Mark Roddentalks to Mayo captain Ronan McGarrity on playing basketball for Ballina and why the game has to take a back seat for now

I TOOK up both basketball and Gaelic football at around five or six. When you were younger it was to get you out of the house and to make friends more so than anything serious.

I was lucky at the time because the basketball team in Ballina was doing very well and the footballers were doing pretty well as well. Growing up you always want to have different people to look at and we had the likes of Liam McHale and the McStays so they were a great influence on the younger guys.

A lot of my friends played basketball and it was something we did in our free time. There was always a basketball hoop around and there was a gang of us playing all the time.

You could play it in any type of weather and that made me take it up as well.

It wasn't until my late teens that I thought I might have had a chance of doing something with it. It wasn't a sport that I took really seriously until then.

I got a scholarship to go to New York purely through basketball camps. I used to go to camps in Dublin and through that I met a coach called Mark Cartmill.

Anything I asked or anything he thought that would be of value to me, he really helped me out big time. I went over to his school, a junior college, and I had a great experience there.

Basketball's a very quick game. You really don't have that much time to think and if an option comes up you have to take it.

Whereas in football you might have one or two chances to make a decision you might have a chance to hold on to the ball and give yourself more time.

The best thing about my position is that in Ireland, the American players that used to come in were usually guards. I used to love playing against American guards.

You'd think about what people would be thinking in the stands, that "this fella has no chance" and "this fella's going to destroy him", and "this fella scored 30 points last week".

To hold them to single digits was an aim for me every night.

You might fit maybe two or three hundred people into a gym and since it is such a small enclosed place the atmosphere is just electric.

When you play in Croke Park you get a delayed reaction - you might score a point and it might take 30 seconds for the crowd to react.

While in basketball everybody's on top of you and you can hear what everybody's talking about and what everybody's shouting.

Kieran Donaghy is a joy to play against in basketball. Himself and Michael Quirke are caught in an awful situation where football is king down in Kerry.

But all you can do is speak highly of them because both of them love playing basketball and they're two very competitive guys.

Any time you play against them you always want to get one up on them, it's enjoyable.

I remember playing them last year and the talk of me against Kieran Donaghy brought a great crowd down in Tralee.

Even when he came up the year before there was a packed house as well because Kerry were just after beating Mayo in the All-Ireland final.

It's rivalries like that that basketball needs.

At a younger age, schools basketball is very good and it's very competitive.

But when you get to the older categories like the senior men's leagues, the numbers dwindle a lot.

You lose an awful lot of players after school when they go on to college and go out working and players don't really give in the effort and time to train.

Rural communities like in Mayo are neglected when it comes to players then because a lot of them move to Dublin and can't give the commitment to travel home every weekend.

In recent years we've struggled to have players available to play and to travel away for weekend games so it's very difficult for us as a basketball team to survive.

This year is the first since I've been home that I've let basketball take a back seat.

I've been doing a bit too much at times and I've paid the price by picking up niggling injuries.

But it's more like a trial to see how my body reacts during the winter league and to see how it goes next year.

Getting home at three or four o'clock in the morning after games was the worst part of it.

The basketball itself wasn't that demanding - if you love the game you could play it all day long.

It's the other things, the training three nights a week and the travelling, that really takes its toll on your body.

"Even when he (Kieran Donaghy) came up the year before there was a packed house as well because Kerry were just after beating Mayo in the All-Ireland final. It's rivalries like that that basketball needs.