THE club that produced Gaelic Football icons in Jim McKeever and Eamon Coleman as well as former Derry manager Paddy Crozier and All-Ireland winner Gary Coleman, returns to Ulster competition this weekend.
St Trea’s, Ballymaguigan won every match from the pre-season Dean McGlinchey Cup, through the league and then the junior championship and they now face the acid test of their provincial potential against Cavan’s Arva at Owenbeg on Sunday (2pm).
“I’m not used to this sort of stuff,” said manager Patsy Bateson, a former Ballymaguigan player, as he pulled up a chair to speak to media at the Ulster Championship launch on Monday night.
Bateson, who was involved in the management team last year, took the reins for this season. He has been able to keep a strong squad together thanks to a tailor-made training regime that he cut to suit the needs of the players from his rural community.
“We have small numbers so when I took the job on at the start of the year I just left it comfortable for people to come and go,” he explained.
“I didn’t want to come in and rule with an iron fist, I wasn’t going to start saying: ‘Right, if you’re not training on Tuesday night, don’t come back’.
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“If there were boys that couldn’t commit I was happy enough if they came on the Thursday night and I left it a bit more easy-come, easy-go because we couldn’t afford to be giving boys ultimatums.
“Nearly overnight it jumped from maybe 11 at training to about 30 players and that’s what we’re working with. There’s still a few boys who can’t make training with their jobs but it’s still the same now as it was at the start of the year – if they can’t make it because of work, that’s fine, we’ll deal with it. It’s got a wee bit too serious in some clubs so I took the seriousness out of it and tried to bring a bit more enjoyment into it and thankfully it has paid off.”
Bateson combined his understanding attitude with a football-based training philosophy and his players have responded to it.
“I wanted to keep numbers at training so we played football every night – backs versus forwards, small-sided games and big long matches…
“Most young lads go to the gym now anyway so I told them at the start: ‘It’s your job to keep yourselves fit and when you come to training we’ll play football’. That’s why we had good numbers, every night they came, warmed up and then the bibs were handed out and we played.
“It gave me a chance to work on our system and now it’s just second nature to them.”
He’s obviously doing something right because, after more than 20 competitive games, his team has won the lot.
“Long may it continue,” he adds.
If it continues on Sunday then ‘the ’Guigan’ can start to fancy their chances for Ulster glory this year. Cavan has an unusual championship grading system and Arva, who played Division One football in the league and have the inter-county quality of Ciaran Brady and Jonathan McCabe, will be a tough nut to crack.
Bateson is well aware of that.
“This Arva team is very good,” he said.
“I’ve seen a couple of their games – I watched them in the county semi-final and final. They have county players and they do look really good. We’ll prepare for them like we’ve prepared for everybody else, we’ll not change too much and we’ll go out and play the game like we have been doing all year.”
