BASKETBALL:Glanmire's Niamh Dwyer has had a glittering career that has gone largely unnoticed in mainstream Irish sports media, writes KEITH DUGGAN

If Lonely Planet wanted a more original perspective on Ireland, they could have handed the task of compiling the guide to Niamh Dwyer. The Thurles woman has covered more or less every motorway and boreen over the course of her basketball life. Last weekend, it was Belfast; a 9am journey with the rest of her Glanmire team-mates (Superleague side Team Hotel Montenotte), a road win and arriving back in Cork city long after the last of the night club stragglers had abandoned the damp streets.

At least they had the relative luxury of a coach for that trip: for shorter away games, they drive cars. At least this weekend she gets to stay local.

Glanmire – who have made a stunning imprint on Irish basketball over the last half decade – play University of Limerick in the National Cup semi-final on what ought to be one of those nights in Neptune Stadium tonight (8pm). The women’s game precedes what has long been established as Leeside’s El Clasico, when Neptune play Blue Demons in the second of the men’s semi-finals.

At 29, Dwyer is too young to have any recollection of the fabled nights when Neptune Stadium was the only place to be in Cork city but she has vivid recollections of her first time playing in the stadium, an under-18 international match for Ireland. And it remains one her favourite basketball halls, with its steep bleachers and that sense, on busy nights, of the crowd leaning in over the court itself.

Like most of the best Irish basketball players of the last decade, Dwyer is a household name you probably have not heard of. Almost as soon as she took up the sport in the Presentation Convent in Thurles in the mid 1990s, she emerged as one of the key players of a particularly-talented generation of women’s players.

She is two years younger than Susan Moran, the Tullamore woman whose brilliant college career in Pennsylvania led to her being drafted by the New York Liberty in the WNBA. Dwyer took the same path as Moran, spending four years on scholarship in Monmouth College, New Jersey and then turning professional and playing in the European league with Vilnius and VICI-Aistes, from Lithuania.

Dwyer is 5ft 9ins but has the speed and ball-skills to play guard. She was an all-rounder at sport, forsaking her enjoyment of playing underage camogie with Tipperary to improve herself as a player. Recognition of what she has done in the decade since is not uncommon for Irish basketball players: she has had a glittering career that has gone largely unnoticed in mainstream Irish sports media.

But she has no gripes about any aspect of her basketball life, apart from the decision taken by Basketball Ireland two years ago to disband what was unquestionably the strongest women’s national team ever assembled due to lack of funding. Dwyer was 27 then: she had been representing Ireland for 12 years and had been a key member of a team that had narrowly missed out on qualification for the European championships.

In the two years since, all that momentum has faded.

“To come so close to qualification and then have no team at all was just very frustrating,” she said this week, in between racing home from her teaching job at Glanmire Community College and preparing for that evening’s training session.

“That team had grown up together and we felt we were the right age – mid to late 20s. So it was disappointing. For us, the decision came out of the blue. I don’t know how long the organisation thought about it. I don’t have any of the details and I don’t really want to know.

“But from our perspective the whole thing happened in the space of a month so it was very hard to put in a protest or anything. It came as a shock. I went to the agm and they did say they hope to get up and running in the next couple of years but as of now it is in limbo. I am 29 this year and it would have been great to have had those couple of years. But we have lost out on two years of quality competition and it is going to take a lot of training and effort to build that up again. Things like that don’t just happen.

“Susan Moran was there, a couple of years ahead of me. It was over two and three years playing together and coming up through the ranks so it is going to be very hard to replicate that. It was an exceptionally committed group. A lot of players had gone abroad and improved their game. It seems easy for me to say: how can they not see that? But there were other factors involved in the decision that we were not privy to.”

Dwyer’s annoyance is compounded by the fact she willingly beats the drum for Irish basketball. She believes strongly in the quality of coaching here, instancing her own career as proof that young Irish players can compete against players who come through the infinitely-better resourced systems in the US and eastern Europe. Her anxiety is less for herself than for the generation of women who are following in her footsteps and whose progression is being stymied by the lack of quality opposition which playing for Ireland always offered.

One of the best young players to emerge on the Irish basketball circuit in recent years is Claire Rockall. The Maree guard had such a promising schools career that she was recruited by Iowa College. She returned to study in UCC after her first year in the Hawkeye state and is now a team-mate of Dwyer’s with Glanmire. It is for players like Rockall that the absence of an international team is a real shame.

Basketball is no longer a profession for Dwyer but since she returned home to teach in Cork, it probably occupies more of her time. She trains with Glanmire twice a week; trains underage club teams in her spare time; she is involved in the game with her school and weekends are dominated by games. The travel has become part of her life: once she started college in New Jersey, seven-hour bus trips to neighbouring states became part of her life. Her time in Latvia meant a different country every fortnight. Dwyer happily admits her playing minutes were limited in Latvia but the experience of living for two seasons as a professional athlete compensated for the trials of accepting a smaller role on her team.

Dwyer competed against some of the best names in her sport. Diane Taurasi, the Californian who was last summer voted as one of the top 15 American women’s basketball players of all time, played on the night Dwyer’s team visited Spartak Moscow. Football is king in eastern Europe but basketball has a fanatical following and the atmosphere in the Spartak gym that night was a rush, with huge murals of the home players on the wall and floral presentations before the game and a crowd that was as noisy and enthused as anything to be found on the football terraces.

“And this was for the Spartak women’s team. Can only imagine what it must be like when the men play there. They annihilated us that night . . . I think they put 30 points on us. But it felt as close as I could possibly come to the elite level of basketball. And I think that says a lot about Irish basketball too. You know, I managed to make it to that level coming from Thurles. I think it comes down to your drive as well. I think there is good basketball available in Ireland . . . I obviously had coaches who made me good enough to secure the scholarship and to play in Europe.

“There is this feeling in Ireland where we look at European teams and say, ‘oh they’re fully professional: I can’t compete’. But I think in my situation, it showed that we can compete. When you think of that Lithuanian team, I played with four girls who had just come off the world championships and I passed the trial, made the squad.”

Oddly, the one occasion that probably matched that night in Moscow for pure adrenaline and noise happened quite early in her basketball days. She played on a Thurles Presentation team that won the All-Ireland Senior Schools League in her final year. Her sister Gráinne was part of the team although she was only doing her Junior Certificate. Niamh got senior player of the tournament that day and Gráinne got the cadette award. But what she recalls most is the pandemonium in the Tallaght Arena and the sense that her classmates had more or less taken the place over.

“I’ll never forget those games,” she laughs. “I will never forget them. The entire school travelled up and even if people weren’t into the sport, you did get caught up in the atmosphere there. We were lucky in Thurles because any time we got to Tallaght, the whole school turned out. It was a great social event. And coming to the Arena . . . it is where you want to play. That is your first taste of what it would be like to play in a really big sporting event.”

Over a decade later she is reunited with her younger sister on the court. University of Limerick is one of the few teams that have been able to suppress Glanmire in recent years. Michelle Fahy, who played with Dwyer on that under-18 international in Neptune, is their leading Irish player and point guard is Rachel Vanderwall, a Canadian player whose British nationality enabled her to declare for the host team at the London Olympics next summer. “It is going to be one of those tight games,” Dwyer predicts. “That’s how cup games should be.”

Dwyer has travelled far since she first learned how to take a lay-up in Thurles but her enthusiasm for the Irish game has never waned. Basketball is a butterfly sport in terms of exposure here and January has traditionally been its hour on the stage. If Glanmire win tonight, they return to the prestige cup finals weekend at the end of the month. “It’s a fairly relentless part of the season and it does get tiring. But I love it. In a few years’ time, when I’m not able to play, I will look back and won’t regret it. The highlight will always be playing for Ireland and I know there may well be kids coming after me who won’t get that.”