The coaching conundrum

He’d be far too humble to admit it, but Mick McKinnon is one of those fellows who was born to lead rather than follow. The Londoner has an easygoing demeanour and a wicked sense of humour, but when it comes to coaching hockey, he means business. Six successive promotions. Let those words rest in your mind for a few seconds. It’s like when you guided Rushden and Diamonds to Champions League glory in the halcyon days of Championship Manager. Except that McKinnon did it for real, bringing Armagh ladies from Ulster’s Junior Division Two to Premier One in six years. Not only that, but during his tenure, he unearthed seven future Irish internationals, and left a blueprint for success that is now being copied by clubs all over Ireland. So how the hell did he do it? “It was luck and hard work,” he smiles. “I landed there at a time when there was a lot of good genetics going around.” Ah now, if it was that bloody simple we’d all be at it. When we meet at Garryduff ahead of his workshop at the Munster Coaching Conference (on his last day as an IHA employee no less – he has since moved to work as a special needs teacher at King’s Hospital) it’s easy to see it’s not McKinnon’s style to be heaping credit on himself, but the tale gradually begins to unfold.

He threw some of the club’s young players in at the deep end and anticipated a struggle, but they won promotion – and didn’t lose a game for four years. It didn’t happen by accident, though. Upon his arrival, McKinnon piloted a “futures” group, which saw the best six girls from the club’s youth section brought in to train with the first team to, as he puts it, “accelerate their learning”. Throw them in at the deep end, the wisdom goes, and they will develop faster. Of that sextet, which included a 12-year-old Amy Stewart, five have since been capped by Gene Muller. This notion was part of an overall framework, which McKinnon masterminded to give each team in the club a specific role that puts ambitious players on a developmental path, without sacrificing the social elements that are so vital to a club’s survival. It essentially involves a five-tier structure, with the firsts providing for the elite players, the second for development and the fifths for anyone new to the club, with the third and fourths serving a social purpose. “You have to strike a balance. There has to be some area lower down clubs for developing players, not just in age grade and at school,” he says. “Learning can be accelerated massively by being put at a level where you’re not quite up to it yet and we have to give kids that opportunity, it’s the only way. It worked in Armagh, it’s working now in Railway. It can be done hand in hand with a social club – you wont find a more social club than Armagh, but each has a designated role.” He has since implemented the same plan at Railway Union, who he joined in the summer of 2007. However, he has found the over-15 age restriction in the Leinster league to be prohibitive to the development of players in more ways than one. “It doesn’t allow the elite to be elite, and it doesn’t allow kids to become club members,” he explains. “Every girl who joined the Armagh club plays a season in the bottom XI of the club. They have fun, they go ice skating and they go to McDonalds on the way home from matches. They learn what it’s like to be a club member, having to raise funds for your club, to be social within the club. “But in Dublin, any elite player will only ever experience 1st XI hockey. They never see all the people who put in hours for the club, the 3rd XI captain who organises everything. And that’s unhealthy. It’s good for a kid to work their way up the club. “In Railway there were very few players in the lower teams who were on a developmental path. They were all playing hockey at their own level, it was good socially and there’s a place for that, but within every team in the club, there should be a designated role. Three or four players in each team should be developing.”

McKinnon’s methods have also left a lasting impact at national level. As well as turning Ireland U18 into a European force during his six-year tenure, he has also developed the Talent ID programme, which piloted in Cork and Limerick last year before spreading nationwide. Talent ID aims to unearth young hockey players with potential who might otherwise slip under the radar, and McKinnon cites one promising Munster youngster, Catholic Institute’s Naomi Carroll, as one of the best examples of the programme’s success so far. “We put flyers out to schools and clubs, and in Munster we found a player that may not have been found by the more conventional methods. Naomi was the top scorer for the Irish U16s in the Euros, and is now in the U18 group. “There are a plethora of hidden gems who don’t have as much access to the nurture that the kids in conventional hockey strongholds would get. There’s no reason why they don’t have more or equivalent potential. “We screened more than 1,000 kids and narrowed it down to an U15 girls squad of 32. The plan next year would be to look outside the current hockey population. I know you’ve problems in Munster with participation outside the big clubs, and this might be a way of increasing partipcation as well as finding elite players – it’s not just an elite programme.” Asked if the net could be cast wider to include other sports, McKinnon cites one of his players at Railway – Cork camogie star Emer Dillon – as an example of the transferable skills between sports. “You’d be amazed at some of the kids we’ve found from other sports – ballet, gymnastics, tennis. If a kid is good at one sport they tend to be good at others. You’re looking for good athletes with good hand-eye co-ordination and good decision-making – they’re the criteria.

“(However), we are overtly against early specialisation in hockey, because we think that playing a multitude of sports is good preparation for being a good hockey player. There’s nothing to stop a player like Naomi playing soccer for Ireland as well. I think it’s healthy.” McKinnon also has some novel ideas for getting the best out of even younger players, one of which has been implemented by the Munster Branch. Concerned that children were being exposed to 11-a-side hockey too early, he recommended a system where U8s play three-a-side, U12s play six-a-side and U14s eight-a-side. This, says McKinnon, allows young players more touches and more time on the ball, and forces them to make decisions on the pitch at a younger age. To compliment this setup, he also pioneered Building Blocks, a set of 50 all-weather cards for coaches, each containing a drill or a game for kids to play at training. Details of how to order it through the IHA are available here. Before he heads off to help a young C of I player with her drag flicks, there’s just enough time for McKinnon to address the participation problems that are painfully evident in Munster. While the general mood on this topic has been one of doom and gloom, McKinnon reckons there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful, but preaches the virtue of patience. “It’s being done but it’s not going to happen overnight,” he offers. “Phil (Oakley, IHA regional development officer) has been appointed, and there’s more hockey being played in primary schools, but it’s going to take seven or eight years for the primary school programme to impact on senior clubs. “I believe Munster hockey has identified a problem and is going about fixing it in the only way possible. It’s not a quick fix, it’s a long-term, sustainable fix. So while it might all seem like doom and gloom at the moment, there’s a lot of good stuff going on.

“(For example), Limerick were youth club of the year last season, and the junior section at C of I is as good as any in Ireland. There is a dearth of players coming through at U16 and U18 but certainly on the girls side I can see that changing. “Talent ID will hopefully identify players who can be put into an international development programme a lot earlier; there are already six Muster girls on the Irish U15 squad. You’d be surprised, you get one who is successful and there’ll be a domino effect – it starts to create a culture of hockey and a culture of excellence. So I wouldn’t be too dispondant. “The coaching committee in Munster has been outstanding; there’s a lot of good people down here, and from my point of view the branch have been superb to work with. You tend to find in Irish hockey that everyone’s quick to snipe, but they don’t know how much work actually goes on on the ground. It can be a thankless task at times.”