Did you have your match yet? What approach to selection & subs did you take? Did you incur the wrath of any mammies or daddies?
We won 5-1 to 1-1 aet in a thrilling contest. Played all 23 but was squeaky hole time for me with the game in the melting pot. Rotated 3 of them into one corner back position and 3 into a corner forward slot. Bit more rotating then between a few others playing half a match each. Left about 6/7 stronger players on for whole match.
A big ‘success’ really but the knives would have been out if one of the rotating corner backs had cost us late on with the match level.
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About RYPT
RYPT is an athletic development platform designed to help multi-disciplinary coaching teams efficiently deliver athletic development programs at scale. The platform supports every aspect of the coaching relationship — from individualised training and performance tracking to athlete monitoring and injury management — centralising data and providing valuable insights to help coaches reduce injury risk and optimise performance.
RYPT currently works with over 3,000 coaches in 19 countries, supporting athletes from grassroots to Olympic level and partnering with sports teams, private facilities, schools, universities, and large sporting organisations worldwide.
Have any of the lads here on the circuit used this?
We are using it this year, tis grand. Same as a lot of them
Yep
Tipp Hurlers been using it for a few years via they’re S&C
It’s ok
Prob just the market leader and therefore everyone follows it by default
It works off data inputted by the players themselves?
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Ya, the s&c coach assigns the programs to the players and they log what they’ve done.
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Coaches upload the sessions onto the app, players input weights lifted, mark sessions completed, etc. and the coaches have a lot of monitoring elements they can add too.
I don’t really see its application at underage level for clubs (unless they are doing structured s and c but im not sure how common that is).
As mentioned above, being market leader and probably the only Irish is its main advantage id say but from what I’ve heard it does make things easier for coaches.
Was involved in a County Camogie team where the S&C coach had the players rate their sleep etc. Buy in was poor - and I can see why
What are ‘hot zone overloads’?
I dunno but I’d look for a cream for it.
Sounds like when Kev can get second helpings when collecting his pub dinners
Kev won’t be happy until he sees a Dublin player kilt from these new rules
Chapell Roans latest song?
Chap Ronan.
Anyone copy and paste this 
WED, 11 JUN, 2025 - 15:52
CIARÁN O’SULLIVAN
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
— The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
THE enduring wisdom of John Ford’s western is that legends are not based in reality—they’re made up of the stories we like to tell. We don’t just eulogise greatness; we manufacture it. Moments are inflated, flaws-covered up, and we cut the highlight plays like a Scorsese montage. That’s how we remember Jordan, Messi, Brady, Serena — not as players, but as myths crafted in our collective imagination.
Youth sport clings to a dangerous myth: the child who doesn’t start out as a star will never be a star at all. It’s a delusion that doesn’t merely distort what exists — it writes off potential before it can unfold. Yet history tells a different tale. Jordan was dropped from his high school team. Brady was selected 199th in his NFL draft. Messi was informed he was too short. Serena, for more than a moment, wasn’t even the top Williams sister.
So we question the systems that sustain our cultural fixation with early developers. Life, like any game, honours those who fight to climb - not those who rest at their starting height.
The Prodigy Trap.
“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” — Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard.
Talent identification too often forecasts incorrectly in high-performance pathways and youth academies. Early developers - bigger, faster, stronger - are favoured in the numbers game of selection, while late developers fade into obscurity when the window closes too soon.
We’ve built a shrine to child prodigies: the kid playing up a few age groups, the 10-year-old phenom, the under-12 champion. We crown them with headlines, flood them with expectation, and rarely consider what was sacrificed - and at what cost.
Time betrays our expectations, while talent betrays our assumptions.
Australian sports performance expert Wayne Goldsmith, a leading voice in coaching, dismantles this illusion: “Elite Junior Athletes. They are about as real as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Wolfman.”
Fergie Time.
“And their memory’s like a train, You can see them getting smaller as they pull away. And the things you can’t remember, Tell the things you can’t forget…” — Tom Waits.
Under Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, time didn’t merely tick - it stretched, warped, complied. ‘Fergie Time’ wasn’t a fluke. It was design. Culture. Like the dream in Inception, minutes inflated when faith was greatest. Opponents howled about bias. Believers witnessed magic. United’s 81 goals scored from past the 90th minute, however, weren’t miracles - they were mentality made real. The 1999 Champions League final was its Sistine Chapel: Sheringham in the 91st, Solskjær in the 93rd. Two late goals. Two late developers. One eternal lesson.
Late Bloomers.
“There is a light that never goes out.” — The Smiths.
Paul McGinley waited until he was 25 to turn pro, some years after contemporaries had turned pro or gone on to do something else. But it wasn’t time lost - the years playing soccer and Gaelic football developed the spatial awareness and focus needed to hole out to win the 2002 Ryder Cup.
Fergie Time is embodied by those who avoid the tidy timeline - late risers who ascended to the pinnacle, not through prediction but persistence. What links many of them isn’t perhaps when they got there, but how: along multi-sport trajectories that taught adaptability, toughness, and instinct.
Denis Irwin, Ireland-capped at 24, also developed playing GAA. As with McGinley, his breakthrough was slow-burning as opposed to meteoric - but no less enduring. Neither Jack Charlton or Alex Ferguson could imagine their star-studded teams without him.
Brian Fenton, excluded from the Dublin minors, honed his speed and decision-making through playing basketball, badminton, and football. When he was recruited by Dublin’s senior team, he was unstoppable and played out one of the greatest footballing careers we’ve ever seen.
Lindsey Peat picked up rugby at the age of 35, after a successful international Basketball career to go with winning All-Ireland football titles with Dublin. Her late arrival did not slow her down - she became a mainstay of the Irish rugby team.
These examples avoided the early spotlight by developing broad, dynamic skill sets. Systems that demand too much too soon often miss out on those whose talent expands later.
The Red Card Nobody Sees.
“Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, sorrow won.” — The National, “Sorrow”.
The car door slams shut. The engine snarls over. The mobile court convenes. This is Succession with shin pads. Adolescent dropout is a cold fact - 70% of children drop out of organised sport by the age of 13. It’s tough and merciless. The exit door is in the back seat.
Questions fall like rain on the windscreen - soft, persistent, and stinging. “You had two clear chances in the first half.” The words arrive before the seatbelt clicks. From pitch to driveway, this space becomes purgatory. The child learns to deflect with humour, cracking jokes to lighten the inquest. Sarcasm becomes their shield, wit their only currency in a place where warmth used to live - anything to keep the vultures at bay.
The engine hums. Guilt-laced analysis lands like a studs-up tackle. The child learns that the people closest to them keep the score.
Are we almost home? How soon is now?
That post-game debrief of the unqualified is universal - just like that great closing scene in The Graduate: you finish the game, but what now? Triumph and doubt collide in real time. The red card stays raised, and happiness is heading out of bounds.
Sometimes, the very hands meant to nurture are the ones that pull the handbrake on a child’s potential.
The Talent Trap.
“All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing… and then made me mute. Why?” — Salieri, Amadeus.
Salieri’s despair in Amadeus stems from realising Mozart’s greatness is beyond his reach. The same tragedy happens in young athletes, where trainers confuse initial physical traits with potential. We end up with a defective hybrid: Moneyball’s obsession with numbers without its nuance, combined with Full Metal Jacket’s control without its definition.
Coaches are preoccupied with physical traits - height and size at age 14 - and ignore vision, scanning, decision-making, and off-ball movement. The consequence? Players who initially overwhelm collapse once their physical advantage fades and the game demands problem-solving skills they never developed. Meanwhile, others who don’t pass the early eye test are ousted before they even begin.
Coaches wax lyrical about inter-county hurlers in ball alleys, Messi slicing through cones, Steph Curry juggling two basketballs pre game - as if the secret lay in isolated practice. Nothing wrong with those activities, but the real message is often missed.
Decades of problem-solving in a fun, unscripted universe gave these icons room to grow. As Keith Davids, a pioneer in ecological dynamics, reminds us: “You can’t adapt to an environment you don’t inhabit.” What looked like clean technique enhancement was built gradually in representative learning environments.
Curry and company have earned the right to isolated technique tuning. Kids require all the safe uncertainty they can manage - repetition without repetition - where mistakes happen and there’s room to self-organise. If training is more like a TED Talk on obedience, don’t be shocked when creativity exits.
Let the Kids Play.
“When the day is done, down to earth then sinks the sun, along with everything that was lost and won, when the day is done.” — Nick Drake, “Day Is Done”
Parish-league scraps - those chaotic pickup games on slanted greens against your cousins or the older lads from down the road - are where real growth begins.
Hearts race. Heads clash. In the blur of instinct and imagination, perception and action fuse. The kids make the rules, pick the teams and finish the arguments. The 10-year-old learns to survive against 15-year-olds not through size but through cunning - threading passes through impossible gaps.
Then, just as tempers flare and the game hits its stride, a voice calls from the window: ‘Dinner!’
No VAR. No car. No post-match breakdowns. Just the spark of something real, glowing in the dusk.
These free-form games are teaching what no formal session can: how to read, how to build from scratch, how to overcome problems no adult might foresee.
The wise coach knows when to step back and when to subtly direct. A subtle change - tightening the pitch, adding a second ball - can create new challenges while preserving the fun that keeps the kids coming back.
The Unwritten Minute.
Like life, sport is a non-linear progression of seasons and seconds. It is shaped by fleeting moments, magical and frustrating instances that defy reason. History is built on the moments we remember, not always the ones that make sense.
In Apocalypse Now, the real story isn’t in the jungle, it’s in the person within. Sport follows the same path. The journey is inward.
In that final instant, when instinct conquers fear and constraint yields to improvisation, something deeper emerges.
Every weekend in Ireland, thousands of young athletes take to pitches and courts. The next Brian Fenton might be sitting on a bench, wrestling with doubt. Our job isn’t to predict who they’ll become, but to provide room for them to find out.
When a late developer finally breaks through like Vardy, Drogba or Olajuwon, it’s electric, a Nick Cave lyric made flesh from “Jubilee Street”: “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, I’m glowing. I’m flying. Look at me now.”
We spotlight players, yet coaches and parents can be late bloomers too, learning, slowly, how to step back and let joy take root.
The bottom line is that every child matters, and their potential cannot be scheduled by a coach’s calendar.
Potential arises in locations clocks can’t count, in time statistics can’t predict and in hearts our communities can’t quantify.
Time can fracture. Stories endure. The clock ticks. And you? You’re right on time.
Thanks 
All the examples there are a little bit flawed in that Id imagine all were absolutely brilliant at their sport all the way through just developed to the very top top level relatively late.
Id be more interested in the lad who’s absolutely useless at 9 or 10 who goes on to be corner back on a county winning minor club team even. Do they exist?
A chap i trained at minor, albeit a good team, wasnt in an asses roar of making the first 15. Just didnt have it at all. 7 years on, he’s corner back on the senior team.
Nice of Ciarán to give a nod to some Serie A greats although I don’t recall Messi playing in Italy, unlike Joe Jordan, Liam Brady and Aldo Serena.