Editorial: Cork GAA barking up the wrong tree

Cork GAA have decided to tighten up on one of the big scourges of the GAA - independent teams!

Independent teams are juvenile amalgamations of club teams, created in areas that don’t have large populations so they can actually field teams. They are created by necessity in areas that don’t have lots of kids. The majority of independent teams are rural and comprise of two or more club teams who come together to play underage GAA games.

My seven year old plays for Sliabh Rua, which is an independent team made up of Belgooly GAA and Ballymartle GAA. Sliabh Rua has been in existence for six decades - longer than Belgooly GAA exists for!

The County Board have recently ratified the recommendations of the Independent Teams Committee. That committee had a review of independent teams over the last six months.

The committee have recommended that only club teams will compete at both Go Games (that is from under 6 to under 10) and U21 level, unless there are “exceptional circumstances”.

The club will split for younger age-grades and work under strict guidelines at others as a result of the new rules. Cork GAA aims to safeguard club identities and increase player participation through these measures.

So my son will now have to choose a club team to play with. Nearly all of the players in his team are from the local school and live in or near two villages, Belgooly and Riverstick. There are about 15 boys in total in the group with the majority from Riverstick.

Training numbers average around 8-10 per night and the most they have managed to get to one of the infrequent weekend blitzes is around 10 players - which is 2 teams. City clubs might have 6-10 teams at these blitzes.

At my son’s first football blitz, Sliabh Rua managed 1 team - just 6 kids. How does splitting them into 2 clubs help anybody? These kids will have to choose between clubs, potentially not play with their friends anymore and already low participation numbers may drop further.

Of the 15 kids who have trained with the team in the last year, there are around 9 from Riverstick and around 6 from Belgooly. 6 is way too low to have a team as there’s always a few kids who can’t make training or games. Those numbers are too low to have meaningful training sessions. If all of the parents of the kids decide to pick one of the clubs, so the kids can stick together with their friends, I guess they all need to buy new gear, which doesn’t come cheap. Amalgamations occur due to necessity and the idea of forcing kids to split from their friends and choose clubs is ridiculous to me. My younger son hasn’t started playing yet but he may have to join a different club than his brother, depending on numbers.

It’s a bizarre and unnecessary situation. Why disrupt a long-standing arrangement that works well?