Liam Moggan: the coach’s coach talks success in sport and in life

Blame it all on a Brother Willie Morgan.

Because ask him where it all began — and trust me, it’s a big question — and, without much pause, Liam Moggan gently points the finger all the way back to Tuam CBS at the start of the 1970s. Another time and another place.

It was here the quiet country kid with no particular dream or ambition became a champion, in athletics first and then basketball, after being taught not what to do, but to think for himself, a mantra and method which has served Moggan well in the five decades since.

“I’ve spoken before about how hugely impressed I was by Brother Willie Morgan, who came teaching in Tuam when I went in as a first-year. I was the eldest of six, and life was good once you did what you were told — on the street, in school, at home.

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“Brother Willie Morgan came along and started to encourage us to think for ourselves. He freaked me out, I was very uncomfortable about that. He’d say things like ‘what do you think of that, Liam?’, and I wouldn’t know what to think. He had a huge impact on my thinking, without me really knowing it.

“I was running a bit already, but he brought me up to a whole new level, to winning the 800 metres at the Tailteann Games. I remember him telling me it was possible, when I thought that was poppycock. He brought me to watch the Connacht Schools, in Ballinasloe, the year before I moved up to Intermediate, and he told me, ‘next year you’re going to beat them.’ I thought the man was mad.”

Talking to Moggan, you quickly get the sense he means that madness as a compliment, especially given the certain madness of his own sporting journey. It’s 10 years since Billy Walsh dubbed him “the coach’s coach” in an interview after the London Olympics, acknowledging Moggan’s role in improving the coaching set-up around Irish boxers long before medals were being won. Part of the problem there, it seemed, was they were being over-coached.

It didn’t matter that boxing wasn’t his sport — in the same way, Moggan has influenced some of the best hurling coaches without ever pucking a ball, is credited with so much equestrian success without ever riding a horse, and excelled with a snooker player without ever chalking up a cue. You get the idea.

Last month a large part of that journey was brought home again, when Moggan was one of four “inspiring” individuals conferred with honorary doctorates by the University of Limerick (UL), in a way his old alma mater. Described by UL in that citation as the “godfather of coaching”, it was fitting too in the university’s 50th anniversary year given he was among the earliest group of students at the former National College of Physical Education, on the original Plassey campus site.

“It was nearly 44 years, to the exact week, since I graduated. When I got the call from the president of UL, Kerstin Mey, a German woman, I fully believed it was a hoax. I’ve never been one for the spotlight, but it was nice because in the build-up, I was reflecting on all the people who helped me get there over the years, who had the trust in me when I always thought ‘well, I can’t do that’.

“I also met my wife, Ann, in class — seven couples happened to come out of the class, actually. Plassey House, the location on the day, and the PE building, were the only two completed buildings on the campus at the time. Okay, it’s over 40 years ago, but look at the campus now, how big it has become.”

Indeed his four years there, from 1974 to 1978, proved hugely formative not just for Moggan but in the development of PE in the country: “You had the likes of Pat Spillane, the year before me, Brian Mullins, Tony Ward in my own class. Originally it was the only place you could do PE in Ireland until quite recently, when DCU started it up, Cork now too.

“John Tobin was there too, a year ahead of us, a GAA god in Tuam, still is, plus Brian Talty, and Declan Smith, who also played in an All-Ireland, and went on to coach Louth for a while.

“I remember we’d be hitching home to Tuam on a Friday, then back on a Sunday evening, and once you got a car, told them you were going to the PE college, they’d nearly drive you to the door. There was a real vibrancy about the place, an interest, a hope. It was through Brother Morgan too that PE became such a big thing. No real structure, no real equipment, but a great time.”

At that juncture his own taste of sporting success brought options too, to join the Irish Brigade at East Tennessee State University.

“I remember someone showing me their training schedules, running twice a day, and I’d never heard of anyone running twice a day. Being the eldest at home too, I was never really attracted to it, so I emigrated to Limerick instead.”

Straight out of Plassey he was offered a teaching position at Ardscoil Rís in Dublin, where by accident and design he began to form some bigger ideas.

“It’s no reflection on Ardscoil, but I quickly realised that very little of what I’d formally learned in Limerick helped me out on the field. The dynamic of these young Dubs, what they wanted to do, was something we weren’t really prepared for. So there was an adaptation there. I also started after-school athletics, with the first-years, and grew it from there on in.”

We’re having this conversation looking out across the playing fields of the GAA’s National Games Development Centre at Abbotstown, and the many magnificent Sport Ireland facilities that lie beyond, and in ways Moggan’s journey is brought home here too, not far from his home in Ashbourne.

He is tasked as group facilitator among the 18 people developing a three-hour coaching workshop, purposely aimed at adult coaching level only, football and hurling, camogie and women’s football too, as part of the GAA’s new Gaelic games Player Pathway.

It helps here that one of his other influences as a coach was Lar Foley, the great Dublin dual player who also saw something in Moggan that he didn’t see himself. Foley had taken charge as Dublin senior hurling manager, and was curious to know about this madness of leading groups of youngsters running across the GAA fields at Ardscoil Rís.

“I’d big numbers, 70, 80 runners going around the field, and that’s where Lar first saw what I did. Then one day he arrived into the school and asked me would I be the physical fitness trainer, as it was called then.

“I would call the university with Lar, if I could call it that, as the university of life. I found a man who was a farmer, a man of the soil, a man with a strong identity, who knew what it was he knew, but also what he didn’t know.

“There was that curiosity in him — ‘why are you doing that, what are you doing there?’ One of the strongest men I ever met physically, and also one of the gentlest and kindest. I’d only heard this ‘Lar Foley, he’d kill ya!’ And he could. But his range I’d never come across before, and just a complete individual.”

He worked alongside Foley from 1989 to 1992, the lessons always a-plenty: “We started training four days a week, which was a lot at the time. When I started they had tea and biscuits after training, we started giving them what Lar called Tuama sandwiches, tuna obviously, he would collect them from a deli in Swords. He also started giving out videos to players to watch, which was light years ahead of anyone.

“And I realised if I could get into the players’ heads, I’d have them all the time, and that’s when mental fitness started to come in. Like I brought in Ben Brady, a good distance runner, to train with them. Of course he was on another level, but showed them what was capable.”

From there Moggan takes what he calls “the next hop” to the National Coaching and Training Centre, which opened in Limerick in 1992, which would ultimately take him away from PE teaching and into a life of full-time coaching.

“Pat Duffy, a good friend of mine, a year behind me in Thomond, was put in charge of coach education. He asked me to take a year out to help devise an introduction to coaching booklet and start work with various governing bodies. One year became five, and in 1998 I started working full-time with Coaching Ireland.

“Now I’m working with people from a whole raft of different sports, couldn’t chance it with sports like cricket and badminton and hockey, so really had to revert into coaching. What can I offer here? Pat threw me in the deep end, regularly, but there was a vacuum there and we were allowed fill it, make those contributions.”

Before long he was making notable contributions to the thinking of inter-county managers, working with Anthony Daly as he took both Clare and Dublin to All-Ireland semi-finals, acting as performance coach to Eamonn Fitzmaurice when Kerry won the 2014 All-Ireland, spending time too with John O’Mahony in Galway, Cian O’Neill in Kildare and, more recently, James Horan in Mayo.

“I am sometimes mentioned as someone who was working with Kerry in 2014, but the list of those I was working with, or tried to help and never won anything, is far bigger.

“I give Brother Morgan credit for this thinking area, but I give Lar credit for getting me thinking in a wider area. I don’t like saying thinking outside the box, because there is no box. It’s still about helping people to think for themselves, really.

“The other thing is, can they actually coach? That’s at the essence of it. I throw out Brian Kerr and Gerry Mullins regularly, because they to me are genius coaches, know their sport, know how to get inside someone’s head first, then help them improve. And the passion oozes out of them. I found with both of them too they never rested on their laurels, always wanted it better.”

Moggan also worked with Ken Doherty during his return to winning snooker form in 2003; three years later he was ranked number two in the world. Ask him what he thinks now about some models of coaching in this country, not just within the GAA, and again he brings it all back home.

“If you look across other sports, a lot of them have been infiltrated by foreign coaches, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The GAA have never had infiltration, you might say they don’t have a choice, you can’t pluck a coach from Brazil, but they’ve done bloody well at developing their own coaches.

“I don’t like the term ‘high-performance’, because that’s been kind of captured away in a part of a governing body. And terminology is important, because if that’s high-performance, heavily funded, what’s everything else? Those who are looking after juveniles, volunteers, referees, they’re high-performance too.

“And I don’t like the title ‘the institute of sport’, again nothing to do with the personnel. Sport shouldn’t be institutionalised, it should be localised, the flame of inspiration.

“I certainly don’t enjoy watching the intense physicality that’s being brought to some games, the over-emphasis on winning, though I still love the game, just stopping off in a park watching two teams play. I’ve learned too that it is all about the journey, and the magic then is what happens on the pitch, or the basketball court, or in the swimming pool.”