An aerial view of Holycross-Ballycahill GAA club's facilities including the John Doyle Centre, two grass pitches, and floodlit astro-pitch.
By John Harrington
Mid-Tipperary club Holycross-Ballycahill are thriving both on and off the pitch.
In 2019, their U-12 hurlers won a third Tipperary ‘A’ title in four years, their U-21s were narrowly beaten in the County ‘A’ Final, the senior hurlers won promotion to the top tier (Dan Breen Cup), and their Junior 'A' footballers won the Mid Tipperary Championship.
Camogie and Ladies Football are blossoming in the club also, with the Tipperary Junior Camogie League, U-12 Camogie Championship, and U-12 and U-14 Ladies Football Championship all won in 2019.
It’s surely no coincidence that Holycross-Ballycahill have produced a very talented generation of players at a time when they have also expended huge effort improving the club’s facilities.
Good governance isn’t a guarantee of success but it certainly helps, and Holycross-Ballycahill have been fortunate in recent years to have a group of hard-working and visionary club-officers.
Over 12 years ago they embarked on a major infrastructural programme that began with the purchase and development of a second pitch at their grounds.
Next came the construction of the John Doyle Centre which includes four dressing-rooms, a fully equipped gym, indoor ball alley, and a large function room and kitchens.
More recently, the club has also developed a flood-lit astro-turf pitch, community walk-ways, and extended parking facilities.
Holycross-Ballycahill recently completed their €2M development project by installing a new community walk-way and car-parking facilities.
The old sporting truism, ‘if you build it, they will come’, seems an apt one for Holycross-Ballycahill, because their juvenile crop has never been as bountiful and the club’s facilities have become the beating heart of the local community.
“The players would tell you it has had an enormous influence in so far as they love coming down to training now,” Holycross-Ballycahill chairman, Michael Ryan, told GAA.ie
“We've an astro-turf pitch now that we installed in the last 12 months and now we have a whole integrated facility.
“We've an indoor gym, an indoor wall-alley, an astro-pitch outside. I suppose in the last two or three years we're beginning to see progress at competitive level in the club.
“There's a good pool of young players on who are all using those facilities and they're having a positive impact in terms of everyone's motivation.
“Winter-training has become the norm and our facilities have enabled that an awful lot better.
“Then, at a wider level, outside the core group of players, the facilities have created a fantastic buzz in the parish in terms of having such an integrated community facility.
“Our astro-turf pitch is open 24/7. It's booked for official training sessions for our own team and it can be rented out too, but during the day or when young lads are on holidays they can go down there and puck around themselves, it's not a locked up facility.
“We try to promote it as being very much open to the whole community.
A view of Holycross-Ballycahill's John Doyle Centre and floodlit astro-pitch.
“We've a flood-lit walk-way now as well that's open to the public that's tarmacadamed. So now you have parents dropping off their juvenile kids and then doing their own fitness.
“We have an operation transformation now for eight weeks and there are walks every week. It's a real inter-generational thing.
“The facilities are drawing older people during the day-time and people with disabilities who can come out with a walking aid and have a very secure place to walk.
“So, really, it's very much a community hub and it has created a sense of renewal and positivity around the whole club.
“We have a dinner-dance coming up now in three weeks, there hasn't been one for ten years, and we're honouring some of the older people in the club and the people who have been very instrumental in the development of the club as well as honour those who have won competitions this year.
“When I think about it, there probably is a correlation between our facilities and our recent success on the pitch. But I think it's much more than that too. It's about community and having the club at the centre of the community."
The Holycross-Ballycahill U-12 hurlers that won the Tipperary U-12 'A' title in 2019.
Holycross-Ballycahill’s development was first envisioned by former club chairman Micheál Hassett and then largely implemented by his successor Tom O’Dwyer with the considerable help of a development committee headed up by Tom Comerford.
Ryan is now building impressively on their work and, like many other club officers around the country, has availed of the GAA’s Club Leadership Development Programme (CLDP), to learn all he can to best fulfil his role as Club Chairman.
Over 6,000 Club Officers have participated in the programme since 2016, and Ryan has found it to be a very valuable resource.
“Any time when you can go to something that's well facilitated and informative it can only be a good thing,” he said.
“I would always be very positive towards those kinds of things anyway in terms of training and exposure.
“I would have completed two work-shops over the last 12 month period, one around insurance and one around training for officers like Chairperson, Secretary, Treasurer, et cetera. I found them both very, very helpful.
“In both of the workshops the personnel running them were knowledgeable, good communicators, and they also drew from the wisdom of experience available to them from participants
“I also think training like this helps clubs to review structures and governance issues, reduce risk, plan towards best practice and provide a better quality of experience for players, officers, volunteers and club communities more generally.
“The work-shop on insurance raised a lot of issues around governance and documentation and procedures in the current climate where there are so many people using facilities, especially like ours in Holycross where it has almost become like an integrated community facility.
“That raises so many issues around public liability and being covered and not leaving yourself exposed by having the correct signage and all of that. I found that very, very helpful as a new Chairperson.
“I had served in other officer roles before that, but, I suppose, when you're a Chair you kind of feel you're the last port of call with a club's exposure so I did find that really good.”
The Holycross-Ballycahill camogie team that won the Tipperary Junior Camogie League in 2019.
When you have been as successful as Holycross-Ballycahill in terms of fundraising and building infrastructure, then having capable club officers is all the more important.
Ryan believes the training now offered to club officers through the CLDP is vital, particularly when it comes to dealing with a club’s finances.
“I would be of the view that no club should be exposed to just having a treasurer on their own anymore, such is the volume of money that is not moving through clubs,” he said.
“There should be a finance committee because it's just too onerous a task now. We're very lucky we have someone who is very skilled in that area and we have an assistant-treasurer and a sub-committee with budgets for development that are well-organised and separate.
“A lot of clubs now could be having a €100,000 or a through-put, easily, in a year.
“So, the days of someone just taking on a role and having an amateur approach to it is probably not very tenable for much longer, to be honest.
“The training is really important. And yet the spirit of the GAA is all about being amateur, so we have to be careful too that people aren't excluded from officers roles because the thing has become too professionalised.
“So, the training is essential. Absolutely essential.”
For information on the Club Leadership Development Programme, go HERE