window down. He says: “Eugene, there’s no basketball on tonight, the leisure centre is closed.’”

He laughed about how matter-of-fact the lad was, but he recalls that period of playing basketball during the Troubles as a great period.

“Those Saturday night matches in Belfast were huge. The place would be rocking. If you had Ballina coming up with Liam McHale, who was the best Irish Basketball player ever, and Dior Marsh who could jump into the sky, then the place would be full at half six. The match wasn’t to eight. They would come in to see the warm ups, and the boys dunking the balls.

“Those Saturday nights were my best memories, not the international games. Those nights were great.”

When Young moved home to Moneymore then he moved clubs to Dungannon because it was local. He enjoyed his days with Dungannon, but the days with St Gall’s are still his stand out memory.

He still misses playing. While his position with Ulster GAA means he can’t coach GAA outside of his club, he gets his action by coaching basketball for some ladies teams and he still loves to get involved.

“I still be diving across the court. But then I couldn’t walk for a week after it. You do miss it. There is nothing like playing.”

Even after all the years the man who tried to play every sport that he could, is still trying to play as much as he can. No matter what Matt Trolan says, Young still won’t give up the Basketball.