ON GAELIC GAMES:The importance of managers needs to be recognised by the GAA – whether that recognition should involve permission to be paid is a debate the association has to have sooner rather than later

IT WAS once suggested to me by someone with a broad interest in sport that whatever the game it was hard to make articles about coaching light up the readers’ lives. If that’s true, let me say that this column is not about coaching but if not, I can acknowledge there is a connection.

In the past 50 years the GAA has created a largely successful culture of coaching and games development. From the early courses in Gormanston College through to today’s infrastructure – from foundation-level training all the way up to highly-technical presentations at the annual National Coaching Conference – there has developed a science of team preparation and how to nurture the games from the youngest days of juvenile involvement.

True, this may not be riveting for everyone but just as you’d never sell tickets to engineering seminars they do keep buildings and transport vehicles safe and fit for purpose.

The GAA owes a great deal to the coaching infrastructure and its innovations and support systems because the association is fundamentally about the games, from which everything else – revenues, status and the upholding of its cultural and community missions – flows.

Yet a book launched last week makes the interesting point that there is no real educational system for managers.

Can You Manage? by Tim Healy subjects team management to the scrutiny that would accompany other forms of management. As a business man with an MBA as well as a wealth of involvement with GAA teams down the years he is in a good position to conduct the task and his introduction sets out the problem.

“Coaching and managing teams are two different tasks. The subject of managing teams appears to have got little or no attention. Are we to assume that managing a team requires no guidance whatsoever or that it is an easier task than coaching and therefore can be done by anyone without reference to experience, training or ability?”

Filtering the varied aspects of team management through the prism of the experience in other sports and in business, Healy writes a thought-provoking account of how individuals should approach the task of taking on a team.

Already within Gaelic games this more studied style of management is visible. Most obviously it was seen in the achievement of Pat Gilroy in taking Dublin to an All-Ireland title. Gilroy is a convenient illustration of the message in Healy’s book (allowing that he perhaps strayed into the criticised category of a decorated player with no real previous team experience). Then again because of his career as a successful business man he was presumably aware of the nuts and bolts of building an organisation, which in effect is what intercounty management is these days.

As a player Gilroy was part of both the Dublin All-Ireland winning team of 1995 and the St Vincent’s side that won the club equivalent 13 years later. So he had extensive experience of what a successful set-up looked like and how it operated.

But pulling this together is an enormous task. Before even getting down to picking the best and most suitable players, you must select your fellow management carefully with a view to supplying expertise that you may not have, as well as people challenging enough to make you think about problems in different ways. Then you have to be able to come to the final decision.

All-Ireland winning manager Joe Kernan said once when addressing a coaching conference the hardest thing a manager has to do is to tell someone their input isn’t required any longer – and that overwhelmingly the reason that happens is the individual in question wants to exceed the parameters of their agreed contribution.

It was also said of Kernan by John McCloskey, his fitness coach and selector, that he had an uncanny ability to understand when the players had done enough at a given session and when they could do a bit more.

The above examples show the range of personnel skills necessary for a successful manager to get the best out of those around him either in management, backroom functions or on the playing panel. Ability to coach is a vital contribution to a team but it’s not the overarching one.

When you see the scale of the responsibilities borne by managers and the size of the impact they can have on teams and by extension entire counties the importance of the debate on whether they should be paid is clear.

So far the discussion document of GAA director general Páraic Duffy on this subject remains undiscussed – in any open forum, at any rate. How important will the issue become? Does the payment of managers automatically lead to the collapse of the GAA’s singular version of amateurism?

That has been for quite a while one of the big arguments in the amateurism debate. It has been maintained (most trenchantly in the 1997 Report of the Amateur Status sub-committee) that under-the-counter payments to managers have to be stopped in order to stop fuelling pay-for-play demands.

Is that apprehension well-founded? That’s not certain. Most players are sufficiently single-minded to want a manager who optimises their chances of winning. In Michael Frain’s MSc thesis The Amateur Professional Debate: An exploration of attitudes and opinions within the Gaelic Athletic Association, payment to managers is seen as a driver in the debate, but only one of several.

Players interviewed by Frain acknowledge payment of managers is widespread but there is no consensual connection made with pay-for-play. In fact the most striking aspect of the views in favour of professionalism or more commonly semi-professionalism is they are not particularly dogmatic.

Some fret over what would happen to club allegiances and others suggest restricting payment to enhanced expenses. Anecdotally, I remember a player shuddering at the thought of pay-for-play, saying (admittedly 11 years ago) the GAA had enough call on his time without contractual obligations.

Some players would love to be paid but whether that’s a response to the illicit payment of managers is questionable and in need of further reseach.

The importance of managers, however, needs to be recognised by the GAA. Whether that recognition should involve permission to be paid is a debate the association has to have – and sooner rather than later.

Can You Manage? by Tim Healy (Ballpoint Press, €14.99); The Amateur Professional Debate: An exploration of attitudes and opinions within the Gaelic Athletic Association by Michael Frain (MSc thesis, UCD, 2010) and cited in Donal McAnallen’s essay “The Greatest Amateur Association in the World? – Amateurism and the GAA”, from The Gaelic Athletic Association 1884-2009 edited by Mike Cronin, William Murphy and Paul Rouse.