Training in Covid: The training itself isn’t what takes a toll, it’s the mental drain’

In the second of our four-part series, new Dublin camogie boss Adrian O’Sullivan explains his approach to the challenges posed by a pandemic

New Dublin camogie manager Adrian O'Sullivan. Photo: Inpho

Conor McKeon Twitter Email

April 06 2021 02:30 AM

No Zoom calls. No Microsoft Teams. No GPS trackers. No Skype team meetings. No virtual sessions. No table quizzes and no cooking competitions.

These tools, the resources and practices that most inter-county managers have leant on so heavily under the current collective training blackout, have all been eschewed by new Dublin camogie manager Adrian O’Sullivan.

“We’ve avoided Zoom at all costs,” explains the Limerick native, appointed to the role in late January.

“I know there’s teams training that have players bring their phone out to the field or the wall and you follow along with the session.

“But we took a different approach. For a start, we didn’t want players suffering from mental fatigue, from having to be on calls at certain times during the week.

“Because I think the training itself isn’t what takes a toll on players. It’s the mental drain. So we avoided everyone having to link up or log in at a certain time.”

Instead, they utilise an app: TeamBuildr.

Donie Fox, a Galway native who had a brief stint on the Dublin senior hurling panel in 2019, is the team’s primary coach. Each week, he uploads a week’s worth of sessions to the squad’s database.

From there, it’s up to each player to complete their training in their own time. There is obligation without pressure. Incentive minus the stress.

Life is tough enough just now without unnecessarily creating any more hassle for athletes in cold storage.

“It takes away that pressure to be in a certain place at a certain time,” O’Sullivan explains. “But also it throws the responsibility on to the players.

“Because, ultimately, if they want to make the panel when we come back, they’ll do it. If they don’t, it will show up as well. So it gives them responsibility for their own preparation.”

So on the one hand, there is trust. But on the other, there’s also incentive.

Some 45 players are training in isolation, primarily conditioning work. Each has been promised four weeks of pitch time, once the squad convenes. After that, ten will go.

“My job as a manager,” O’Sullivan notes, “is when the first ball is thrown in in a match, it’s over to the players. It’s up to them to assume the leadership roles on the field.

“So if you need a GPS unit to make sure that an inter-county player is doing the run you set for them, I think you’ve lost before you started. It’s trust. We trust them to do it.”

And yet, some of the Dublin players still wouldn’t recognise O’Sullivan if he stood, socially distanced, in front of them in the queue at the supermarket. By the time inter-county training begins on April 19, O’Sullivan will have been Dublin manager for over 12 weeks.

And yet, he admits: “If some of them walked into the kitchen here, I wouldn’t know them. It’s very unusual.”

That’s because there was no Zoom town hall meeting either. No rabble-rousing speech or mapping out of their quest to the promised land after his appointment.

Each player received a phone call. In all, O’Sullivan made 50, eliciting 45 positive responses.

“It’s not my style,” O’Sullivan insists. “Look, everyone knows where Dublin camogie is coming from. I told the players I wasn’t going to come in and start making ridiculous promises about where we could go. Or what we wanted to do. There was no big announcements. No big beating of the drum. We avoided it all costs.”

Similarly, they are quite happy to start from scratch. O’Sullivan has managed UL to back-to-back Ashbourne Cups over the past two years and has come across plenty of the current Dublin squad in that time.

But other than having managed against them, he is keen to look at each player with fresh eyes.

“The disadvantage of the GAA is that when a manager goes, everything goes with them,” he explains. “The S&C goes. The stats man goes. The cameraman goes. They tend to be teams.

“Where in professional sports, a head coach or a manager might go but the infrastructure stays. There is more continuity. There’s data.”

As it happens, Fox also works as coach to Nadia Power, the Irish middle-distance runner, and sprinter Phil Healy.

So by way of injecting a different dynamic to the training schedule, each player was tasked with running sprints and 800 metres and clocking their times.

It’s unlikely that any of the Dublin camogie team will be lost to the Olympic games later this year.

But as O’Sullivan explains: “It’s given them an appreciation for how fast Phil and Nadia are, but also how difficult it is to be an individual athlete.

“You have to remember, they’re team athletes. They thrive in a team environment, not an individual one. When you take them out of that environment – especially when they have had no date to aim for – it is completely demotivating.”

“So if there is any good to come from the last ten weeks or whatever, it’s that they’ll really appreciate the team environment when they come back into it.”