Setting the Tone: The Bellaghy camogie story

Bellaghy are in their first Derry senior camogie final since they last won the title in 1993. Angela Turner and Paddy Downey look at how they bridged the gap. They sat down with Michael McMullan…

Bellaghy’s training base in Drumanee is clean, fresh and impressive. In some ways, it sums up what they’ve brought to the Derry camogie scene.

It’s a product of foresight, planning and togetherness. Based out of the town, away from Páirc Seán de Brún, it has two full-sized pitches with scope for more.

The expansive grounds is a sea of impeccably finished tarmac. There are ball walls and floodlights. There is even a couple of basketball rings in front of the clubhouse.

Inside, there is a meeting room with rows of blue chairs, perfectly laid out. There is a pool table at one end and a plasma screen that fills the back wall.

In a club were football and camogie are intertwined, this is perfection. It won’t puck the ball over the bar in Sunday’s camogie showdown but you get the feel of a club that are leaving no stone unturned.

Paddy Downey and Angela Turner (née Lee) agree. The club’s teams want for nothing. Between the club’s committees and the Friends of Bellaghy group, the backing is there.

Both are part of the management team plotting the downfall of league champions Swatragh. Bellaghy’s win over Lavey last year was a major boost. They’ve backed it up by an unbeaten run to this year’s final.

The last decade or more has been one blanket of underage camogie success. Three Derry and two All-Ireland Féile titles. They have been minor champions twice in the last five seasons.

Their impressive U16 team recently brought home the bacon, a title they also won five times in a six-year window.

It all started with an U14 B title in 2014, followed by winning the A grade four times in the next five seasons.

While Sunday is a novel pairing, when you scratch the surface, it’s no surprise that Bellaghy are pulling up a chair at the top table.

A deeper look into their 1993 success and it wasn’t unexpected. It was a year they ended Swatragh’s bid for an amazing 20 successive titles in the semi-final before then beating Castledawson in the final.

Angela’s mother, Mary Lee, was Chair of the first committee when camogie began in Bellaghy in the 1960s. Brigid McCann was treasurer, Evelyn Mackle was the secretary.

“I was reared with camogie and we’d have been out in a field where Daddy had the goalposts up” Angela recalls. “We were playing from when we were very young children, my two sisters (Karen and Eimhear) and two cousins (Eithne and Fiona Molloy).”

Bellaghy had been knocking on Swatragh’s door for the best part of a decade before it opened in 1993. The previous year, Damian Cassidy was the first man to get involved in managing the team as they got within two points of Swatragh.

While Cassidy was helping Derry land Sam the following year, Mary Lee and Marie Kilpatrick were in charge when they finally overcame Swatragh.

“We just knew we were getting nearer and nearer,” Turner recalls. “We’d won two leagues prior to that and we’d beaten them in the league, but we just couldn’t get over the line in the championship.”

Mary Lee (née Molloy) played camogie with Lavey for a time before they got the game up and running.

The Tones were the first club in the county to reach an All-Ireland final but ran into eight-time champions St Paul’s Kilkenny, who had were eyeing a third successive All-Ireland with a team littered with county players.

Swatragh won their first title in 1974 and have been a consistent rock in the county since.

“Getting over the line against Swatragh (in 1993) was just brilliant,” Turner recalls.

It was their passport to a win over Castledawson in the final.

Bellaghy were still challenging for the rest of the decade without getting their hands on the cup.

“We were talking about this at training the other night, we didn’t think at the time that it would be 33 years until we’d be back in a final even.”

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Bellaghy’s U14 B success of 2014 was a watershed moment in the development of the current team.

Back in the club, after comfortably winning the title, the club made a decision that they’d put their total focus on Grade A camogie from then on.

Downey, Damian Cassidy, Ciaran McNally, Liam Lee, Gavin and Paul Diamond, former championship winners, ploughed their efforts into camogie.

Former Kevin Lynch’s hurlers Aaron and Peter McCloskey for involved too.

“When your daughters are involved, you try and help them in whatever way you can,” Downey said.

“The girls were trained hard and trained properly. Aisling Diamond (now McErlain) was involved with that group as well.

“My daughter Rachel and all those girls, they idolised Aisling because she was the All-Star and had played in Croke Park.

“If Aisling had asked them to run to Cork and back, they would’ve done it. The girls learnt what proper training was, skills, hard work and discipline.”

It paid off and underage titles began to arrive. The tradition of parading the cups into the town only inspired the younger girls to want their slice of the pie when they got older.

It’s the same now. The majority of the senior girls are involved in coaching under-age. The younger girls on the current senior team are also involved with the Cúl Camps in the summer.

“That gap’s closed, in terms of those girls looking up to the seniors, they’re role models,” Downey added.

“Rachel and Eimear (Doherty) were involved in the U14 team this year and in two years, some of those girls will be up in that senior set-up. That’s how important it is to get that involvement.”

As Bellaghy’s senior and intermediate teams played their games this year, the younger players were all there in their club colours. They know the senior team on a first name basis.

“We’re blessed in this club,” he adds. “We have a lot of people who give up time to coach.

“The U6 nursery is out throughout the summer. The U8s have 38 girls and are self-sufficient without dipping into the age below. It’s the same at U10 and U12. We have two teams at U14 and U16.

“When you’ve got a pool of players, it definitely helps you bring them through a bit of success.”

The other element Aisling brought into the underage coaching was the idea of small-sided games to maximise the touches of the ball.

Before every session, players are paired off with a ball between two, all geared at maximising the touches to improve their skills.

“Theirs is no point in 16 of them battling around the same ball, there is no development in that,” Turner added.

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Winning at underage is one thing but keeping players on board is the most important success story.

Between their current senior and intermediate teams, it has kept the vast majority of their successful youth teams together.

After a spell down in intermediate, Bellaghy made their return to senior in 2020 to a chastening start, a 47-point league defeat at the hands of Sleacht Néill who were on the back of winning three successive All-Irelands.

It was followed up by a defeat at the hands of Swatragh the following week by 30-odd points. This was the absolute test of the underbelly.

“It told us there was work to be done,” Downey said with a smile. “It built up resilience in the girls; they have all been through it and there hasn’t been that many of them that have walked away from us.”

Having being used to underage success, they made the collective decision, they eat up the gulf in class, one mouthful at a time.

Of the 18 players used in their semi-final win over Ballinascreen this year, the average age is 20.

“We probably played for two or three years where we’d maybe have won one game to stay up,” Turner added. “We knew what we were coming up to.

“We could have just said, ‘we’ll wait and we’ll go down’ but we didn’t. We wanted to be playing Sleacht Neill and Swatragh.”

The best barometer was to play the best teams and prepare to eventually beat the best.

There were marginal gains but Sleacht Néill, Swatragh, Lavey and Ballinascreen remained a definitive top four.

That’s why beating Lavey in last year’s Senior Championship was so important.

“Lavey was our first big scalp, it was massive,” Turner said, comparing it to their 1993 win over Swatragh.

“We’ve doubled that up this year when we beat Ballinascreen in a semi-final,” Downey added.

“We’d never been near Ballinascreen, they would have been beating us year after year.

“We beat Glen this year and they beat us a couple of years ago in the senior championship. We had to win to go through, but they beat us by a point.

“These girls have a lot of bitter pills to swallow, but as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. They are such a resilient bunch, they just keep going at it.”

After years of wondering what it would take to get to, or how far they were away from, the top table, Bellaghy camogie is on the crest of a wave.

“It’s nice for people like the Mary Lee, a founder member of the club, to experience buildup to another county final,” Downey said.

Swatragh were champions two years ago and will be a tough nut to crack but the last 12 years of camogie in Bellaghy have been in preparation for days like Sunday.

“I think I would cry for a week if we win, that would just be phenomenal.” Turner summed up.

“You’re not guaranteed to be back. As I touched on earlier, never would I have thought that it would be 33 years until we’d be back in a final.

“We did have the team to come back the next year and the next year, but it didn’t happen.”

With the numbers playing camogie in Bellaghy, it’s hard to see them not being back in a final in the foreseeable future.

For now, Emmet Park will be rocking on Sunday. A second title in three years for Swatragh or the end of a 33-year famine. Bellaghy will be praying for the latter.