Young players' games schedule targeted

Player welfare:With the GAA's new work group on player burnout about to be appointed, Croke Park's Player Welfare Officer Páraic Duffy has described the games' schedule of many young players as akin to "horror stories".

Duffy will be a member of the work group set up to develop proposals to deal with the problems of over-use among players, especially vulnerable in their late teens and early 20s when they are eligible for a multiplicity of teams. "The brief," he says, "is to provide specific proposals to address the evidence of burnout among elite players in the age group 16-21. We're not looking at the issue, as there's more than enough evidence there.

"The typical problem arises when a good player leaves school to go to a third-level college. He will end up involved with the freshers' team and maybe even the Sigerson or Fitzgibbon panel as well as having to stay in touch with his club and return for county under-21 training. Some of the case studies read like horror stories."

This issue has been on the GAA's agenda for a while at this stage and as part of the association's response a study has been initiated by the Ulster Council. Researched and written as a doctoral thesis for UUJ by Tyrone women's footballer Lynette Hughes, Incidence and Aetiology of Burnout amongst Male Inter-county, Junior Elite Footballers, is due for publication at the end of this year.

In the meantime some of Hughes' preliminary findings and data gathered elsewhere, including by DCU's Head of Sports Science Dr Niall Moyna, will be considered by the work group with a view to developing solutions. Implementing them will be as much a political challenge as an administrative one. Already one of Duffy's views on how to reduce pressure on players has come in for criticism.

"I think there will be problems. Already there's been some hostile reaction to the proposal to do away with the intercounty under-21 football - hurling's different because it has an established place in the schedules that fits neatly into the rest of the hurling calendar - but we have to look at all proposals.

"It's not going to be easy and I'm glad that the committee will be taking over responsibility for the issue so that various proposals don't have to be personalised. The idea of scrapping the under-21 mightn't find wider agreement but it will be evaluated with other possible solutions."

It is accepted at this stage that the scale of multi-eligibility within the GAA is contributing enormously to the problem. Between club, college and county commitments individuals between minor grade and under-21 are liable to be called on by numbers of teams stretching into double figures if they are dual players.

Further problems are created by intolerance and inflexibility on the part of team managers, who are naturally interested only in their own teams and who insist on attendance at training when players are away at third-level colleges.

On a comparative basis, according to Duffy, young Gaelic footballers are sustaining far more stress injuries than their counterparts in other sports. He cites one of the contributors to a recent Ulster Council coaching seminar. "Dr Phil Glasgow (Head physiotherapist at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland) deals with elite athletes across a number of sports and he presented an analysis of players who had come to him at the institute, individual profiles and injury records that were horrific. Of 30 Gaelic footballers, every one had injuries that were down to over-use, no rest, no proper close season and no proper pre-season."

Duffy believes there is no alternative to limiting the number of competitions or the number of teams for which individual players are eligible to play. Given the opposition generated by the relatively straightforward reform of restricting underage players to grades no more than two ahead of their age, likely solutions will probably prove contentious.

"Everyone's going to have to compromise or move and it's not all down to the counties and under-21. In the colleges you have players - maybe only an elite but they exist - who play freshers and Sigerson or Fitzgibbon. In a student's first year he shouldn't be allowed play both."