GAA coaching and medical conference: Keith Duggan talks to three key speakers who will address next weekend's conference at Croke Park

There is no close to the GAA season now. Even as the elite club teams play out their championships in the marshy fields of November, the best of the county squads have already started their preparations for next summer's All-Ireland championships.

Tyrone, held up by many as an exemplary force in modern football, held their first official squad meeting last month. In Galway, the sleeping giant in hurling, Ger Loughnane is scouring the county in a search for new contenders for the maroon squad and the most suitably punishing training venues in which to steel them for the combat of the fast days. And in Croke Park next weekend, a major conference covering the spectrum of the GAA revolution takes place.

The incredible popular appeal of the All-Ireland championship over the past decade has been matched by the phenomenal preparation undertaken by all teams, not only those with a realistic chance of winning the two titles on offer but also by counties merely aspiring to compete with the small number of perpetually dominant counties. Because of that, the importance of the role of the physical trainer has become paramount.

After stepping down following a three-year period in charge of the Kerry football team, Jack O'Connor once more paid tribute to the input of the team trainer, Pat Flanagan. The evidence that winning an All-Ireland championship takes a ferocious toll on successful teams is plain to see and in football, the feat of consecutive championship victories has become increasingly elusive. In that light, Kerry's achievement of appearing in three consecutive All-Ireland finals from 2004-'06, losing just the middle match in a classic final against Tyrone, has to be regarded as a triumph of training technique as much as match performance.

The remark that it would take Kerry three seasons to reach optimum strength has often been attributed to Flanagan and although he agrees there was a step-by-step process to the training programme he devised for Kerry, the significance of the three-year time span has been overstated. "We actually started with a two-year programme and, as it turned out, we had a third year to build on it. And I think Jack was probably happier with the physical aspect of our play last season than he would have been in 2004. The basic idea was our preparation would be done properly. I feel burnout and fatigue only become an issue when the training is not being done properly.

"And I tried to combine the physical stuff with football. So if you take a simple 10-metre sprint, you build different aspects and incorporate a football to try and make it fun and interesting for the players. Some ideas I picked up from a Glasgow Celtic training video. Others were just made up."

Flanagan will speak about his role over that period at next weekend's conference and hopes his talk will encourage coaches to try new ideas and to use the ball as much as possible. If there is a message, it is there is no need to half kill players with the slog of repetitive training to leave them in ideal physical shape.

In terms of the importance of prime upper-body strength, Flanagan admits he believes weights training has become a necessity but he emphasises it is not simply a matter of piling on body mass or benching extreme weights. In general, the Kerry players were probably stronger this year than three seasons ago but individually, they have not all noticeably bulked up.

"The benefits of weights - done properly - are manifold. They can increase flexibility, reduce injuries and give players added strength without them losing their suppleness. The old definition of weights as mere heavy lifting is a bit narrow."

In terms of the emergence of Tyrone and Armagh as the sword-bearers of the Ulster game, Flanagan is happy to agree they influenced the scene, not only in turning out physically tuned players but also in adopting a rigorously thorough approach to every aspect of the game. "It kind of put it up to the other counties to either compete with them on their terms or to continue in the old pattern of things that maybe worked in the past."

When he reviews that 2005 All-Ireland final, he believes Kerry "felt" physically fine going into the match. But the game was lost. "Probably it came down to Tyrone being overall a better team on that Sunday . . . I was full of admiration for them then and remain so. And also for Cork this year, who played with an intensity that I don't think has been fully acknowledged."

After losing to Tyrone, Kerry came back and rid themselves of the perceived Ulster jinx by eclipsing Armagh in this year's All-Ireland quarter-final before crushing Mayo in a repeat of the 2004 final. The motivation of not ending their reign on a negative note was enough to bring O'Connor and his management team back and by September, Kerry were rampant.

The transformation of their season not only highlighted the fickleness of GAA analysis but also the importance of psychological well-being for teams. The presence of psychologists in top GAA backroom teams is no longer thought of as a luxury or a fancy idea. But the notion of a player controlling the thought processes that govern him during a match is still relatively new.

Dr Siobhain McArdle, who lectures in the Psychology of Sport at DCU, will be addressing that subject. A Canadian of Irish parentage, she became interested in the influence the mind has on the athlete's body while on a running scholarship in America and also from watching her brother Robert's attempts to break into the professional golfing circuit. She has found intercounty footballers and hurlers very open to the concept of sports psychology.

"A very common worry is it takes younger players a while to settle into the team and the worry that they either won't get or hold down a starting place is very prevalent. So much so they find their minds wandering when they see team-mates warming up on the sideline. Another problem is adjusting from a club unit to a county unit and not being fully familiar with a team-mate's pattern of play so the anticipation of what he might do can affect the decision-making and the cohesiveness of the team. But overall, they are keen to talk. It is managers that are more commonly reluctant to join the process and you often find there is not a great understanding of sports psychology there."

As McArdle sees it, the chief task of the sports psychologist is to become redundant, meaning they instil in athletes a positive mindset and a routine for coping under adversity. The prelude to this year's All-Ireland football semi-final between Dublin and Mayo provided a perfect scenario of how management and players reacted to a situation that was beyond normal experience. Learning to persevere with clear thinking and to overrule emotional instinct is key.

The former Chicago Bulls basketball coach Phil Jackson and UCLA coach John Wooden are prime examples of coaches who adapted psychological practices in dealing with their teams. Both those teachers have been name checked by Tyrone manager Mickey Harte among others and there in an increasing awareness among Irish sports coaches of the usefulness of "outside" influences.

"I heard Eddie O'Sullivan speaking recently and it is clear he is very open to the concept of sports psychology, that he is very holistic in his approach to coaching the national team," says McArdle. "I believe GAA coaching is travelling in the same direction."

Tommy mains is dealing in a different type of GAA psychology. Tir Conaill Harps is a Glaswegian GAA club, founded in 1994 in Anderston, a tough parish in the city centre. There are five senior teams in the Scottish Gaelic league and although Harps were champions in the late 1990s, their form has declined in recent years and the club has turned its energies into coaching youngsters.

The morning he took a phone call to talk about his role with the club, Mains had just been interviewed by police about vandalism to the club van, which happened when a kid jumped from the roof of a nearby school on to the top of the van. Delinquency, alcohol and drug abuse and urban boredom are typical problems for many of the kids who sign up for the club and in the last few years, the club as a social initiative has gathered stunning momentum.

"In the past couple of years, we have coached 2,600 kids at 21 schools. We are starting off with kids as young as five. Territorialism and gang fighting is a major problem with kids in the centre of Glasgow and the idea is to get children involved with our club early and basically to try and keep them out of trouble."

Ten years ago, all members of the club had strong Irish connections but since the underage initiative, there have been as many youngsters from Asian backgrounds as Irish. Mains is interested to see how integration of foreign nationals is progressing in Irish cities as it is becoming clear to him future Harps teams will contain players with little or no knowledge of Irish culture or history.

"And we see that as a positive thing. Even the Irish kids, a lot of their experience has been limited to singing the kind of rebel ballads you hear at Celtic Park. When we go on trips, we try to teach the kids a bit about Irish history . . . Last year, on a visit to Limerick, we took a team from what was basically a Protestant school. And on the way back, they were all buying Tricolours and shamrocks and that. And I was thinking: the parents are going to go ballistic when they show up with this stuff. But these are children and if you can work with them at a young age, all the old territorial stuff just disappears."

Mains will be in Roscommon this weekend. The Harps juvenile teams will play in a tournament and have organised a Sunday match in Co Down before getting the ferry home. His experience is light years away from Flanagan's but it is all down to a common cause in a once slow-moving organisation that never stands still.

The GAA National Coaching and Medical Conference takes place in Croke Park from Friday, 24th November to Sunday, 26th November.