SPORTING PASSIONS:Cork football champion Angela Walsh tells Mark Roddenhow the pressures of trying to be a dual player took their toll and led her to decide camogie would have to wait.

I STARTED off in athletics when Fr Liam Kelleher, a priest in our local parish, set up a club here. I've two sisters and three brothers and we all got involved in it. We did track and field but it was mostly cross-country.

With Fr Kelleher we won individual All-Irelands and team events and I won the under-12 cross-country up in Belfast, so it was very good.

I suppose I gave it up when I was about 13 or 14. I'd say for the last year or two I was being dragged along - a lot of girls started giving it up and I just didn't find it as enjoyable as team sports.

Volleyball was absolutely huge in my secondary school, St Mary's High School, and I took it up there. We played volleyball for six years and I was training with the Irish squads for two and a half years as well.

Volleyball's a really fast game and you have to be on the ball all the time. It's a sport where you have to be really mentally strong because the game could turn just like that. You have to be really focused and able to communicate with your team because it's a really small space and there are six of you on the court. You have to have a lot of trust in each other.

When I was playing it in school it was fantastic because we did really well and won the senior A All-Ireland when I was in sixth year.

It was a great experience to be part of the underage Irish team too because we got to travel to the Netherlands and London playing tournaments. It opened up a lot for me because it was actually my first time travelling abroad.

I was playing football all the time at club level. But I'd say it was probably third or fourth year that Fr Kelleher was training us in athletics and we started kicking around with a ball and he asked would I come along to the under-16 panel. I spent a year and a half on the Cork under-16 team and then went on to the under-18 team but I didn't get a game really until the under-18s.

I never played underage camogie for Cork - I was just playing away with the club and then I got a call from one of the senior selectors. That was in 2005 and my initial reaction was that I'd give a year to both.

I wanted to travel, go on a J1 and play football in New York. As it turned out we won the two All-Irelands that year, I got convinced to stay and I'm still here. I've given up camogie this year but I never got to go on my J1!

In Cork we had seven dual players on the 2005 team and it was because the management of both teams came to an understanding. They were really good to us because if we had a hard camogie training session they'd say "okay, don't do the running in the football".

Or if we had championship coming up for the camogie at the weekend, you didn't go to the football training during the week and vice versa.

This year there's only three doing both so it is getting harder. Last year the format of the football championship changed and I remember during last summer I had seven weekends in a row of championship. That was just too much for me - you were barely finished one match and you had to focus on the next one.

Hopefully, I'll go back to the camogie in time but being captain of the footballers this year, it came to the time when I had to choose. The last couple of years have been very demanding of my time and I've made an awful lot of sacrifices.

We put in as much work as the men every year and make the same type of sacrifices. It's so disheartening sometimes because the Cork footballers have won five Munster titles in a row and we've won three All-Irelands in a row and yet there'll only be our mams and dads and our friends at the game. We put in so much work and it would be great to have a crowd in Cork that would come to our games.

I can't complain because ladies football has come a long way since I started and it has got a lot more professional. TG4 have really upped it and the newspapers are giving it a lot more coverage but in comparison to the men it's relatively low.

That's not taking away from the lads because we all go to support them as well but the question we ask is why don't we get a crowd and why aren't there people who would like to come and watch us?