More than one way to make a hurler

LockerRoom: Sometimes in the GAA you can't help but be reminded of the old Harry Chapin song about the kid in school being admonished for what he's just drawn with his crayons. "Flowers are red, young man/ Green leaves are green/ There's no need to see flowers any other way/ Than they way they always have been seen".

Other times, though, you just get cheered up. On Friday night there were about a hundred people gathered on Ballymun Kickhams' plastic pitch to attend one of the Dublin County Board's hurling workshops for coaches.

You had to pinch yourself and remind yourself that this was January. This was Dublin. This was Friday night. This was an artificial pitch with floodlights. This was the future of hurling in the city.

The event was a guru-free zone. No snobs. No sciolists. Marked absent were all those tedious types who tell you hurlers are born and not made, those guys who by the pained expression on their faces let you know you are an inferior hurling man (indeed not a hurling man at all) if you can't name the reserve right corner back on the unlucky Kilkenny intermediate team of 1973. You know the fellas. They rub their chins and stare out from the sidelines like mystics in anoraks, and they know that flowers are red and green trees are green.

No, out on the plastic pitch with the planes roaring so low overhead you sometimes had to lean in and crane your neck to hear, the message was that anybody could coach hurlers if they had a willingness to learn themselves. Nicky English, who was giving the night's workshop (on his speciality, first-touch hurling), stressed it again and again.

Anyone with a mind to could teach hurling. And he gave himself as an example: growing up in the football fiefdom of Lattin, with a dad who never hurled much, he learned the game at home and in the club.

The county board's hurling development officer (HDO) is responsible for the elimination of the cult of the guru. It's a great idea. Gurus are the scourge of Dublin hurling. The HDO is so dedicated to the idea of empowerment that he declines to be named in newspapers lest he inadvertently become a guru himself. The revolution, he says, is about the men coming down from the mountains.

He's right, he's right, he's right. He has, I think, identified two crippling problems in relation to Dublin hurling.

One: the Culture of Godhelpusness. This feeling that with every defection to football or every setback on the field the future has just got more forlorn and hopeless.

Two: the Curse of Parochialism. "I come from the side of a mountain in Waterford," he says, "and I never knew what parochialism was till I got involved with Dublin hurling."

So he sets the challenge. The county can do it by itself. Take away that element who act like maors keeping those who know less away from the sidelines. They are the principal enemies of promise. Create a huge database of those who are interested in learning. And give them the tools.

On Friday night in Ballymun, the proof that there was a promised land ahead was there on the pitch. A hundred interested coaches and four young lads from a Dublin development squad. Each of the players was new to Nicky's drills and exercises but performed them with such aplomb and touch that they surprised Nicky himself and drew frequent rounds of applause from the gathering.

The revolution spreads more quickly than that, though. The structures of Dublin hurling are changing. The number of full-time coaches and volunteer coaches working in the field right now is incredible. The development squad system has been regionalised. The schools system is changing.

If there is an emphasis on the quantity of players coming to the game, there is an equal stress on quality. Good players are getting to spend time with the sort of coach who can make them better hurlers in the space of half an hour.

The county board is making more of those coaches.

And there's a different way of seeing things.

One of the best ideas challenges our parochialism. It is proposed to create, for the purposes of championship, group teams along the lines of the Cork/Kerry divisional teams. There would be one group team in each of Dublin's three development squad/ management zones, ie, North, South and West.

How would it work? Well, anybody in a junior or intermediate club in the relevant management zone would play senior championship for these teams if they were good enough. They would still play for their "home" club.

The group teams would be directly managed by the county board, which would provide mentors, ensure club "buy in" and provide an equal and appropriate amount of finance.

Each "development hub" could also have two minor group teams to cater for players below division one again, while they still continue to play for their "home club".

So you are allowing access to top-level championship hurling and top-level coaching to a whole raft of hurlers who would never get that unless they did the unpopular thing and switched to a different club. You are strengthening the senior and minor hurling championships and deepening the range of players the county teams get to pick from.

The model is slightly different from that in Cork and Kerry in that those counties have divisional boards. In Dublin, leadership from above (the county board) and "buy-in" from below would be the path to progress.

The flowers-are-red brigade will no doubt throw their arms in the air and say this is the old Fingal junior selection business, or the old northside/southside juvenile representative teams idea again.

Well, it's not. And it can be pointed out furthermore that in Cork, back in the early 1990s, Imokilly (East Cork) began to benefit quickly from huge investment of men and materials in underage hurling and a line of players who would have been lost to Cork got a chance to play and excel at senior level. On the back of this, many clubs moved up from junior to intermediate and intermediate to senior off the back of the "upsurge": for example, Castlelyons, Bride Rovers, Killeagh, Cloyne, to name but a few.

In Kerry football, the progress of clubs was less marked because the clubs were smaller units. Nevertheless, the system threw up players like Séamus Moynihan, Johnny Crowley (East Kerry), Declan O'Sullivan and Seán O'Sullivan (South Kerry).

In Dublin, where there is constant moaning and mourning over the leakage of hurlers to the senior football team, it makes sense to tap into a greater well of hurling talent and to offer the chance for excellence to more and more players.

The idea of group teams perfectly complements the remarkable development work being done by the county board and the upsurge of interest which is being harnessed. The challenge is to start thinking outside the box and to move on from Godhelpusness and parochialism.

On Friday night, it finished with a few words from English and a few words from the HDO. A Friday night out near the airport is one thing. The breadth of change, activity and enthusiasm which is currently being harnessed is something else.

Visit dublingaagamesdevelopment.ie to get a hint of the range of activities unfolding, the incredible number of coaching workshops which can be accessed and the new sense of professionalism out there.

English stressed again it's nonsense to tell anyone that hurling is bred in the bone. The HDO said that the train is starting to leave the station, that hurling in Dublin is starting to move and that now was the time to get aboard. After the unceasing negativity of 2005, it was a tonic. Everyone left with a spring in their step.

It suits certain people and certain counties to insist that flowers are red and green leaves are green and that true hurlers must be blood of blood. When Dublin hurling breaks through it will be loud and noisy and maybe a little vulgar in the eyes of gurus, but it will be the greatest boost the game has ever gotten. The train is leaving. The men are coming down from the mountains. There's a mass movement brewing.

Viva la revolucion.