By Cian O’Connell

Fergal O’Callaghan possesses a particularly interesting sporting CV.

As an international rower O’Callaghan represented Ireland at World Championship level before moving on to work with Munster Rugby for two decades.

During that time O’Callaghan was involved in different Galway and Tipperary hurling backroom teams so significant experience has been accumulated.

Now NUIG’s High Performance Sports Lead, O’Callaghan has helped to develop a support programme which is benefitting more than 30 GAA scholarship holders in the university.

“I'm not long in the job, I'm there about 10 months, but one of the first things I was asked to do was to look at the whole scholarship programme, to make changes to it or to try to make changes to it,” O’Callaghan explains.

“One of the things I noticed was that there really wasn't much being offered to the students in terms of services and stuff outside of the sporting sphere.

“My boss Mike Heskin and I would have a similar view in that generally students are only in college for a four or five year term, maybe a bit longer if they do a post grad. Generally it is only a four year term.

“They come to us out of school, they are just starting adult sport. Most of them won't be senior athletes in whatever sport they play. What we are really doing in a lot of instances is preparing them to play senior sport. We have a lot of good coaches in the college. From the GAA side of it we have two fabulous coaches of our Sigerson and Fitzgibbon teams in Maurice Sheridan and Jeff Lynskey.

“Most of our GAA athletes are involved at inter-county level. So when it comes to training, they are pretty well looked after. There isn't really a lot that we can do.”

That is why O’Callaghan and NUIG staff are keen to develop other aspects to work alongside students GAA activities.

“Students come to college so they can get a degree, they do that because they want to get a job - part of our role is to prepare them for when they leave college, not just in sport, but for work life,” O’Callaghan adds.

“We want to have them better prepared to go out to get a job. I worked closely with the Careers Department within the college to create a little programme specifically for our scholarship athletes, to help them with that side of things.

“We ran some workshops with one being on personality profiling. We wanted to make all the athletes across all of the sports to be a little bit more aware of themselves and their personalities.

“The view was that if they know more about their own personality and the various other personalities out there, they will be better able to deal with things like when a coach is speaking to them and they don't necessarily like what the coach is saying, they may think this is the coaches personality in the way he says things.

“They might understand how the react because that is their personality and the way they take things. It should also help them if they sit in front of an interview panel if they are more aware of their personality.

“They may become more aware of where to adjust things if necessary or to highlight the good things in their personality that an employer might like.”

O’Callaghan is also encouraged about how the programme has assisted athletes in several different sports in NUIG.

“We have a nutritionist and a sports psychotherapist - We have a sports psychotherapist as opposed to a sports psychologist,” O’Callaghan states.

“The reason being that this guy is trained in sports psychology and psychotherapy because we are dealing with people who may have issues outside of sport.

“It has already turned out to be a good move, we have picked up a couple of issues which we have been able to help people out with outside of the sporting environment. That has been really good.

“Our county players are well looked after when it comes to nutrition and psychology. I try to look out for things that they are not getting at county level - helping them get jobs, helping them with their personality profiling, other stuff that may not be looked at.”

Ultimately O’Callaghan is thoroughly enjoying his stint in the west and is keen to develop other areas further in the coming weeks and months.

“We have good staff, in nearly all of our sports we have top level coaches,” O’Callaghan remarks. “In hurling and football we have Jeff Lynskey and Maurice Sheridan.

“This year I haven't done as much as I would have intended with them, but hopefully next year I'll be able to liaise with them a little bit more around the training.

“There isn't really a lot we can influence, but what we can do is provide facilities for them to train in. We are in the process of upgrading our weights room. About half of the equipment has arrived, in a few weeks time we will have the rest for a new High Performance weights room.

“The idea would be that county players could do their gym work on campus as opposed to travelling, to make life easier for them.

“Long term we would be looking at having a better High Performance Centre for all of our athletes to train in. Again some of our county players have to leave two or three times a week to go training. Sometimes it is only a gym session.

“Even our Galway lads go to Loughgeorge which depending on the traffic could take an hour to get out there.

“We would be saying if we can come to an agreement with the counties could they not do it on campus to save themselves some grief. They would do their own programme on campus to take as much stress off the athletes.”

O’Callaghan’s days assisting the Galway and Tipperary hurlers brought joy and a belief that the area of performance and preparation was improving.

“I was there when John McIntyre was the manager,” O’Callaghan recalls. “I love hurling and I loved working with the Galway lads.

“They had some brilliant players. Joe Canning was at the start of his career when I was there, and his brother Ollie. I thought Ollie was brilliant and I really enjoyed working with Ollie. I always found it a bit frustrating because I had a full time job with Munster.

“It was hard to do the things I would like to have done and probably should have done. What you will find is county squads now have more full time strength and conditioning specialists.

“In Galway they have Lukasz Kirszenstein. He worked with Tipperary before, I brought him into Tipperary. It didn't work out for me in Tipperary and then Lukas started doing more, he has made a great name for himself.

“You have a situation where strength and conditioners are becoming more integrated and more of a full time member of staff with County Boards.

“That is much, much better. It is hard when you've a day job because the players don't get what they deserve to get from you. I was hard on myself and I thought they weren't getting what they should be getting out of me. That used to frustrate me, but there was nothing I could do about it.”

Being competitive and trying to glean silverware will always be high on the agenda, but O’Callaghan stresses the need for a proper balance.

“As much as we want to win things, and we do, but our primary focus is to look after our players, not to abuse them,” O’Callaghan comments.

“We want to create a situation where they are able to get a degree, they are able to play at a high level and have a good chance of winning things while being under the least amount of stress possible doing all of that.

“They are under a huge amount of stress from all angles and it is getting even more pressurising. A bit of my role is to try to put things in place so there is the least amount of stress possible on our students. At the end of the day there is no point winning a Fitzgibbon and failing your exams.”