St Mary’s Kiltoghert players before the 2022 AIB Connacht GAA Football Senior Club Championship Semi-Final match between Tourlestrane and St Mary’s Kiltoghert at Avant Money Páirc Seán Mac Diarmada in Carrick-On-Shannon, Leitrim. Photo by Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile.
By John Harrington
It has the potential to be a record-breaking year of success for Leitrim club St. Mary’s, Kiltoghert.
They’ve already won the county U-13, U-15, and U-20 football championships and this weekend they’ll also contest the minor and senior finals as well as the Junior C semi-final.
The following weekend their Junior A team will be contest another County Final.
No-one in the club is tempted to count any unhatched chickens, but as things stand St. Mary’s could end the season with a clean sweep of U-13, U-15, minor, U-20, Senior, Junior A, and Junior C county football titles which would be nothing short of remarkable.
Ladies football is also thriving at all levels in the club, with the senior team winning last year’s Intermediate Championship.
Based on the outskirts of Carrick-On-Shannon, in the past St. Mary’s had a reputation for being underachievers, but no longer.
They’re now serial winners and it hasn’t happened by accident. The club has put a huge emphasis on quality coaching over a sustained period of time and are now being rewarded for that approach.
Club Coaching Officer, Damien Butler, is also a selector with the senior footballers and manager of the Junior A team, and has seen a generation of young footballers grow to blossom in recent years.
“We’ve won the last four U-20 championships and the vast majority of the current senior team are aged 23 or younger,” he told GAA.ie.
“They're the first group that would have come through a proper nursery structure that we started on Saturday mornings and we’re strong all the way back now at U-20, minor, U-15, U-13, and U-11.
“Some of the senior players would be involved as well with the current U-17s and U-15s as coaches and more of them would be there when they can as well on Saturday mornings with the nursery and a lot of our senior girls in particular would also be heavily involved with the Cúl Camps.
“We run a really good U-11 in-house tournament for boys and girls called the Patsy Guckian tournament. At U-13 level we run the Joe Flynn memorial tournament and we bring in a lot of clubs from around the country for that.
“We started an U-15 tournament last year for the first time, the objective was to have tournaments at all age-grades. As a result of organising these tournaments you get invited to other ones around the country too which is really good.
“Our nursey is going really well on a Saturday morning and the All-Stars Initiative (for children with additional needs) has gone from strength to strength too. This is our third year with it and it's going really well. That serves a big area, the kids are coming from surrounding areas as well.”
St. Mary's, Kiltoghert make a big effort to run tournaments to nurture the talent of their underage players.
St. Mary’s have taken an imaginative approach to hot-housing the talent of their up and coming young players.
They’ve established an ‘Advanced Skills Summer Camp’ for 14, 15, and 16 year olds where they bring in highly regarded coaches from around the country to take them for sessions.
“There has been a good buy-in to that, says Butler. “We've brought in some great coaches like Davy Burke (Roscomon senior manager), Luke Barrett (Donegal minor manager), James Burke (former Mayo and Cavan coach), Mickey Quinn (Longford player), and Gary Sice (former Galway footballer).
“It's also an opportunity for our own coaches to attend and observe and learn as well, so there's a double benefit.
“There's a really good buy in to all the coach education courses. And we just have really good people too, you know?
“You don't have to be an expert coach, but if you're a good person then you're more likely to make good decisions and bring other people with you. That's a lot of it.”
The biggest issue the club has faced in recent years has been servicing the huge numbers of players they now have at all levels, and they’ve shown considerable ambition to address it by purchasing a 21 acre site which they’ll soon begin developing
The St. Mary's, Kiltoghert U-15 team that recently won the county championship.
A huge fund-raising drive that saw them raffle an Audi E-Tron car and organise the inaugural Carrick Folk and Country Festival last month underlined the ettent to which everyone in the club is pulling together off the pitch as well as on it.
“It's very exciting times for the club, absolutely,” says Butler. “There’s a great buzz around the place.
“At the minute it's the culmination of an awful lot of work by an awful lot of people over an a long period of time. Not just at underage, but with the senior team too over a number of years to get us into a good position, and off the pitch too.
“Fund-raising, ticket-sellers, ground staff. There's an awful lot of people there working very hard doing a lot of the unglamorous work.
“We're fortunate too that we have good numbers, which a lot of clubs in Leitrim wouldn't have. They just don't have the population in their catchmetn area that we would have.”
St. Mary’s have been the coming force in Leitrim club football for some time but last year’s county senior championship probably came a little earlier than many expected because their team was so young.
They play the same opponents, Mohill, in Sunday’s Final and if they can make it back to back titles for the first time in the club’s history it might well herald a golden age for the club.
If that does indeed come to pass, it will be a deserved reward for a huge amount of hard work and no little foresight by all involved with a club striving to tick every box it can on and off the pitch.
