Danske Bank MacRory Cup quarter-final: St Mary’s Magherafelt v St Patrick’s Maghera (Friday, 7.30pm, Owenbeg)
WHEN St Patrick’s Maghera’s 2003 Hogan Cup winning team held their 20-year reunion last year, Gerard O’Kane rang up John McElholm and got him to put together a video message.
McElholm had been manager of the opposition, their nearest and dearest from St Mary’s Magherafelt, in that year’s MacRory Cup final.
Chasing what would have then been their first ever MacRory success, the Convent boys led by 1-4 to 0-2, with current joint-manager Ronan Devlin’s brother Coilín also having missed a penalty.
“If Gerard disappears halfway through the night, not to worry, he’ll be back in no time,” McElholm jokingly told the Maghera lads in that message.
Maghera’s All-Ireland winning minor captain had been stretchered off during the first half.
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Lazarus himself would have been taking notes when he re-emerged on the sideline early in the second half, sparking St Pat’s into life. They recovered to win by five.
Maghera had obstructed both of St Mary’s first two serious attempts at glory, beating them in an infamous final in 1996 where the rivalry showed an uglier side than at any other point.
St Mary’s had only just stepped up to A football at that time.
The shadow cast over them by the three-story red brick building on Maghera’s Coleraine Road was inescapable.
Current Derry minor manager Damian McErlain lived all his life in Magherafelt.
He, like so many, did his GCSEs at St Pius X in the town, which had no sixth form at the time.
McErlain was accepted into both St Mary’s and St Pat’s for his A-Levels. The primary justification for his choice, and that of others, was always football.
He ended up a back-to-back MacRory Cup winner with Maghera, winning a Hogan in ‘95 and then captaining them in the ‘96 final amid a slew of bans from the MacRory final fallout.
“I wanted to go to St Pat’s to play MacRory football, it was the football school. The Convent was only starting to come at that time,” he recalls.
“And then we ended up playing them in a MacRory final, that just wasn’t what I expected when I was leaving St Pius’.”
A loughshore contingent of Fionntain Devlin, Gary Doyle, young Adrian McGuckin, Daryl McKee and a few others took the Curran Bus around Magherafelt and through Desertmartin every morning for five years.
The contingent grew when Stephen McGeehan, now of Ulster Council, and his Ballinderry team-mate Gerard Cassidy infamously left St Mary’s at the end of fifth year to move to Maghera.
Some bones don’t need to be dug up. These are to be used as evidence of the rarity of such moves now.
The sun has shifted south and the shadow that once crept in from Maghera has been pushed back.
Virtually nobody from Magherafelt town or any of the neighbouring heartlands like Newbridge, Ballinderry or The Loup is driving past the Convent now.
Not only that, but four of the St Mary’s squad are from Lavey, a village once joined to St Pat’s at the hip.
Bellaghy always leaned towards St Pat’s but it too has started to tip the other direction.
“We’re bringing players in from areas we never had before,” says McElholm.
“We have a lot of Bellaghy bags about the school and a lot of Lavey bags and Slaughtneil bags, lads and girls that traditionally we wouldn’t have got.”
Of the 34 youngsters who shared Derry’s All-Ireland minor final win over Monaghan in early July last year, no fewer than 21 will be involved when the schools contest tonight’s MacRory quarter-final in Owenbeg.
Eleven from St Mary’s, ten from St Pat’s. Six starters to three, though that would have been 5-4 were it not for goalkeeper Jack McCloy missing the final.
Paul Hughes and Colm Lavery are back in charge of Maghera and they’ve pulled out an ace card by bringing Derry’s 2022 Ulster winning captain Chrissy McKaigue into the fold as their coach.
“I was chatting to Colm and Chrissy the other day about MacRory and saying they’re not won in sixth form, it’s what they’ve experienced coming up through the school and what the culture has been,” says Hughes.
“William McAteer runs a first year tournament every year and the kids would die to get playing in it. They stood at the start of the final this year and sang the national anthem and the whole of first year backing them up.
“You need the right people to establish that culture. Since Adrian [McGuckin]’s time, we’ve been blessed with people like Martin McConnell, Sean Marty Lockhart, Neil O’Kane, Ronan O’Donnell in hurling, Dermot McNicholl for absolute years – Dermot McNicholl!
“It’s a big thing for the school that we keep getting those quality people that will demand those standards of the kids down the school.
“It’s the old Lombardi quote, to paraphrase, I’ve never met the player who doesn’t want to be pushed or doesn’t appreciate being pushed hard.
“When they get that experience at a younger age, they get used to those standards.”
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THAT those players are all coming into a MacRory knockout campaign with their All-Ireland medals pocketed highlights the shift in the school-county dynamic.
Whereas a lot of the lads were 16 when they overcame the Farney with a brilliantly composed display in the jammed Athletic Grounds in Armagh, MacRory has capacity for lads anything up to U19.5.
“The county appreciate that because they’ve put development coaches into the schools. They’re involved in the placement of boys in our school and St Pius’ and Maghera,” says McElholm, referencing jobs occupied in recent times by Enda Muldoon, Killian Conlan and Gavin McGeehan.
“They see the value of schools football and playing at MacRory level. It’s a higher level than club and even minor level. There’s a big step up from U17 to MacRory, bigger than it was.
“There’s a direct correlation between success in the schools and what the county’s doing. It’s a symbiotic relationship; the better the county does, the better the schools do; the better the clubs do, the better the schools do, and vice versa,” says the Loughmacrory native, who began teaching in the school in 1999.
Back then a small group of men such as Eunan Conway, Cathal Hinfey, Tony Collins and Vincent Cassidy were keeping the GAA scence alive.
McElholm took a back seat from MacRory this year, leaving it to former Antrim defender Kevin Brady (another member of Maghera’s 1996 team) and Ronan Devlin, who has a handful of Antrim titles under his belt with Cargin and helped facilitate the school’s rise when he came into that Gaelic Games Promotion Officer role a few years ago before becoming a PE teacher.
While the Convent have grown to take complete command of their own catchment, St Pat’s untouchable territory contains both Glen and Slaughtneil, winners of five Ulster Club titles between them in the last decade.
Dungiven won last year’s Ulster minor title and have always pushed a sprinkling of players across the Glenshane.
What St Mary’s have gained in south Derry, they’ve lost in east Tyrone, with the Ardboe and Moortown pupils of the past opting more frequently to school in their own county.
They both still draw a bit from the Creggan and Cargin clubs just the other side of the Toome border with Antrim.
The Convent might have muscled in on a bit of St Pat’s territory but it will be a long time until St Mary’s are putting their elbows out in a debate over tradition, history or silverware.
It’s less that the balance has swung and more that it’s evened out.
The Convent have reached three MacRory finals and won two since 2017 but Maghera won it the year before that, as well as in 2013, 2014 and a shared Covid title with St Colman’s in 2020. They’re going nowhere.
St Mary’s, a girls’ only school until 1978, has grown as a footballing institution in its own right. Since stepping up into ‘A’ football, they’ve never gone back down in any competition.
That has driven their sobered rivalry to new heights – and helped Derry football as a whole.
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IT’S six years since they last met in a knockout game, a semi-final in Bellaghy.
Throw-in had to be delayed as 4,000 people piled into Páirc Sean de Brún beneath a sunshine-and-shivers sky.
St Pat’s were favourites but it was the holders, St Mary’s, who won en-route to another final where they lost to St Ronan’s.
The county’s deep interest for MacRory Cup football was embedded by Maghera’s run of successes that began in the early 1980s under Adrian McGuckin.
Having the Convent as a bonafide rival has only strengthened the whole premise.
The correlation that McElholm talks about between success for school, club and county cannot be dismissed.
“It’s huge for the county to have two schools going,” Paul Hughes agrees.
“A lot is made of Tyrone having three schools coming, their two traditional schools in Dungannon and Omagh and now St Joseph’s Donaghmore stepping up to it.
“Look at Monaghan, they have [St] Macartans as the traditional school but Patrician Carrickmacross and Our Lady’s Castleblayney have stepped up.”
That the three Monaghan schools all made the knockout last twelve of the MacRory – and might all have made the last eight had two of them not faced each other in the playoff – six months after the county reached its first All-Ireland minor final since 1939 cannot be brushed off as mere coincidence.
Derry minors have won two All-Irelands and played in seven Ulster finals over the last decade alone. St Pat’s won MacRory Cups in 2013, 2014, 2016 and that shared 2020 title, while St Mary’s won in 2017, lost the final the following year and grabbed their second title in 2022.
Their captain for the second title was Eoin McEvoy, nominated for the GAA’s Young Footballer of the Year last season.
He lost out in that award to Ethan Doherty, Glen’s own captain of the Maghera side for the final that never was in 2020.
Doherty is sitting waiting on a second straight All-Ireland club final, winner of two Ulster Club titles and two Ulster senior titles with Derry.
Six of the Glen starting team against Kilmacud have MacRory Cup medals with St Pat’s. Jody McDermott is an All-Ireland minor winner from 2020. There are Ulster minor medals floating all around the place.
School and county have learned to co-exist. There were frictions a bit over a decade ago that manifested themselves in some of the best minor footballers in Derry opting out of county setups before they’d joined up. MacRory came first.
McErlain took over as minor manager in 2015 and one of the first things he did was seal up the cracks.
“The fact I knew everyone in St Pat’s when I took the job did no harm, I was fit to say how I wanted things to work and the personal thing helped.”
The more they’ve learned in terms of the science behind it, the less tension exists.
When Derry minors train during MacRory time, the players are under no obligation to attend at all if they’ve trained with the school that day. They’ll generally go anyway and decide then whether they want to train. Those that do stick to recovery work.
This week, they were told to steer clear of Owenbeg altogether and concentrate on Friday night’s game.
It’s mid-January and the MacRory players haven’t laced boots yet at Derry training.
Anything they’ve done has been in the gym and all tailored around keeping them right for MacRory because the benefits will ultimately be mutual.
“My aim as Derry minor manager is to get the MacRory players back fit and well and fresh when they arrive back, not killed and carrying groin injuries because they’ve been having to train for five different masters,” says McErlain.
The players in both schools that are involved with minor setups follow the county’s strength and conditioning programme and the rest are on their own plan.
They’ll all train with MacRory two or three times a week plus whatever add-ons there such as video work.
“Damian’s one of the people that makes the job easy,” says Hughes.
“He came through as a player, a MacRory Cup winner, a Hogan Cup captain, and he understands and appreciates the value of what the kids get here. It’s about what the cubs can get most out of at this time of year.”
It is an extension of where they all want to end up, a level up from the clubs that all of McErlain, Hughes and McElholm credit for shouldering the bulk of the work.
The schools and counties are nothing without the clubs, and after a period of slippage, a lot of Derry’s traditional powerhouses plus sleeping giants Glen and Magherafelt have really got their act together.
This is the fixture that tells us why Derry football is where it is.