Paul Kinnerk’s laser-focus approach to coaching paying dividends for Limerick

The bug bit early. In the introduction to his doctoral thesis, 'Coaching Pedagogy in Intercounty Gaelic Football,' Paul Kinnerk recounts how his first experience of coaching was at the age of 12 helping his father to prepare a soccer team of under-12s for the Community Games.

“He had little exposure to coaching and I helped out by setting up linear skills practice (which I had picked up from my involvement with another team). I enjoyed it. It was an early start into the coaching world but it initiated thought about how to improve performance.”

That start led over the next couple of decades to an extraordinary coaching career for the Limerick man, who is still only 35. At its heart is the apparent paradox that someone reared in the county’s football tradition, which he represented at intercounty level, should have made such a seismic impact on hurling.

In his 20s he combined a senior intercounty football career with coaching Clare’s under-21 hurlers, then in the process of winning multiple All-Irelands, and achieved the apparently impossible by short-changing neither.

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Coaching is one of those subjects that can make the eyes glaze over for most observers of sports. It’s the intricacies of internal combustion in a desirable car. Yet it’s every bit as vital.

Occasionally, coaches break cover and get noticed. It’s another of the Kinnerk paradoxes that he is very private about what he does, venturing out only occasionally to do coaching conferences and rarely engaging with media.

With his fingerprints on six All-Irelands, between under-21 and senior, and the prospect of a seventh should Limerick justify their favourites’ rating this month, attention is however inevitable.

The champions have combined high levels of athleticism and power with high-tempo hurling to become an almost irresistible force in the game. John Kiely is the manager and a well-regarded coach in his own right but he is happy to delegate that vital preparatory role to Kinnerk.

It’s interesting that even his singular dedication to becoming an almost custom-built specialist coach for Gaelic games – he has also had several involvements across other sports but GAA is where it started – is academically based not on hurling, where his practice has been so successful but football where his origins lie.

It's not a unique journey. Former Laois player and football manager Michael Dempsey became one of Brian Cody's lieutenants in Kilkenny during the years of imperium. A specialist in physical preparation, he told The Irish Times last December of what he saw as similarities as well as differences.

“There may a difference in the requirements between the games, but in both the high-intensity efforts that lead to creating scoring opportunity or preventing the ball going in at the other end. Those efforts are key and there is more specificity in training now; it’s geared to what you actually do in a match whereas before we were probably all doing long runs.

“Now with all the data, we prepare for what you will be asked to do in the game.”

Kinnerk is an evangelist of that games-based approach. In a rare interview, with Michael Verney in the Irish Independent he explained about his work in Limerick.

“We’re a principles-based approach team in terms of how we try and play, exposing them to that and exposing them to greater difficulty and increasing the complexity at which they’re working within those areas. Ultimately, it is done through games – pressurised opposed environments.”

Getting there was a result of random events – being asked by his then St Caimin’s, Shannon, teaching colleague Seán Stack to help out with Sixmilebridge – and the stellar results that he quickly produced.

He moved up to the Clare minors and under-21s, achieving success with both before David Fitzgerald and the Clare seniors came calling and the All-Ireland duly followed in 2013.

Although he had family connections in Clare –both his parents are from the county – his GAA home is Limerick, with whom he played football for a few seasons. Maurice Horan was manager of the team that reached the All-Ireland quarter-finals for the first and only time 10 years ago and a club-mate of Kinnerk in Monaleen.

“I started to hear rumblings that he was a good coach and I was trying to piece it together in my head, picture it,” says Horan. “A couple of times I asked him to do warm-ups, which I’d usually never ask a player to do, because I was curious. I could see even at that stage a certain confidence or belief.

“He was comfortable talking about tactics and listening. Sometimes players can come across as a bit anxious to show what they know. He was in his mid-20s at the time and that’s how I realised that he had a future in coaching – because he had the ability to stand back and see the bigger picture.

“He was a member of the squad and very reliable but he wanted to train the Clare under-21s, which I was happy to facilitate. He was very committed to doing both. In the course of that year I was expecting to hear the occasional, ‘I can’t make this’ or ‘I can’t make that’ but it was never an issue with Paul even though it must have been a six-day a week commitment.”

One former intercounty hurler whose club had Kinnerk in for a night some years ago, rhapsodises about the experience. “It was unbelievable, fantastic. We were saying, no wonder Clare won the All-Ireland. The questions he was asking of the players in his drills, the communication of what he was doing – constantly challenging players.

“There’s more time in football to make a decision. Hurling is all about decision makers. The best hurlers are the best decision makers. Hard to coach because the game is so fast. All his drills are about decision making. Very often it’s the simplest option but most of the time the simplest option is the correct one.”

Horan, though, believes that football has influenced and informed Kinnerk’s coaching.

“Over the following years whenever I spoke to him you could observe the growth in him. I wouldn’t be an expert on this but he appeared to be taking some things from football for hurling, like intensity in the tackle.

“I would have worked with Joe O’Connor [fitness coach who was with Kinnerk in both Clare and Limerick 2018 All-Ireland wins]. He and Paul were very close and I spoke to Joe about how they worked together.

“It was the first time I had come across a coach and S&C guy dovetailing like that to achieve skills goals and tactics goals but also to hit conditioning targets necessary for those tactics.”

Kinnerk, as he developed, also had access to two leading football coaches, Donie Buckley, who he would have worked with during his Limerick football career, and former Kildare manager Cian O'Neill, who has the distinction of having coached All-Ireland winners in both football (Kerry 2014) and hurling (Tipperary 2010).

Their paths crossed at Monaleen when O’Neill was a student in UL and Kinnerk has acknowledged that influence.

“He would have trained under Donie Buckley at times,” says Horan, “and the graph of his learning was impressive. Then there’s the academic stuff. A lot of coaches take academic work and try to apply it, which doesn’t always transfer to Gaelic games, however good it seems on paper.

“Sometimes you need more than theory and technicalities. He has been able to marry the two – academic and practical – and you see the savage intensity the Limerick hurlers have and he’s their coach.”

Horan believes that Kinnerk may be interested in emulating O’Neill and collaborating on a football All-Ireland.

“I’m definitely enjoying hurling,” Kinnerk said in the Irish Independent interview. “I wouldn’t rule out moving into Gaelic football or another sport in time in a coaching capacity because there’s always that passion for coaching.”

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