Kevin McGuigan pictured speaking at the 2014 GAA Games Development Conference.
By John Harrington
Kevin McGuigan has regrets about how his time as a Down senior inter-county footballer panned out, but when life gave him lemons he made lemonade.
That experience of not realising his own full potential has been a source of motivation throughout his successful career has a Performance Analyst.
His boyhood dream was to win Sam Maguire with the Mourne County, but helping the Irish Olympic swimming team to three medals in Paris this year as their Head of Performance Analysis surely wasn’t a bad substitute?
“I would say it was a career highlight and I'm nearly tempted to say it might always be the career highlight,” McGuigan told GAA.ie.
“Coming back from it and reflecting on it you're thinking to yourself, 'God, I don't know if my career will ever peak beyond that".
“You've literally come down 20 minutes after Daniel Wiffen and Mona McSharry have their medals presented to them and you're holding their medal in your hand.
“At the time the buzz was just incredible. When Mona won her medal the emotion was through the roof. I was right up at the back of the stand with all the other analysts from the other nations and the emotion just hit different.
“Watching the flag during the medal ceremony, Mona's hit really hard because it was the first one. And on a personal level Mona had gone so close in World Championships before so to see her get over the line and the fine margins of it, there was such a release through the team that that had happened for Mona and happened for us as a team.
“Dan then obviously backed that up the following night with the gold. It was two completely different emotions, but both of them were almost overwhelming.
“The swim that was probably most satisfying for us was Tom Fannon in the 50M freestyle because Tom trains in our centre in Dublin. He was one who we would have had an involvement with once or twice a week at stages in the build-up to the games.
“Tom went from 39th ranked before the games to end up finishing 10th and just marginally missed out on swimming in the 50M freestyle final and took two tenths of a second off his PB with two incredible swims.
“The Olympics was an unbelievably emotional experience and an unbelievably satisfactory experience from the point of view of the work and the analysis that's been done.”
Kevin McGuigan, Swim Ireland's Head of Performance Analysis, pictured (far right of the front row) with the Irish Swimming Team at the 2022 US Open Championships.
McGuigan will be one of the guest speakers at the Gaelic Games Performance Analysis Community of Practice Day at Setu Carlow on Saturday, November 9 (Tickets available here - https://www.universe.com/GaelicGamesPAEvent).
He’s a fitting choice given he completed a Masters in Sports Performance and Analysis in Carlow and during his time as a Sports Scientist with Ulster GAA pulled strings that made the Gaelic games Performance Analysis community a tighter one.
“In my early days with Ulster GAA I remember going to an Ulster Championship game on a Sunday and then on Monday I would drive half-way across the province to get the DVD off the guy who had done the video,” says McGuigan.
“One of the main things I did in Ulster GAA was to develop a video sharing platform. So I would get all Ulster teams to upload their own footage to a shared drive after an Allianz League game thereby meaning they would have access to one another's footage as well.
“I ran that for two years to the point that I started getting contact from counties like Mayo, Louth, Kerry, and a few more all wanting to be included as well. That eventually then grew into a national video sharing platform which is still there.
“For the last seven national leagues I have been able to access 99 per cent of the Allianz league games that have been played. It all grew out of that vision I had with Ulster GAA whereby we could get counties to cooperate and share video.
“The Performance Analysis community is a very tight one, not just in Gaelic games but in swimming too where we also have a similar WhatsApp group.
“Within the Sports Science world, Performance Analysis is probably a rare thing in that it's such an open and willing group who are happy to share.”
Around 100 performance analysts from around the country will attend the upcoming Community of Practice event in Setu Carlow which is a testament to how the industry has grown in recent years.
Kevin McGuigan in action for Down against Padraig McMahon of Laois in the 2008 All-Ireland SFC Round 2 Qualifier in O'Moore Park.
Performance Analysis is now a given at club as well inter-county level, and McGuigan would love to have been able to avail of it himself in his own playing days.
“If I was playing now I would in my element with all the objectivity around the measurement of performance now,” he says.
“My entire career was completely subjective and based on people's opinions and what they thought of me or how I played.
“There was no measurement of it, per se. Other than someone saying, 'I thought you played well today'. The only measurement was what did you score or what did the man you were marking score.
“That was about as high as I got in terms of an objective measurement of how you played. Now looking at something like GPS data, I would have loved to have had those numbers.
“When I was playing your performance data in terms of how you performed on the pitch and not just around the scoreboard was non-existent.
“How many times were you on the ball, how many times were you on the ball in certain areas...there's certainly a way of thinking now where players will look at that sort of stuff. There's a data hungry generation out there now where players want and expect to have data available.
“Had it been available when I was playing I would have loved it. How it would have impacted me, I don't know. But I'm fairly sure it would have made me better as a player.”
Tickets for the annual Performance Analysis Community of Practice Day are now available to purchase.
With every passing year Performance Analysis digs deeper and deeper into the numbers that affect individual and team sport, but McGuigan believes the most important skill a Performance Analyst can possess is the ability to make a judgement call on what information is most relevant.
“I absolutely analyse everything and gather everything but I'm the gatekeeper then,” says McGuigan.
“People talk about paralysis by analysis, but part of the role of the analyst is to not paralyse the system, paralyse the coach, paralyse the players. I'm only going to filter through the important stuff to the coach. The the coach and I are going to filter the really important stuff to the athletes.
“While more and more aspects of performance are being analysed and it now requires more people to do a team or athlete's analysis, that doesn't necessarily mean the players are getting fed all of that information.
“Plenty of people have said to me that AI is coming for my job as a Performance Analyst, but it's not. Because the real power of a good and effective analyst is around the softer skills. How do we deliver this message, how do we land this message, how do we interpret what we're finding here, how do we change it up to the coach, how do we deliver it differently to the athlete.
“All those softer skills around the profession are so important, and that's why AI will never be taking over the role in its entirety.”