When Colm Collins returned from America, he decided it was time for a change. Before he had left Ireland on a career break to spend four years in Yonkers, Collins had been a schoolteacher. He had settled among the Irish community in the city and he’d found Clare people there too, but those years working in construction in New York had opened his eyes to other worlds and other ideas. It made him think there was no point doing a job you didn’t enjoy.
So when Collins and his wife Kate made the decision to come home, he also made another decision.
“Everybody said it was a big decision. It wasn’t a big decision for me,” he says, and pauses to smile, “but my mother thought it was a big decision.”
Kate was also a teacher so it wasn’t as daunting as if there had only been one income, he says, eager to deflect attention away from himself. Teaching was fine, he says, “a fantastic job, if you like it”, but he wanted something else.
So instead of spending a lifetime doing something he didn’t want to do and grumbling about it, he did something else. This is Colm Collins’ way. There are big decisions in life, but they become easier if there is something to pursue that can bring meaning and enjoyment. The big decisions became less daunting if you take them on rather than complaining about the obstacles preventing you from doing them.
Taking Clare’s footballers to an All-Ireland quarter-final might have required a similar approach.
Collins looks at the players he manages on the Clare team and wants them to enjoy what they’re doing too. As importantly, he wants them to enjoy the responsibility that comes with it.
Collins listens to those who talk about the draining nature of the modern game and wonders if it’s true.
“They spend far too much time at this not to enjoy it. Young lads now won’t do something if they’re not enjoying it.”
He thinks about those who look back wistfully to another time when the pub was the centre of an inter-county player’s lifestyle and he wonders why that has to be synonymous with enjoyment.
“They lament the loss of the days when they used to go into the pub, but the unfortunate thing about that is that for every group that would go into the pub, you’d have 20 players who could have one or two drinks, and then three or four that would end up with a real problem in their lives. But that gets brushed under the carpet by some of the people when they romanticise it.”
Collins sees it differently. He sees the commitment his players make as something worth doing, something full of purpose, even if it is not the most important thing in life.
He has guided Clare’s footballers to an All-Ireland quarter-final against Kerry on Sunday, but he makes it sound so simple that it’s tempting to think anyone could have come along and achieved recognition for Gaelic football in a place known for hurling.
It was, he says, merely a question of going out and getting things done, which overlooks his natural ability for going out and getting things done.
When something works, there is never just one thing that is the difference between success and failure, he says. But if there is one factor he wants to draw attention to it is the players. “They walk the walk.”
And he believes the players will be committed if they’re enjoying themselves.
“The only way to get the most out of people is the carrot. The stick will work short-term, but it won’t work long-term. This isn’t groundbreaking news. All the multi-billion corporations figured this out long ago.”
Colm Collins has figured some stuff out himself as well. His house in Cratloe contains the sports books he will turn to for insight, but often when he picks them up they confirm what he has learned about human behaviour in all his years thinking about coaching and management, in all his years thinking about life.
He has got a lot from the books on his shelves too, whether it’s a sporting autobiography or something on “the whole area of getting the most out of yourself.” Legacy, James Kerr’s book on the All Blacks, was one that made him think about what you should want from a group of sportsmen.
“When things were broken, and they went about fixing it, that was the emphasis: better people make better All Blacks. No point having a kid on the pitch who can score ten points if he’s acting the thug and breaking windows in the school. Everything has to be developed.”
Collins watched Sonny Bill Williams hand his World Cup medal over to a young fan and saw it as the conclusion to that process and an example of better people making better players.
Teaching might not have been for him, but it doesn’t take long in his company to understand that developing young people through sport is what motivates him.
His coaching career began with underage sides in Cratloe, where they moved around the turn of the century after a couple of years in Limerick when they returned from America.
They had left New York when it was time to start a family. New York was great, but this was the place to raise their kids.
Collins taught for a time at a school in Shannon under principal Brendan Vaughan, the legendary Clare GAA figure who was responsible for the appointment of Ger Loughnane as manager of the hurlers.
He once asked Vaughan why he had appointed a man with whom he had so many disagreements. “I would deal with the devil if it was for the good of Clare hurling,” Vaughan told him. Instead he appointed Loughnane and success in hurling followed.
Colm and Kate had three sons under the age of five and as they went down to the field in to play, Colm Collins became involved in coaching football in Cratloe.
“They were mad to go to the pitch,” he says of his three boys and when they were mad to go to the pitch, he went with them.
His sons have progressed too and managing a side with two of them on it “isn’t easy”, he says. The pride he feels as their father and the responsibilities he feels as manager have to be separated.
When his time is done with Clare, he’d like to work with underage sides again but Colm Collins being Colm Collins, he now has some new ideas.
“I would be an entirely different coach. Every kid is special. What happens is you get to the situation where winning is more important. It often doesn’t come from the coach. It comes from the other players. If I was going back, the emphasis would be completely on skill development and participation of all the kids.”
He has always been thinking about the game and Gaelic football is what Colm Collins knew. If Cratloe is hurling country, Collins comes from a different part of Clare, a part where football is what matters. He was one of six children born in Kilmihil and he grew up playing Gaelic football.
“Football was religion in Kilmihil,” he says. Then he smiles again: “It was a good way of dodging work and stuff like that, you’d get off to go training.”
When he is asked about his own playing career, he smiles agains. “You’re badly stuck for something.” He had a year on the county panel, but even when he was playing coaching interested him.
When Clare beat Kerry in the 1992 Munster final, it electrified the place.
He developed football in Cratloe and says he was always encouraged in a place which was more known for hurling. His three years as Clare manager has seen gradual improvement, but he is aware that the county’s presence at Croke Park today is seen as evidence in himself that the system needs to change.
If Kerry's embarrassing route to a potential semi-final doesn't spark change in the #GAA, nothing ever will https://t.co/GhUemNvTcr
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) July 24, 2016
The thing is he thinks it needs to change too. He says the All-Ireland draw last year was like “watching paint dry” and wonders why the championship couldn’t be eight groups of four with the top seeded and some interesting pairings.
Those who’ve grumbled might be saying something else on Sunday evening. The run of matches Clare has been the making of this side. They’ve found out about themselves playing every week and Collins believes the problem with the six-day turnaround is not the six days but the defeats that accompany them.
Clare’s experience has been different. Some felt nothing should get in the way of Clare hurling, including football, but Collins has set out to prove the two can coexist, but only by getting what was necessary to make the football team work.
There are a list of people to thank for that, he says, from a sponsor to local businesses who have helped out and the arrival of a coach like Mick Bohan has been central too.
“A whole load of things came together, but the kernel is players who walked the walk. It’s great to put the thing in place, but if the player don’t walk the walk nothing happens. And this crowd do.”
For the players and all those who have supported Clare football, Sunday will be a special day.
“For a lot of people in the county football has been their whole lives. Clare is known as a hurling county, but it’s almost 50-50.”
He hopes his players will enjoy it at Croke Park on Sunday, not because he feels defeat is inevitable, but because it gives his side the best chance of victory.
His Clare side are 10/1 to beat Kerry, but some consider those odds flattering. They are playing the most successful county in Gaelic football history.
Collins doesn’t deny the odds, he doesn’t dispute that there is a psychological hurdle to overcome when you are Clare footballers playing in Croke Park against a county with 37 All-Irelands.
But just because he admits to the existence of the hurdle, it doesn’t mean he believes it can’t be cleared. The reason he believes it can be done, the reason he believes in most things is because of his players.
Nothing is inevitable, he says.
“We’re going out to play a team for a place in the All-Ireland semi-final. We don’t care what they’re called or who they are.”
Talent alone is almost worthless, he says, and he has found a team who want to get the most out of themselves.
“Players nowadays are very well read and they’re well prepared. If you’re trying to get it into somebody’s head who hasn’t prepared very well that they can beat Kerry, well that’s a different job. But when you’re dealing with players who have, the job isn’t as difficult.”
There are other factors too and the expectation is elsewhere.
“There is no pressure on Clare. We have a free shot at getting to the last four. We could have gone out when we played Laois and instead we beat them by a point. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. When it does happen, you have to grab the opportunity.”
There is, he could easily have added, no point in grumbling about it later when the opportunity has gone.
Listen to our GAA podcast with Colm Parkinson. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.
