Award winner’s frustration at lack of hockey facilities

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

IT is astonishing that in this day and age sports clubs, particularly in the West of Ireland, have to turn children away because there just aren’t the facilities available to cater for growing numbers. Such is the case with Greenfields HC, the top women’s hockey club in Galway and Connacht.

Greenfields – Talking Sport is aware of others – are not the exception, yet the consequences and impact of local authorities and successive Governments not providing facilities for young people across the sporting divide seems to go unnoticed.

Obesity levels have risen – catastrophically so – and, even more alarmingly, people lay strewn across trolleys in over-crowded hospitals across the country, including Galway, while under-paid nurses endeavour to survive in a system that continues to fail many.

The lack of facilities in the West is more poignant when local clubs travel to other parts of the country. This is not lost on Greenfields senior ladies manager Imelda Brennan, who is due to be honoured for her service to hockey at the annual Galway Sports Stars awards later this month.

“We are so short of facilities,” says the long-serving Brennan. “We are in the All-Ireland League and when you travel around to all these places, the facilities they have! You would be envious. They are fabulous facilities.”

For Greenfields part, they share the all-weather pitch with Galway Hockey Club in Dangan – despite both clubs swelling with numbers. Brennan believes their membership would be even greater if they had the amenities.

“We are refusing kids because we just don’t have the pitch time. It is coaching on a Saturday for the children and we are sharing the pitch with Galway Hockey Club. They also have a huge underage no more than ourselves.

“So, you are trying to work out your underage sections and you can’t take everyone because you will get nothing done. There is only a certain amount of space on the pitch. We need another pitch.”

Greenfields explored expanding their structures with Galway City Council but they could not be accommodated. “Teresa Concannon did great work talking to them and put forward all kinds of proposals but it didn’t happen. Hockey is a real minority sport; that is the problem.”

If a club is turning away children though, it will always be a minority sport. Brennan, who has been involved in Greenfields since the early 1970s, agrees: “We can’t provide and you can’t discriminate by saying ‘I will just take the good players’. You try to keep everybody involved.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.