Cratloe GAA Club won a first ever Clare County Football Championship on Saturday, with eight dual players that in September tasted All Ireland Hurling glory at Croke Park. Within 24 hours they had turned out again and won a Munster Championship semi final.
Such a fixture pile up comes about every year as club Championship games have to be squeezed in around the country following on from a pause in action over the summer months to accommodate the All Ireland series at inter county level.
The maintenance and priority given to the 12,000 sporting clubs that exist across Ireland is one of the biggest challenges faced by sporting administrators and it is an area which Sport for Business will explore in detail over the coming week.
A panel of 30 players stays together at inter county level for the summer months and, with luck, brings glory and honour back in September. But for every one of them there are 30 more back at their local club, or 30 more again at neighbouring clubs who can only sit and watch at a time of year most suitable for matches to be played.
In rugby, while a full house will pack the Aviva Stadium next weekend to see the All Blacks take on Ireland, there will be a lot less standing on sidelines at the full round of AIL fixtures that wil be played on the Friday and Saturday before.
And in soccer, there are ten times the number of people travelling to watch the English Premier League every weekend that will take a bus rather than a plane to watch their local side in the Airtricity Premier League.
The main sporting bodies are aware of the responsibility they have to the foundations of their sports and are making concerted efforts to assist. We will explore how those efforts are being targeted and what success they are having.
We will also look at a number of templates on how individual clubs have taken it upon themselves to engage in self help among local business communities to keep the show on the road.
We will look at the ways in which smaller local units are being managed in sports in other countries and discover whether there are ways in which we might do things better.
Finally we will undertake a short survey of clubs across multiple different sports to discover what their needs are and how they might best be addressed.
It’s club week on Sport for Business and we hope you will find what we publish to be of interest.
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