Replying To Viking66: "#Pikeman I think the point being made is that non traditional and/or smaller clubs are producing top level players. And that this is shown by the fact they are competing and winning in higher divisions. Which is why you are seeing more and more players from these clubs making county teams. The best players should be making our county teams regardless of what club they are from."
Oh, I fully realise that, and I fully recognise and applaud the work going on and the progress being made in those clubs - e.g. three starters from Monageer-Boolavogue on our minor hurling team last weekend, and two from Oylegate-Glenbrien.
But things sometimes have a habit of growing legs that they shouldn't really have.
For instance, would be accurate to say the three clubs specified in the original post on this thing are making great strides, picking up a county title or two, and competing at a higher level than they traditionally did.
But inaccurate to say they're "winning the Premier titles at underage levels" as though they're hoovering them all up, with nobody else getting a look in.
Replying To Afinestick96: "Think I agree with you Viking . I think 5 group games and then having preliminary quarter finals is too much of a cushion for teams. They dont have to peak until September which means the early rounds are generally poor."
Five games is enough, personally think #1 in each group should go straight through to the SFs, and then 2nd should played 3rd in the QFs, 4th and 5th are done done for the year, and 6th play each other in the relegation final
If you play five games in a group and come 4th, I don't think you should really be arguing that you deserve to play more games
I do think that while it is right that the County Board have a programme for the development of the game in the county, each club and secondary school should also have their own programme
Their needs to be buy-in for this to work and a lot of people might think there's no need for a programme at each club or might have little interest in formulating one but the fact is, you have have to convince thee people and bring them along with it by first off working back from targets
1. Ask yourself what grade the club aspires to realistically play at in 10-15 years time?
2. Ask yourself how does the club get there
3. What grades to underage teams needs to be playing at in the next 10 years for you to get there at adult level?
4. Ask yourself if you want to play at that underage grade, what work do you need to do at club level in order to get there?
5. How does the club get more good hurlers? Can the club expand its playing population? Can the club improve the quality of its coaching so the club develops better hurlers?
6. How does the club develop its coaches?
7. How do the players themselves improve? Technically, physically, tactically, and mentally? What are all the technical skills? What are physical skills? How do we best coach these? How do we challenge good players?
8. Do we have the equipment and infrastructure to allow them to improve e.g. a gym for S&C work even though it's probably own body weight stuff? How does we then finance this if we don't have the infrastructure atm
9. What are other clubs doing well and how do we copy them?
10. Are we training enough months in the year?
11. What are our link-ups with primary schools and secondary schools?
12. How do we measure success in the short-run to know we're on the right track? Success at underage level, playing numbers, number of players on development squads, number of players on schools teams?
13. How often do we review our programme to know that we have the right programme in place?
14. Are we adhering to our current programme? If we aren't, why aren't we?
I think if every club and secondary school were to do something like that, we'd be in a great place
Replying To Afinestick96: "Think I agree with you Viking . I think 5 group games and then having preliminary quarter finals is too much of a cushion for teams. They dont have to peak until September which means the early rounds are generally poor."
To be frank, I'm not sure it would make much difference.
Let's say we did move to groups of four (so only three group games each), and possibly even expand each grade to 16 teams - i.e. four groups of four.
Clubs would probably only go for it on the grounds of group winners going to a quarter-final, with second and third place playing a preliminary quarter-final. If it was just first and second going straight through to quarter-finals, then half the teams in the county would be out after only three games.
Then you'd still have three-quarters of teams (12 out of 16) going to knockout stages, so questionable whether there'd actually be much more jeopardy at all.
And with 12 out of 16 teams going through somehow or somewhere, then particularly the stronger teams still wouldn't have to peak until knockout stages in September anyway.