SHORT STORY. Once upon a time the GAA in Athlone existed in a happy little bubble. The street leagues thrived, throwing up a constant supply of players from which the single club which bore the name of the town trawled the best. Soldiers and bank officials and later department of education workers came to the town and Athlone would pick the best of them too. Sometimes they could throw good local players back into the lake.

Felim Finnegan would call in to Séamie Nugent’s shop for the paper and they’d talk GAA every day. A running theme of their chats was the need for a second club in Athlone.

Not that they were bitter men. They had both worn the Athlone jersey, Séamie with massive distinction. When Athlone won six county titles in a row from 1955 onwards, Séamie Nugent was their boy wonder, a county star. He missed the sixth championship of the run, however, busting his kneecap in an accident which cut short his top class career at 23.

The love of the games never left him, though, and himself and Felim put that love over the partisanship for their old club.

Felim, for instance, remembers a day on a team bus with an Athlone team on the way to an underage championship game. He reckons it was third round game, a quarter-final maybe. One of the young faces sensed something different.

“This young fella on the bus said, ‘Am I playing today?’ I remember the selector looking away and saying, ‘We’ll see’. The lad knew, though, the bus was half full of players who were just back from playing soccer. They hadn’t trained or played in the previous rounds. So the young lad, said, ‘Stop the bus’ and himself and two or three others of them got off.

“Athlone could afford that, though.”

Athlone was expanding on all sides. At the time the town ran hugely popular road leagues and the boys from the Garrycastle area on the east side were continuously successful. There was little or no follow-on for them from late teens to adult level, however.

Séamie and Felim and a couple of others, Dan Hogan, a Tipp hurling man, Jack Veale and Eddie Martin became a sort of ad hoc committee of like-minded souls. They called a meeting in the primary school in Cornamaddy.

“We got 30 or 40 people to it and we knew that things being how they are, it was easy enough to get 30 or 40 people to a meeting about anything. So we called another meeting and another and another. Maybe five or six meetings over the next three months and the faces that kept coming, they were the ones who formed the first backbone of the club.”

Down the road in Athlone the town’s old blue bloods weren’t too impressed but Garrycastle pressed ahead. They got plenty of help and encouragement from Paddy Collins in the Westmeath County Board and finally in January 1981, they became an affiliated club.

Athlone, in fairness, swallowed hard and helped out with facilities and pitches in the early years, never quite suspecting, perhaps, what was growing up on their doorstep.

“Our first match,” Felim recalls, “was a game against Athlone. They beat us 5-11 to a point. The ref kept playing till we got the point. I remember an old Athlone friend of mine saying, ‘Ye’ll get better’. And he smiled. People thought we would never last!”

To have support, Garrycastle knew they would need an adult team. The players duly came out of the woodwork. In the early days they gathered up those who had drifted from football in the town. Garrycastle won a junior championship straight out the gate in 1982. They were proud of the win but their energies were being channelled relentlessly into the underage sector of the club.

They had no recognition, no field, no money, no teams. They had the spirit and the energy, though.

“We started underage and built up along the line” says Séamie Nugent. The club started its own road leagues. They won an under-12 championship in 1985 and added 13 more underage titles in the following decade or so. The focus on underage excellence has been a hallmark of the club since the start and all of the players who wear the green and red tomorrow are graduates of that system.

In the early days it was a policy which gave rise to a little friction in the club. The junior championship team felt perhaps they were due a more lasting celebrity than they were accorded. The clubs focus was always on the future, though.

The past was the past.

Séamie Nugent would go down to the school at lunchtime and coach. Three local schools became feeders for the club and the area around Garrycastle started to grow as Athlone expanded through new housing developments. An area which had needed a focal point in order to make a community out of itself suddenly had the unifying form of a thriving GAA club.

The greatest act of wisdom of the club’s founders, however, was recognising the influx of people and energy and stepping back and permitting others to drive on with their creation.

“The success,” says Felim, “came with the second wave. We did the John the Baptist work at the beginning and then the like of us settled into the background. Those who came afterwards, they were the people who created the current success out of what was there.

Men like Dermot Ryan, he came in and brought such energy to the club. Michael Lydon, a player from Galway, came to teach in Cornamaddy. He had a huge impact. There was good continuity between the old and the new, though. We knew when to stand aside. Dan Hogan’s son Roddy was chairman after.”

Nugent acknowledges the change the expanding population brought to the nascent club.

“Look at us now. We have our own pitch, a clubhouse, a stand, floodlights. We started from nothing and look where we have got to. We are in a Leinster final. We were very lucky with some of the people at the beginning and we were lucky with the next wave of people who came in.”

Success means the usual. Debt and all that goes with it. The endless running of the club lotto in Dan’s Tavern every Monday night. Race nights and raffles. Running just to stand still a lot of the time.

But the rewards are there on the pitch. Four county titles in a decade. Garrycastle men backboning Westmeath’s underage success of recent years, Dessie Dolan’s All Star, the sight of another Garrycastle boy, David O’Shaughnessy, captaining the county to a first Leinster title half a decade ago.

And tomorrow. Garrycastle go into the Leinster final as a nettle-hardened outfit with a belief in themselves that suggests blue blood must be flowing through their own veins by now.

Against Ballyboden of Dublin in the semi-final they played possession football and took their scores with astonishing coolness.

Another milestone. The first Westmeath team to beat a Dublin side in the competition. Garrycastle, once a GAA club waiting to happen, have become a template for what the GAA can be.