Cahill answers Meath's call

JIMMY GEOGHEGAN

Out of the blue the call came, as these things tend to do. It was a familiar voice, a familiar name. Meath manager Seamus McEnaney was looking at ways to improve the fitness of his team and had done his homework.

Somewhere along the line he made the decision to recruit Skryne man Sean Cahill.

A few weeks ago McEnaney rang Cahill, introduced himself and asked if he could visit him at his house in Skryne in a hours time; he had something to discuss. Cahill was intrigued as much as he was surprised.

McEnaney duly drove into Cahill's driveway almost about 60 minutes later. He asked the Skryneman if he would be interested in joining the Meath backroom team as a fitness coach.

A long-serving member of the green and gold army, Cahill agreed. When your county needs you, he felt, you should answer the call.

"It was a surprise all right, Seamus came to talk to me and he can be very persuasive," he said. "It certainly will be a challenge but I'm really looking forward to starting working with the lads in January I'm really looking forward to helping out."

The 'challenge' for Cahill is to harness his experience as an athletics coach and use that to improve the fitness levels of the Meath footballers.

He has already demonstrated he knows a thing or two about getting the most out of those who seek to be the best.

He is well known as the coach to the 2006 World Indoor 60m hurdles gold medallist Derval O'Rourke although Cahill is no stranger to the big occasion. At the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart he made it to the semi-finals of the 110m hurdles and it was around then he achieved his highest placings in the world rankings - 29th position.

He wore the green singlet of his country at European Championships and was selected for the Atlanta Olympics although lady luck deserted him in the heat of the Deep South when he tore his Achilles tendon a few weeks before the Games began.

Helped along by steroids he was allowed by the authorities to help the healing process he made it to the staring line of his heat and finished fifth.

The problem was only four qualified. While it was "an amazing feeling" to be at the Olympics his fitness problems conspired to make it all an anti-climatic experience.

Yet he's content that he gave his athletics career his best shot. Along with his wife Terri, who held the Irish record in the long jump for 18 years, he turned to coaching athletes.

As well as O'Rourke others in 'Team Cahill' have included Athboy man Ciaran McDonagh, who is still the Irish record holder for the long jump, and Eilis McSweeney, officially Ireland's fastest woman - ever! Now Cahill, who is an electrical contractor by day, is about to turn a new chapter and join the Meath backroom team. He has some previous as a trainer having been involved with Skryne when they won the Keegan Cup in 1999.

He understands what's required. He is at pains to emphasise that in his new role he is very much "a cog in the wheel," a foot soldier working under the direction of fitness and conditioning coach Martin McElkennon.

His main task will be to improve the players aerobic and anaerobic capacity, their speed and endurance, help them get an inch or two ahead of their opponents, something that can make all the difference in the white heat of a championship contest.

It's about applying science to the needs of Gaelic footballers, he says, finding that delicate balance between weights training, jogging, sprinting.

Watching out for little signs that shows a player is getting tired, over-doing it or not doing enough. It's something that only comes with experience and a keen eye.

"All I've been asked to do is to try and make the players a yard faster and Marty would be a massive, massive help because we would be thinking along the same lines. I'll be looking forward to starting to work with him and the boys," he explained.

It's about working together to achieve the "common goal" of getting Meath back up to performing at their best, back to the top where they once were. But how is he going to apply the lessons he has learned as an athletes coach and utilise that knowledge to improve the lot of a group of inter-county footballers?

"The first thing we do is ensure that all the basics, the fundamentals are right. You have to help the players in how they rest, how they eat, what supplements they take, that's very important and having a good medical team, that's crucial.

"Then you move on to their training and you make sure they're training enough, that they are not training too much. It's not a quick fix, it will take a bit of time.

"There are certain drills we can do to get your body into certain positions and that's when you can apply the techniques and hopefully that can make the players that little bit quicker.

"Everyone might think I'm an athletics coach that I'm going to run the lads until they're skin and bone, but that's not how it is, there's more to it than that. Yes they will be fast, yes they will be fit but ultimately they are footballers and that's key for me."

Meath is blessed, he adds, with a fine crop of players, talented and with a good attitude. What's required now is to get all the players to reach the same level, fitness-wise. It's about the collective effort, that's the key.

The concept will collapse unless everyone is working together. The difference between Derval O'Rourke and a Meath player like Seamus Kenny, he emphasises, is that the athlete has 12 years of speed and endurance training punched in while Gaelic footballers are still catching up, still getting accustomed to the demands made by all the science and research.

Yet the fundamentals are the exact same. Cahill is confident that he can make a difference and he's told the players that it will require a big effort from them as well. Watching Meath in recent years Cahill felt that the team's fitness could be improved upon.

"It's hard when you're on the outside looking in because you don't know who's carrying injuries or whatever, but ultimately if I didn't think there was room for improvement I probably wouldn't have taken the job.

"Yeah I do think they could improve. I just think there was more that could be done to make them into better footballers."

The Skryne man has willingly answered his county's call to do just that.