All aboard for the Chicks with Sticks! revolution

LockerRoom: In America, when they think of sunsets and Mom's apple pie and things which America as a nation deems to be incontestably good, they often talk about fathers playing catch with sons.

A baseball, an old catcher's mitt, a napkin of green grass and a father telling himself that, hey, the kid's got a good arm, just like the old man.

Where are the girls in this picture? Learning to make Mom's apple pie? Ironing the baseball uniforms? Pressing their noses up against the window, thinking they could do that? Only better. Who knows? Who's ever known? Sport, the great metaphor for life, traditionally excluded girls and women as squarely as life.

What do girls do? When I was young I knew what they did. They played intricate games that involved various ways of bouncing rubber balls off brick walls while singing lyrical little songs. "Plainy the marmalade. Plainy the marmalade." Bounce. Catch. Bounce. Catch. Bounce. Catch. They would stand around in groups and watch each other do this from dawn to dusk. They seemed happy.

Girls had evolved, indeed, to the extent where they could also perform complicated skipping manoeuvres while singing these type of songs. "In and out goes Saucy Bluebells, in and out goes Saucy Bluebells", and two of them would twirl the rope while a third, playing, I imagine, the role of the indecisive Saucy Bluebells, would literally jump in and out.

There was no end of real-life situations in which this skill would be useful. Perhaps it would be televised live and they would all become millionaires.

They could do these things and they could play chasing, pull hair and learn to knit. That's as far as I understood their remit, anyway. Later, they disappeared from view, only to re-emerge as fully-formed young women who were smarter than us and knew it.

I don't know for sure what changed and when it changed, but everywhere I go now I see hordes of kids carrying hurleys. Girls as often as boys. From Cabra to Donnycarney to Marino to Ballyboden to Kilmacud, girls are doing unbelievable things, they are moulding themselves into teams, expressing themselves, challenging themselves, pushing themselves. I see fathers out pucking sliotars around with their daughters until the girls give permission to head for home. I see girls fighting over whose sideline cut it is, arguing with refs, soloing 40 yards, executing perfect blocks. Just enjoying the best sport in the world.

And it has a coolness to it. When we were kids, getting on a bus with a hurley meant hearing none-too-subtle remarks about "boggers" and "rednecks" and "gahmen". The games have a different cachet now, for some reason we can't understand but have to welcome.

Camogie, despite itself perhaps, has undergone a huge change. In those estates which teem with kids, GAA clubs and soccer clubs have always thrived while sport for girls has always been something of an afterthought, if even that. Now, perhaps because of a change in the safety of the environment and a change in the expectation levels of girls and their parents, camogie has been in there competing for customers. Girls still play basketball and soccer and Gaelic football, but more and more of them walk around with hurleys in their hands. Some clubs just can't get enough coaches for their mini leagues.

It's intriguing and thrilling to watch. Girls are as different from boys in team situations as cats are from dogs. A dog will fetch sticks without thinking about it. A dog will pull a sled through snow without question. Just happy to be there. That's boys, the incessant tail-waggers of the sporting world. Girls have to see the point of everything.

"You're going to run out there, jab-pick the ball and solo back and handpass," says the coach.

"Yeah? Why?" comes the answer.

But they love it. Their play is an extension of their personality, their intensity, and the will to win is sometimes frightening.

And camogie was there all along? How did they keep it a secret from the Saucy Bluebells crowd? I asked three 12-year-olds this week what they were going to be when they got older. One surgeon (Clare), two professional hurlers (Fionnuala and Carol).

Camogie has problems, though. It's a competitive world out there and the game has more skills to be learned than any other you can think of. Takes time. Needs money. Requires patience. Gaelic football has gobbled up the imagination of much of its natural constituency. Soccer too. Fixture lists are often chaotic, with not enough games being played in summer, while minor grade is at under-16 so the sport haemorrhages good kids.

And the game needs, not to be gender specific about it, a make-over, not to make it look like something it isn't but for its image to begin to reflect what it has become.

Next year is the centenary of the association, and camogie is looking to put as much life into its image as it has into its game. To that end, the association has formed a committee, the average age of which is 27 and which will be electrifying the sport's image over the next year or so.

This isn't unusual. Sports market themselves all the time for the better. It's a world full of sharks out there, and the tragedy of camogie is that it has suffered for too long from its image of being something for big girls with fat ankles to do between Macra dances. It has no face, no stars, no real impact on those who don't play it or know it.

How radical are they going to be? Well, try Chicks with Sticks! as a slogan.

The working group (I repeat, average age 27, not a Macra dance between them) will be moving at last towards a stronger GAA/camogie alliance, with all the benefits that would bring. That alliance on a national level will change both the GAA and camogie forever.

Tests have shown that once you've tried a GAA club with a thriving and vibrant camogie section you'll never go back to the old "men stewing in their own bitterness" model. The GAA club at its best is part of the community, not a men's retreat house.

Having a camogie section means the club represents the community better and opens itself up to new perspectives and new ways of thinking.

We have a strange way of thinking about sport in this country. Largely, we view it the wrong way around. A Sonia O'Sullivan happens despite ourselves, really. Then we start rewarding elite athletes to make up for our earlier negligence. We don't target girls for sporting development and we don't reward them. We don't cover enough girls' sports on Monday mornings. Oddly, we don't view women as a market for sport.

It's shocking that despite the huge impact camogie has on ordinary, day-to-day life in Ireland that the senior intercounty leagues and championships in the sport are still available for sponsorship, that somebody hasn't taken those competitions by the neck, tagged their name to them and committed the rest of their spend to telling the stories and revealing the personalities.

Girls don't stand up laneways and throw rubber balls against walls anymore. You hardly ever see them skipping. They are house-bound and baby-sat by the Gameboy and the TV. But let loose, the chicks with sticks get to play on teams and grow and express themselves strenuously.

Girls have discovered camogie for themselves. They are waiting now for the rest of the world to discover them.

Life begins at 100.