Photo courtesy of Colm Walsh.
jing GAA. We always had a small number but this gave
us a new avenue to promote Gaelic games. The timing
couldn’t have been better but we knew that it was going to
be a lot of hard work.
the academic year. So training was divided into semesters. The first semester started in September 2014 and it
lasted 8 weeks. The training was every Saturday morning
from 10-12.30pm. Stephen Lillis and myself committed
ourselves to these 8 weekends.
DID YOU GIVE CLASS-ROOM PRESENTATIONS?
Yes, we gave a 45 minute power-point presentation that
we pieced together ourselves in a lecture room, explaining
Gaelic Games, Beijing GAA and what our national sports
mean to the people of Ireland. Then we focussed solely on
the football. One of us would explain a certain rule or skill
of the game while the other demonstrated it. It was very
surreal to be honest. It’s the last thing you expect to be doing in China. We had become “Lecturers of Gaelic Games”
in one of the biggest cities in the world!
HOW DID YOU AND STEPHEN GO ABOUT ORGANIZING THINGS FROM THE START?
As this is a university we had to tailor the training around
We also realised that even though the students had good
English, there would still be communication problems.
So our instructions would have to be very clear. I’m from
Galway and I know it was hard enough to understand
Steve’s Tipp accent at the best of times! He would say the
same of me though!
As Stephen is a former Tipperary hurler he had an assortment of drills that we could use for fitness and we
both have very good experience of Gaelic football. However we had to be careful as we were aware that many of
these students were never involved in team sports before
so everything had to be built up slowly. The key factor
in all of this was for everyone involved to have a good
time. So we made sure to mix it up with some games that
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