RUGBY:Ten years ago they were a one-man operation run from a few portakabins, today Leinster are tapping into their potential and have become a marketing giant, writes GERRY THORNLEY

MICK DAWSON became the Leinster chief executive in November 2001, shortly before Leinster won the inaugural Celtic League. That final, and the 30,000 who turned up for the win over Munster, gave them an inkling of the rich potential which the province had, but they were a while tapping into it. Now the Leinster machine is doing just that.

Up until about a year before, the Leinster Branch had effectively been a one-man operation on a voluntary full-time basis by its honorary secretary, the late Sandy Heffernan, a retired bank manager.

Back then, Dawson freely and good-humouredly recalls that the main stand in Donnybrook didn’t even have number seats. “No-one knew exactly how many people it could fit.”

Dawson’s operation was then run from a portakabin in Donnybrook while the team was run from a couple of portakabins in Anglesea Road.

“You had nobody who sold tickets. Now we have two people selling tickets full time and Ticketmaster. We now have four people on the commercial and marketing side and the PR side. We had nobody doing that either.

“We have now got two people in finance. We used to have some bookmaker out in Glasnevin doing it. That’s not criticism, that’s just the way it was. The whole place was run by Sandy Heffernan.”

Keira Kennedy, Leinster’s Commercial and Marketing Manager, is in her sixth season with the province after being hired by her predecessor in the role, Conor Hanratty.

“In the beginning, if it was a family day, I was putting up the goalposts. It was tiny. We had no support structure at all.”

She has since brought on board Ian Murray, like virtually everyone in the operation, a former player, and including the senior playing squad and management, there are nearly 140 people working full-time in the Leinster machine.

There have been mistakes along the way, one of which is visible from the boardroom in the Leinster Branch offices, namely the rebuilt stand at Donnybrook. Costing €6.5 million, Leinster outgrew it before it was finished and which, along with proposed new clubhouses for Bective Rangers and Old Wesley, was to have been funded by apartment blocks. Planning permission remains.

“Hindsight would suggest that we spent too much money on that stand. We needed a new stand, but we built something that was going to be for the professional game and it is a bit of a millstone around our neck, we have a debt on it and we’re paying the debt back. We just rushed our fences a bit, we built the stand and then the recession kicked in.”

When Kennedy joined, Leinster had 1,200 season ticket holders. Now they have 13,500.

A season ticket holder automatically becomes a member of the Supporters Club, and Dawson and Kennedy describe them as “stakeholders” and “ambassadors” for the province, who bought 26,000 tickets for both the Leicester quarter-final and Toulouse semi-final.

In all of this and much else, Dawson accepts that Leinster have huge, inherent advantages which they didn’t always exploit, most obviously being a capital city which they pretty much have to themselves, certainly as a professional team sport competing internationally.

Leinster are also seeking to branch out into the other 11 counties. When someone said to Kennedy a couple of years ago ‘what about the American diaspora?’ she responded: ‘we’re trying to get to Navan and Naas’. Now busloads are traveling from Carlow, Dundalk and elsewhere, especially for the Aviva games.

Another advantage is the Government’s retirement tax, which has helped to keep so many stellar names in the fold. But more than any other factor of course, is a golden generation of players.

“There’s no marketing without them, says Kennedy. “They are our product, and they happen to be a very good product. In the beginning, we had lots of different creative ideas on posters and funny meanings, and then we realised all people really want to see is the players. That’s it. They are it.”

She also says it is something of a daunting challenge, simply trying to do justice to the team’s achievements.

The IRFU’s restriction on overseas players also compels Leinster, and the other provinces, to produce a high number of their own players, and as Dawson admits “the next big trick is managing change”, not least when the last of the golden generation retires in two or three years.

The task of making sure the machine keeps rolling lies with former Leinster and Irish number eight Philip Lawlor, the Domestic Rugby Manager, who is effectively the chief executive of everything outside the elite.

Working with him as Coach Development Manager is Gerry Murphy, the former Irish coach. “His CV is so good in that job it’s not funny,” says a grateful Dawson. Murphy is responsible for all of Leinster’s under-age teams and underneath him there are five regional coach development officers covering the metropolitan area, the north midlands, the south east, the midlands and the north west.

Working alongside them is the Community Rugby Manager, Declan Fassbender, who is served by six community rugby officers who work on nine-month contracts, and through them Leinster’s tentacles reach out to 41 club community officers, six FAS development officers and College Officers in DIT, DCU and Carlow IT.

What Dawson describes as a ‘pyramid’ structure, with its broadening base providing a pathway through the schools and youths system and eventually peaking with the Leinster team, is called The Leinster Way.

“Each team that we produce, whether it’s the under-17s who won a tournament in Perpignan last week, the under-18s, the under-19s; we have a myriad of underage teams but they all operate on the same basis.

“They are all coached the same way, we want them to play the same way and we want them to all operate in the Leinster Way. So when you go away you behave yourself in a certain fashion.”

“For years schools just didn’t want to know us really,” admits Dawson. “They just wanted to play in the Senior Cup and educate the kids. Now they have realised with our strength and conditioning staff, the Girvan Dempseys of this world and nutritionists, that we can actually bring a lot to the party that they’re doing. We’re not looking to take over the schools team.”

To this end, Leinster recently spent €100,000 upgrading a gym in Donnybrook which looks after all those in the sub Academy, which could number around 120 players in the schools or clubs system, or even in the first year of college.

This falls under Lawlor’s remit and is part of the pathway into the full Academy whose manager is Colin McEntee. Working with him are Wayne Mitchell and Girvan Dempsey, as well as two conditioning coaches, Dave Fagan and Sonny Dowling, along with five more full-time regional conditioning coaches.

The module for this pyramid structure, aka The Leinster Way, was devised by Murphy, Lawlor and McEntee, and ratified and put into operation by the Branch four years ago.

“It just gives a cohesiveness as to what we’re trying to do and all the time now you’re trying to move it on to the next level,” says Dawson. “We would also be of the belief that all our underage teams each season should play home and away against an English team, or a French team, to benchmark yourself as to where you’re going.”

Eight of last Saturday’s match-day squad came through full three-year programmes in the Leinster Academy and McEntee estimates that 55 academy products went on to play professionally.

“We try and get our screening right and stuff like that as best as possible so the Academy isn’t even there to screen players, it’s there to develop players. So we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and on the system to make sure that we get it right.

“Our clubs and schools have really embraced with what Leinster are about. And throughout all our player development and all our programmes we try to be as inclusive as possible with our stakeholders.”

McEntee also says that coaching at schools and under-age level has improved immeasurably, citing much more of a 15-man game in the Leinster Schools Senior Cup in recent years.

With better coaching has come better talent identification and then, once they reach the academy, Joe Schmidt has continued the approach of Michael Cheika in ensuring they train and play with the senior squad. And, in what will not be music to the ears of the clubs, the provincial A games have assisted in that, although he maintains there’s still a role for the clubs.

Dawson credits much of the early progress in the making of a machine to the drive, work and professionalism of Matt Williams, and the legacy left by Michael Cheika.

“History should treat him very well,” acknowledges Dawson. “Michael Cheika came in to a ship that was unsteady, a lot of talented players and I think that he got them to bind to what he wanted to do. He had a vision. He had an anger, an enthusiasm, all those things.”

“He probably misread a few situations when he started,” adds Dawson. “I think he learnt, he put an edge into the pack, and we got Leo (Cullen) and Shane (Jennings) home, who’d got the hard edge over at Leicester.

“So Michael must be credited with a lot of the structures that he put into the team and I think before he left he gave an awful lot of the responsibility back to the players and they were prepared to take it, and I think that Joe Schmidt has brought that on to a different level.”

“We’re in a recession,” says Dawson, “and we’ve been lucky that the team has been able to compete during that period. But history would show you if you look at the Great Depression in the States sports thrived during that period.”

Even so, Kennedy and co have to be mindful of how they package and market the brand.

For example, the cheapest season ticket for next season is €289, which is for one terrace standing ticket for all 14 games at the RDS.

Dawson is also mindful of the bad days, when he and Leinster copped plenty of flak, not least when their new signing, Felipe Contepomi, wasn’t registered for the Heineken Cup in his first season.

“It’s like everything, when you are perceived to be going well it’s the time to watch yourself, because I’m very conscious of the bad old days, the Contepomi thing, and the team getting kicked around the place for supposedly being a bit flaky. But I think that that image has gone. Leinster has moved on but we are in a capital city. We can improve all the time and you want to be seen to be doing things.”

To that end, Kennedy and Murray have recently completed a root and branch research of Leinster with Genesis.

“For us it’s looking to like the Superbowls, the NFLs, see what they’re doing,” says Kennedy. “We’re way behind in terms of US sport is and that’s the benchmark for us.”

Next season Leinster move lock stock and barrel to UCD, with it’s on-site training pitches, swimming pool, all-weather pitch, a state of the art gym and plans for a running track and indoor athletics arena.

“If you have ambition to be at the top of the European tree, you’ve got to provide the facilities for your own players and also to bring in what you perceive as quality players from overseas,” says Dawson.

Leinster will treble their gym and office space, and Dawson reckons their relationship with the college and its sports science and sports medicine will be mutually beneficial.

There are also joint plans between the RDS and Leinster, who are 20-year tenants, to rebuild the old Anglesea Road stand.

“The feedback we’re getting from the research is that the supporters absolutely love going to the RDS,” says Kennedy, “but you’re comparing it with the O2 now, and the Aviva.”

They pitched the Aviva just right, filling it out four times this season although it was also Leinster’s good fortune that the first visitors back in October were Munster.

For the Clermont match, they emulated Mad Max Guazzini, the Stade Francais owner/benefactor and marketing genius. His philosophy is that you begin by selling the cheapest tickets in the ground at €5.

Leinster put the first 1,000 tickets for sale at €5, dubbing it ‘the hour of power’, and they were snapped up in three minutes.

Their team earning a home European quarter-final was a bonus, as was a home draw in the semi-finals, which was an ERC game, but two or three matches a season at the Aviva is fine, partly because the RDS remains their true home, and also because any more would diminish the value of season tickets there.

Now, Leinster stand on the threshold of joining an elite group of clubs to have won two Heineken Cups, thereby underlining their hard-won status as a true European superpower.

To lift a second European crown, all the more so were it to come with a league, would permeate through the whole machine.

“Personally I’d be so excited for the team and the club because I’d be very passionate about it,” says McEntee, “but for the Academy it would definitely ignite a drive and passion for younger players to go on to be a part of that. And you can see that already.

“If we hone in on it and if we don’t pay lip service to players coming through, they’re actually going to continue to come through. It’s the adrenalin rush and everything it gives you, you just want to be there again.”

Succeeds breeds success, all the way down the line.