James Horan to host conference on Sporting Excellence

"Second only to Leicester, really," says James Horan when asked where he thinks Connacht's rugby season ranks in sports stories of the year. The former Mayo manager has always been fascinated with rugby.

This weekend, Kerry's visit to play Mayo will inevitably bring to mind his final competitive match as an intercounty manager, that breathless All-Ireland semi-final replay in Limerick.

But he will spend the weekend as MC at the Sporting Excellence conference in Breaffy he has organised. Among the speakers will be Conor McPhillips, the former Connacht winger who is now the attack coach with the club.

“Conor was giving me details of his presentation and he is going to go through some of the tricks of the trade in terms of their stats sheet. So you can see what a really progressive team is doing and how it breaks down. There is a lot of misinformation about stats and what you collect and turnovers . . . it is how you use that and build it into your training that matters. So it will be great to see what a team that is successful at a very high level is doing . .”

Every outing

Anyone who followed Horan’s four-year term with Mayo would recognise the base line for his philosophy. Mayo lost just four championship games in his reign and two of those were All-Ireland finals.

Learning from every outing and incremental improvement became the characteristics of his teams. It is an aspect to sport which has always fascinated him and will be the central theme of the talks in Breaffy. He hopes that they will be of interest to everyone from the general sports buff to progressive athletes to young managers or trainers.

Among the speakers are sports psychologist Brendan Hackett; Deirdre Lyons, player development manager with Connacht rugby; former Republic of Ireland manager Brian Kerr, former Olympic track cyclist Martyn Irvine and Clare O’Leary, the mountaineer and polar explorer.

Horan believes lessons and principles are applicable across a range of sports. In Gaelic football, the most frequent comparison is to basketball because of the proliferation of the hand pass and the adaptation of warm-up drills from coaching manuals and the importance of guarding space or territory. Rather than simply hold talks. Horan has organised a number of practical workshops as well.

"On Sunday morning, for instance, Kenny Cunningham is going to take a soccer session on how to coach an effective press. When to press and when not to: when to hold back and when to go for it, how to cover space; that is applicable to Gaelic as much as soccer. Whatever level you are at, if you want to learn there is something in it for you."

The conference is scheduled to end at 12.30; in good time for the NFL meeting between Kerry and Mayo at MacHale Park. Horan agrees it is matches like these that make him hanker after more immediate involvement.

“A few of the speakers might well tag along, yeah. It should be a terrific encounter. You start the feel the tingles again for it. But I am enjoying my time out of it . . .”

l Full details of Sporting Excellence 2016 at sportingexcellence.eu.