On the outskirts of the Long Island town where I live, an enormous furniture store has lain idle for a couple of years, one more victim of the recession. A new sign finally went up over the door the other week though, proclaiming this place to be the future home of "Keith Osik's Major League Instruction." Where once they browsed for coffee tables and wardrobes, parents will now pay top dollar to have their children receive personal coaching in catching, throwing and hitting a baseball. The big selling point is that Osik was a journeyman catcher in the big leagues for nearly a decade so the kids have the chance to learn from a real, live professional. Somebody who actually made it to the show.
Listening to the excited chatter about this among the sports moms and dads in our neighborhood this past month, it struck me that it is surely only a matter of time before somebody imports this business model to the world of the GAA. After all, hurling hasn't been afraid to copy baseball training methods before. Those portable hurling walls/rebounding nets you see cropping up in gardens all around Ireland over the past couple of years. They are simply adaptations of a device used by kids learning how to play baseball for generations. All it took was one bright spark to see the potential for using them for another stick and ball sport and pretty soon you could buy them at Tesco.
And yes, it's worth pointing out children of previous generations in Ireland didn't need rebound nets because they had gable ends of houses to lash the ball against, not to mention that most towns back then had functioning handball alleys which hosted never-ending games of hurling too.
For more serious levels of training, hurling folk have looked west for inspiration too. The former Waterford icon Paul Flynn was among those involved in taking the basic baseball pitching machine and amending it to be able to fire 600 sliothars an hour at pre-set and nearly always perfect trajectories towards the players. Much more reliable than the GAA's traditional method of having a couple of selectors of varying ability hurling balls of all different speeds and lengths at long-suffering players waiting down the field.
If devotees swear by the efficacy of that particular contraption introduced by Flynn and his cohorts, American sport's biggest contribution to the GAA actually dates back more than four decades. That came when UCC hurler Michael Murphy's quest for some head protection on the field during a Fitzgibbon tournament led him to try on an American football helmet. He eventually opted for a sleeker ice hockey equivalent. The Cooper models we all grew wearing in the pre-mask era were the end result of an experiment that earned Murphy a curious footnote in hurling history.
Against that background it seems funny then that nobody has yet saw fit to go down the road of copying baseball's example and offering personalized hurling instruction for kids. After all, the sports have more in common than the fact they both involve hitting a ball traveling at speed through the air. They both also possess a degree of difficulty that is off-putting for youngsters trying to learn the basic skills. Indeed, hitting a baseball is such an art that a professional who manages to do it once every three tries will be considered eligible for the Hall of Fame at the end of his career.
The thing about the baseball coaching here is that it's big business too. These facilities are dotted all over the country and our town is actually coming late to the party. It's not like our area lacks for existing baseball outlets for kids either. There are two different leagues, one seriously competitive, the other much less so. Once the children reach 12 and 13, they start playing for the school teams as well. Why the need for additional work then outside those clubs?
Well, there are hurling coaches all over Ireland right now who probably wish their charges would practice more between training sessions. Getting them professional coaching is just a proactive way of getting them to do that in a century where, unfortunately, children no longer cobble together teams to play impromptu games on the street or the town field for hours on end. A waste of money then by overzealous moms and dads? Surely not if you want to help the child improve at the game at a faster rate. Especially not if the over-worked, stressed-out parents don't have the time to devote to working with the kid themselves.
How many kids all around Ireland are brought to expensive one-on-one music lessons every week, sometimes more than once a week? Most of the parents ferrying them to and from these instructional facilities are not under the illusion their offspring are going to grow up to be orchestral maestros. They just want them to gain a proficiency at an instrument by receiving expert instruction from an experienced player. Surely then there's a market for an inter-county hurler of past or present vintage to establish a hurling clinic where Johnny can go of a Tuesday night to do extra work on his touch under the watchful eye of a seasoned veteran.
With so many hurlers struggling for work just now and so many vacant commercial spaces crying out for tenants all over Ireland, here is an idea whose time may well have come. Is it outlandish or ridiculous to think of parents willing to fork out a little money for private hurling coaching from some big name star? No more so than the prospect of a GAA club paying a couple of thousand euros for a baseball machine to fire sliothars at their hurlers might have seemed a few years back. And that initiative seems to have worked out well for all involved.
*Dave Hannigan's latest children's novel "The Runt of the Litter" is currently being published in weekly installments at www.lijsoccer.com/
