Helping to get Gaelic footballers up to speed

SPORTING PASSIONS PAUL McKEE:ATHLETICS WAS always my first choice. I played for St Paul's for a couple of months and on the school football team as well, but from a young age I wanted to be the next Carl Lewis or Seb Coe.

I did enjoy the team atmosphere but nowadays I know I can help Gaelic footballers develop into athletes. This season I have been coaching Lámh Dearg, a team from Belfast close to where I live. I’m coaching them about improvements in technique, speed and specific match fitness.

I’ve done all my coaching badges in strength and conditioning. Sprinting in Gaelic football is different from athletics. Most sprints are over 10 metres, but they also need to decelerate and change direction and keep going for 70 minutes.

Wee things you don’t even realise can be a big help. When guys are getting in position to run I noticed most of them have the same arm and leg forward. That has to be corrected because when your left knee comes up, your right arm comes up. That can give you maybe a quarter of a metre, especially when the first 10 metres are all important. Most guys were doing it wrong.

Another is standing up straight before running. When you are in full acceleration, standing up tall is perfect but beforehand you should lean forward so I throw a ball in front of them and most were almost taking a step backward before going forward.

I do it beside them and after a few paces I’d look back and ask ‘what’s the craic here boys? It’s not Riverdance!’ Working on technique can help injury prevention as well. There were five Lámh Dearg guys who suffered from cruciate knee ligament damage last year and there is none this year. Touch wood. Maybe it was a little bit of over-training and they didn’t have enough time to recover.

I enjoy having people around to motivate me. I like when some of the Lámh Dearg boys are struggling there are others who are straight onto them, encouraging them to keep going. Last season the club got relegated but there has been a big effort to get back up as a lot of people in the club were embarrassed.

A lot of teams are employing strength and conditioning coaches – Lámh Dearg didn’t want to get left behind. When you see how much you can pass on, I realised I’d like to do this in the future. I’ve worked with 70 kids at the Gaelic Performance camps this week. I know most will go home and forget what I showed them but five or six keep practising and they will progress to senior level.

One of the ways Gaelic football training went wrong 20 years ago was hiring middle-distance athletics coaches. It’s only in the last five or 10 years that sprinters have started to come through.

The “laps” mentality is actually detrimental to many things a player needs to develop. Recently I designed a session for the coaches in Antrim and while some of them took it on some kept asking about the laps.

Okay, you do need fitness but you need speed as well. Rugby has tapped into athletics coaching much quicker with Munster, Ulster and Leinster all employing speed coaches. It pays off.

• Paul McKee – Irish Olympian (Sydney) over 400 metres – former national record holder. He is also a strength and conditioning coach.