MUNSTER SHC/Waterford v Tipperary: Tom Humphries talks to Nicky Cashin about drawing on the Kilkenny factor

A balmy Friday afternoon and the sun kissing hurling's home. The lightness of holiday is in the air. For many of the kids beyond St Kieran's grey walls when the bell rings today it introduces the summer and liberation. The last day of term marks another of the endings which school life is full of. The school will have no more boarders. Nicky Cashin will be here 30 years.

Three decades. He's been here so long he has gone native. Three daughters reared and grown, all of them camogie players for Clara in their day. And years of Kieran's hurlers gone on to the big stage, with the maker's mark on them.

Cashin was instrumental in preserving the tradition which he came into. He preserved it and immersed himself in it.

When Justin McCarthy called before Christmas and asked him back to the Waterford senior hurling set-up, he thought that Cashin would be a Waterford man coming home. It hasn't been quite that way.

"It's surreal. It frightens me. I came to Kilkenny a couple of years before some of those guys on the team were even born. We have lots of guys in their mid-20s. I was in college and gone away for summers in America and England before they saw the light of day. I've been away that long. I feel like an outsider. It took a while to get used to."

Now here he stands on the edge of a Munster championship game against Tipp. He brings a Kilkenny hurling sensibility to the sometimes quirky business of Waterford hurling. The first thing he noticed was that in Waterford hurling is a game. In Kilkenny it is mainstream culture.

"Sometimes it's striking. In Kilkenny, hurling is a religion, the one game that counts. It pervades all aspects of lives, from youngest to oldest. From primary schools on upwards they have the system perfected. I've come back looking at Waterford from the outside. I left in 1970 to go to college in Cork, so you see things from that perspective. We have declined as a hurling culture."

The evidence isn't hard to find. In the mid-90s Cashin took the Waterford minors for a summer and what was coming through wasn't the same as what he was delivering from St Kieran's.

"By then there was no school system as such in Waterford. You could see it in the skills levels. I had to wonder where it went. There were great Mount Sion school teams back in the 50s and 60s challenging for Harty Cups. I'm not sure where they went. It's hard to find out answers.

"There seems to have been some division, though, between the club and the school. The school fell away badly and you never hear of them now, yet the hurlers in the club are all former pupils. I've been meaning to chat to Ken McGrath about it."

The point about the Waterford minors was driven home to him more forcefully the year before last when he took the Kilkenny minors and won an All-Ireland with them. Hey presto! Himself, he is an Abbeyside man, a former classmate of Dublin hurling manager Humphrey Kelleher.

They went to Dungarvan CBS together at a time when the joke was that the Abbeyside fellas went over the bridge to bring hurling into Dungarvan. It was a joke with just a twist of truth in it. There was a great tradition of hurling in Dungarvan which he notes is gone also.

He did a coaching night down there recently and was sort of shocked to see just how far gone that tradition was.

"The school were a Harty Cup outfit back in the 50s and 60s but hurling will wilt unless you nurture it. Humphrey and I played on the same schools team and with the club we won the minor double in 1970. By that time, though, the school were in the B division and the successful days were well gone."

They strayed. Kelleher and Cashin played a little soccer back then. Young fellas sucking in the new game. Harmless, but looking back soccer was colonising a lot of imaginations.

"In the 60s all those Waterford teams that won the League of Ireland had a huge impact (Waterford won six titles between 1965 and 1973). That was a time when Waterford city people were getting access to the BBC and its intoxicating pictures of English league games.

"It had a huge influence around Waterford. Kilcohan Park would be packed. I remember in Cork as a student being in Flower Lodge to see Waterford playing Cork Hibs and there was 20,000 to 25,000 people in there. The game took a grip then."

Kilkenny, though, was spared. While Waterford has receded Kilkenny has entrenched.

"Thirty years this year. September 1974 I came here and hurling in Kilkenny has become stronger all the time. It was hit-and-miss back then. The tradition was there alright but it was taken for granted maybe. Now it's more streamlined and businesslike. Ned Quinn (the county chairman) has been driven single-mindedly to do that.

"I know from my experience with the minors that he has single-mindedly dedicated himself to Kilkenny success in hurling. The structures are there at all levels from primary upwards."

That's where the Waterfords of the world need to start he reckons. Flooding primary schools with hurls and helmets and blitz competitions and tastings of the game to get players into clubs.

"I would start with the primary schools. Then get as much help as I could to the clubs. Go to people, ask what can we do for you. People don't believe that Waterford used to win All-Irelands. It just needs reviving in Waterford.

"I would saturate the place with equipment. Then address the fall-off in second level. Concentrate periods of the game. First-year blitz, second- and third-year blitz. Develop that 16 to 16-and-a-half years age group. Have a three-year plan for minor, development squads all the way from there.

"In fairness, Waterford are getting there. It's being done. This year Waterford Colleges got to the Harty Cup final. It's encouraging."

It's encouraging but will it be enough? St Kieran's breezed to another schools All-Ireland last month. The county has a past that is glorious and a present that contains no distraction.

"They punctured all the footballs," says Cashin. "That statement was made at a Kilkenny county convention about 25 years ago. There's half a truth in it. Success breeds success. I see Richie Power in school and he knows he'll be a Kilkenny senior next year. The young fellas four and five years behind look at him and know they'll be where Richie is in a little while.

"The area is so compact. Everyone knows everyone. Success feeds off itself. The hard work just gets done.

"In Waterford we'd have to hope that a bit of senior success would spill over. Get every kid out carrying a hurley and then the sheer weight of numbers will help maintain things."

Kilkenny doesn't need spill-overs or good breaks. When the new batch of kids come in through the gates to St Kieran's next September just about each one will have arrived with the hope or intention of hurling for the school. They'll have what Cashin concedes is a "great grasp of the basic skills".

Already there'll be issues of pride around wearing the St Kieran's jersey.

And the phrase weight of numbers has different resonances in Kilkenny than anywhere else. Take last year.

St Kieran's had 30 on the first-year hurling panel. On the day the school played the final in Carlow there was an under-14 blitz on in Kilkenny. St Kieran's had another 22 guys there. That's 52 first years competing on the same day.

"They get it early. Discipline, skills, talking about the basics of a pattern. We stick to a few basic things. Never giving up is the one thing we stress. Eight, nine points, it's nothing in hurling if you keep playing. At senior level in the school we work on tactics a bit more but you don't want to confuse the younger guys."

And so it goes on, virtually uninterrupted, the tradition of excellence and winning through excellence. It could have been his life till retirement but when Justin McCarthy called . . .

"Justin just asked would I get involved. Colm Bonner had left after a number of years there. Justin wanted to develop a team around him, professional, stronger.

"I saidI'd carry the water. Then I got permission from herself at home.

"Myself and Gerry Fitzpatrick joined Justin. Off I went. I said to myself that Kilkenny could win the next 10 All-Irelands and that wouldn't do anyone any good. Not Kilkenny. Not hurling.

"I decided I wanted to give something back. Justin was looking for durability, strength and more organisation, some people he could delegate to. Hopefully we have fulfilled our part."

So it started, the long drives southwards towards old familiar places. Through the winter the team trained in Dungarvan or nearby and the journey was 170 miles round trip. In January the commitment unexpectedly became a little harder to give.

"Our deputy principle in St Kieran's got sick at Christmas and I became acting deputy. With that and the hurling it's been quite a chunk of time. I made the decision in mid-December, I had committed. And then the work situation came upon me."

Waterford have gone well. The evidence of the league final against Galway notwithstanding, they took the secondary competition seriously and fought well. Cashin was away for most of last summer but his assessment on taking the job and on working with the players early on was that Waterford weren't too far off things.

"I think that the pool of senior talent is much better now than when I played. We have outstanding club teams today, Ballygunner and Mount Sion, who have proved what they can do. There's a good basis there and then some individuals from other clubs.

"When I played we had Pat McGrath (Ken's father), Jim Greene and a couple of other very good individuals but not so strong a team."

And here he is. Summer's threshold. Waterford have one big scalp already taken. Tomorrow it's Tipp, who have lain in the long grass for some time now.

Tipp. For Waterford players that sometime involves a different psychological state than an afternoon in the company of, say, Clare.

"The last day against Clare could be 10 years ago for all we care," says Cashin. "We have to set our targets again, aim for the highest level we can. Regardless of who we play. The lesson from Kilkenny is that success filters down to the youngest age groups. Not just one win, but staying at the top."

And that he hopes will be the legacy he and others will leave behind. Enough success to nurture a new generation and an end to the hard days of Waterford teams always coming up a dollar short and a day too late.

That after all is what they taught him (and he they) in the great hurling civilisation which absorbed him three decades ago.