The National Sports Campus continues to make steady progress to being what it was always envisaged as a central point for sport to play, develop and improve.
The National Aquatic Centre was the first obvious block and that is being joined all the time by additional facilities like the headquarters of the Irish Institute of Sport, and of a growing number of governing bodies including the FAI; by the National Horse sport arena, all weather multi sport facilities and now for the first time an accommodation block for athletes to use while there.
It is becoming more and more a real campus.
Four Irish swimmers training at Swim Ireland’s National Aquatic Performance Centre are the first athletes to live and train on campus following a joint renovation of accommodation on the grounds by Swim Ireland and the National Sports Campus Development Authority.
“I am delighted that the swimmers have become the first athletes to live on campus” commented Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Leo Varadkar “I hope there will be many more from other sports in future. Living on site means they can save time commuting giving them more time to train. It also means that they are close to the Institute of Sport if they need an assessment or test.”
“The new accommodation is the ideal situation for our athletes to be in and we look forward to further growth and development of these facilities in the coming years,” added Swim Ireland CEO Sarah Keane.
“Swim Ireland are striving to compete at the highest level of swimming. We now have performance centres and coaches in place across the four regions of Ireland, and are in a great position to provide the best opportunities for our swimmers to compete at a World level.”
“Moving into the athlete accommodation has been of great benefit to my training regime,” said European Bronze medallist Barry Murphy who is one of the first to avail of the facilities. “It is the most professional and convenient set up I have ever worked in.”
Bringing teams and athletes together from across different sports is another area of great benefit which the Campus is delivering.
National teams from women’s soccer, cricket and hockey were all on site together recently and Irish national soccer manager Sue Ronan summed up the benefits.
“Our home-based players on the Women’s Senior International Soccer Squad are now training in the National Sports Campus facilities on a weekly basis. This involves using both the High Performance Gym and the new state-of- the-art artificial mini pitches.”
“On one of our first visits to the gym we bumped into the Women’s Cricket Squad who also train there on a weekly basis. It was great to see two female international squads using the same top class facility and it shows that this type of training is now to the fore with more and more elite athletes. Many of the girls knew each other as some of the cricket players also play soccer at club level, so there was a lot of banter between the two.”
“The facilities we are developing step by step will assist all sports in the implementation of their high performance programmes,” added Dave Conway, CEO of the National Sports Campus.
