You’re Not Coaching a Full-Time Athlete

It is easy to forget sometimes that the player standing in front of you at 7pm has probably already had a full day before they ever arrived at training. They might have been on a building site since 7am, spent the day teaching, worked a shift in a hospital, travelled home from college, or driven across the county just to make training on time.

Then they arrive and we expect them to sprint, lift, learn, communicate, and perform at their best. That is the reality for a huge number of players in the GAA.

The players we work with are not full-time athletes. They have jobs, college, families, exams, long commutes, and plenty of other things competing for their time and energy. They might be training with the club two or three nights a week, playing at the weekend, and fitting gym work around everything else.

And I think that matters when we coach them.

Sometimes we look at professional environments, see what they are doing, and try to copy and paste. Two gym sessions, multiple pitch exposures, recovery work, extras, monitoring, individual top-ups. On paper, it can all make sense. But the professional athlete might have spent the afternoon recovering. Your player might have spent it pouring concrete, teaching a class, working a 12-hour shift, or driving home from the city for training.

That does not mean standards should be lower. It does not mean we should stop trying to improve performance. But it probably means we need to understand the context before deciding what “committed” or “professional” should look like.

A player missing a recovery session because they have work the next morning is not necessarily lacking commitment. Someone arriving flat after a long shift might not need a lecture about standards. And the player who cannot complete every extra gym or running session you send them might simply be trying to balance club football or hurling with everything else going on in their life.

Part of good coaching is understanding that.

We can still challenge players. We can still hold standards. We can still expect them to prepare properly and take responsibility for their performance. But those expectations probably need to live in the real world. Because sometimes the best programme is not the one that asks the most from a player. It is the one they can actually sustain across a long GAA season.

So the next time a player walks into training looking a little flat, maybe before questioning their attitude, ask yourself what their day looked like before they got there.

Food for thought - Michael