They say experience is a great teacher. It certainly makes for a good coach.
When both Ciara Neville and Sarah Lavin found themselves at their lowest ebb, they didn’t have to look far for advice from an athlete who had been down a similar road – being able to turn to their lifelong coach and mentor Noelle Morrissey.
At 26, Neville’s return to the top of Irish women’s sprinting has been one of the more heart-warming stories of the last year. She won back the National Indoor 60m title last month, adding to her 100m title won last summer – six years after she last won those same titles. With that Neville finally closed the door on all the doubts, and doubters, which had plagued her since her prolific teenage years with Emerald AC in Limerick.
Lavin had also faced similar challenges. It took her seven years to improve on her 100m hurdles best, set as a 20-year-old. After that her career soared. Three years ago, at 29, she broke the Irish record which had been held by Derval O’Rourke since 2010.
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When Lavin broke the Irish schools 100m hurdles record back in 2012, the time she beat belonged to her coach Morrissey since 1983, before Morrissey’s own career was cut short through injury and over-training.
“I think back now, and at age 25, I thought I was old,” says Morrissey, who won a series of Irish underage sprint hurdles titles before her aspirations were ended. “Now I see people are running fast well past 30. So I say that to young athletes when they get injured. ‘Don’t give up and think you’re old’. Because they’re not.
“I always say that would be my advice to my younger self. We always love the next shiny new thing in this country. And invariably there’ll be someone else coming through who is faster or stronger. But you can only be as good as yourself.
“And if you don’t see it, you won’t believe it, as they say. For Ciara, seeing what Sarah had come through – not running a personal best for seven years – helped her believe.”
Neville and Lavin both started training at Emerald AC under Morrissey at age six. She’s been their rockthroughout, when funding, shoe sponsors and whatever other support came and went. She’d been through all that too. Morrissey has also coached them while juggling being a mother-of-three with working full-time, owning and managing the Eason’s in Nenagh.
Last August, Neville and Lavin were both part of the Irish women’s 4x100m team which broke the national record in London. Next weekend they will be reunited on the Irish team at the World Indoor Championships in Poland.
For Neville, this comes nine years after making her senior international debut at the 2017 European Indoors in Belgrade, at age 17, when she was running faster 60m times than Rhasidat Adeleke was at the same age. Two years later, Neville ran 11.33 for the 100m, the then second-fastest Irish woman in history. She was also part of the Irish 4x100m relay team, along with Adeleke, that won World Under-20 silver in 2018.
Then in 2021, well within sight of the postponed Tokyo Olympics, Neville sustained a serious hamstring injury when racing in Finland. She tried to train through it before an MRI scan revealed her hamstring had been partially ripped off the bone. Which is every bit as painful as it sounds.
After trying a course of platelet-rich plasma injections, intended to speed up recovery, Neville was eventually resigned to surgery in London.
“It wasn’t like anything I’d experienced before, pain-wise,” explains Neville. “It just took a lot longer to get back sprinting, we couldn’t get the strength back in the right leg to match the left leg. Which is very frustrating, because as a sprinter, the hamstring is one of the main muscles that we use.
“When I first got back it felt like I was running with someone else’s leg. It just didn’t feel like it was a part of me. From not running for so long, it felt like it was such a foreign thing.
“Nothing was moving smoothly, so it was really difficult just to get the stride pattern back. And to get my contact off the ground quick, because that was something we really struggled with. Because the leg was injured, it just wanted extra time on the ground, so it wasn’t putting as much force through it. It definitely made for an interesting journey.”
Which is where Morrissey’s own experience proved paramount.
“After Ciara qualified for the European Indoors, as a 17-year-old, I suppose we thought the sky’s the limit here,” says Morrissey. “But it’s never a smooth ride. As a coach, you always blame yourself. Say ‘okay, where did I go wrong here’. I wouldn’t say Ciara was trying to do too much. It was about getting on to the circuit, into bigger races, where you could start making something out of the athletics, as well as qualifying for the championships.
“We had two situations then, in tandem, where if the Tokyo Olympics had been in 2020, Sarah would have missed out, after a freak accident that February, ripping ligaments off her ankle. In 2021, Ciara was inside the rankings, trying to ensure her points, when her injury happened. These things happen.
“It’s taken her over three years to get back, but I feel at this stage she’s made of iron. I’m an inherently optimistic person, I know how much she wanted it. So for me, there wasn’t even a question of giving up on her. It’s hard enough to do the whole thing on a part-time basis, without letting any negativity creep in.”
Back in 2016, within touching distance of qualifying for the 100m hurdles at the Rio Olympics, Lavin broke down with Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (Red-S), after which she had to build back up from the dangerously low weight of 57kg.
Morrissey’s experience of trying to navigate the pathway to senior success means she’s never short on advice for Neville and Lavin. She won her first Irish senior international vest at age 15. Then at the start of 1984, in her first year at UCC, she went on a warm-weather training came in Portugal, sustaining a stress fracture in her foot.
“I didn’t even think I was seriously injured. You don’t realise the implications. We didn’t have the proper coaching and support, and my big problem was that I overtrained. And that was more or less the end of me.”
Which is also why Morrissey has always fought for the support of her athletes. In 2023, Sport Ireland introduced a package of funding for coaches, worth around €10,000 a year, and Morrissey was one of the first beneficiaries.
“I’ve been coaching for the last 25 years or so, and I’ve only got support the last three years. It’s improving a little bit. But it’s still tough. I know it’s hard to support athletes who are injured or aren’t competing. But it’s doubly hard on athletes without communication, because they don’t know what’s going on. And I think that’s still one of the biggest problems – communication.
“People write athletes off all the time, but I’d say don’t bother, not until athletes decide to write themselves off.”
