Kilmacud Crokes and a 25-year boom in women’s football

You’d hear them before you’d see them.

It is the same any and every Saturday morning, or at least it was in those blessed prepandemic days.

The racket is that of children, hundreds of them aged five and up, as they laugh and shout and dart about in different directions. It may look chaotic, but it’s structured and it’s fun. It’s also inclusive.

The kids running around kicking balls and swinging hurls are almost by equal measure boys and girls.

For a young one obsessed with football, Gregory’s Girl was heaven

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The story behind the amazing growth of women’s Gaelic football

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Nobody gives a second thought to this because it’s become so commonplace and because the same scene is being played out in GAA clubs the stretch and reach of the island.

And yet, if you pause to reflect and think of how it was in the not so distant past, the transformation is breathtaking. At least it is my own club, Kilmacud Crokes.

To appreciate the trajectory, some history might help.

Back in 1995, when there was not a stray silver hair in my head and when our club was nearly three decades old and winning its first All-Ireland club title, there was still not a single woman kicking a football in the club colours.

Male preserve

Back then, notwithstanding the important presence of camogie, the playing fields were overwhelmingly a male preserve.

Change always starts somewhere and for us, it was John Sheridan, son of Cavan but Kilmacud to the core, who, in 1996, led the local charge to establish a Gaelic football section for ladies within the club.

But, of course, establishing a sport is not the same as growing it.

So how does ladies Gaelic football go from having no presence in Kilmacud in the mid-90s to today boasting more than 1,000 players and 45 teams from under-8 to adult?

There is no easy answer, but let me suggest two key changes that owe nothing to wider societal change or to slick marketing or TV exposure and everything to very practical developments on the ground.

Firstly, and before there was any talk of grandiose Croke Park schemes for Dublin, Kilmacud had embraced a GPO model that helped broaden the club-school links and which, crucially, didn't discriminate between boys schools and girls schools.

Secondly, the GAA re-oriented its games development programme in the early noughties towards more child-centred approaches, with “nurseries” and “go-games” among the most obvious of the innovations that resulted.

Combined, these initiatives brought more and more girls to the club at a younger age and ensured that their early experience was at once quality and fun-filled.

From this healthy start point, everything else flows.

And what has flowed from it in Kilmacud’s case may not be unique, but it is no less remarkable for that.

Almost unrecognisable

The influx of young girls and women into club – as players and general members – has been on such a scale as to render it almost unrecognisable from the one of 25 years ago, let alone from the 1970s and 80s when I was starting to plod my own GAA journey.

This change has been entirely for the better and it has meant that, among many other things, Kilmacud Crokes no long merely represents or serves the local community. Now it fully reflects too.