In the latest instalment of the University of Limerick Alumni Spotlight series we speak to Gaelic football coach and entrepreneur Evan Talty, from Quilty, County Clare who studied Applied Sports Coaching at UL’s Department of Physical Education and Sports Sciences (PESS).
Evan has over 25 years of experience in Gaelic Games, and recently joined the Limerick Senior Football backroom team in a unique role as Skill Acquisition Coach. He talks to us about how he was able to excel in sport and business during his time at UL, and the opportunities which have come his way as a result of completing this course.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I’m from Quilty, County Clare. My home club is Kilmurry Ibrickane. I’m lucky enough to have won nine senior club championship medals and two Munster club medals with Kilmurry Ibrickane, as well as a Tommy Murphy Cup medal with the Clare footballers.
After completing my Leaving Cert 20 years ago, I went straight into the world of work and started my own business, Wild Irish Seaweeds, which came to public attention back in 2017 after receiving a €50,000 investment on Dragon’s Den.
We produce seaweed products from hand-harvested seaweed from the Atlantic Ocean for food ingredients and cosmeceutical, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries. It began 2009 working out of our kitchen and we’ve just developed it year on year. We’ve 11 staff based in West Clare, and we supply around 80 countries all over the world.
I managed the Clare Ladies Football team, before moving into a coaching role with the Galway Ladies Football team, the Roscommon under-20 Men's Football team and the Dublin Ladies Football team. I recently joined the Limerick Senior Football team as the Skill Acquisition Coach. It’s the only role of its kind at inter-county level at the moment.
What drew you to the MSc in Applied Sports Coaching?
I was young when I started up a business and had no college experience bar doing courses in entrepreneurship with Enterprise Ireland and the Local Enterprise Board so it was a huge change for me to return to formal education.
Alongside my business interests, GAA and coaching have always been a big part of my life. I wanted to upskill in the area of coaching and decided to apply for UL’s MSc in Applied Sports Coaching.
Coaches have an obligation – if you’re given the opportunity to work with a group of children or adults, whatever it might be, their learning and enjoyment are in your hands. It’s not enough to go out there and wing it.
In recent years, job advertisements for coaching roles in GAA are now specifying third-level coaching qualifications. As the GAA is professionalising, people are looking at your CV. In the GAA you can make it in two ways: you have to be a brilliant inter-county player, which I wasn’t, or have the education behind you and the piece of paper. The reason I took the route back to education was to have a bit of credibility in the places where I was giving talks and delivering courses. If someone were to say, ‘What do you know about it?’, I’d say, ‘Well I have a Master’s in it’.
There are two entry routes to the programme (the first is for people with an undergrad degree in a relevant area), I was accepted through the second route - for those of us without a degree, but with extensive experience in coaching.
Why did you chose UL? What were the highlights of the course?
The fact that most of the course was delivered online was an advantage for me.
We would meet every Monday from 9 am to 2 pm online. We met on campus for a full day once a month. As well as this, most of the people on the course are working full-time in coaching and had a good bit of experience.
My favourite part of it was working with the other people on the course. We were able to bounce off each other, so peer learning was very much involved too.
Course director, Dr Phil Kearney, and the other lecturers on the programme are very aware that for people who are already working and coaching, adding study on top needs to be carefully managed.
I was able to use my weekly coaching sessions towards hours for the course, by giving examples of my session plans, the drill and activities I used, and reflections on how I engaged the players as part of my coursework.
It’s a master’s you come away with learning as much about yourself as you do about the pedagogy, which is what endeared me to it.
Was there a challenging moment for you during your studies?
There was a fear factor involved in returning to education, especially without a primary degree.
You’re going in on a Level 9 basis and most people on the course have degrees, even though they might not have been in college in a couple of years, they have that knowledge.
The lecturers make it manageable for people like me who are older learners coming back into education. Dr Philip Kearney was hugely supportive and patient. It’s not your typical student set-up so the time he gave us by helping us learn the likes of scientific writing was invaluable, as many of us were novices in this area.
Tell us about your thesis project.
My master’s thesis was something I really cherished and I enjoyed thoroughly. It was an action research thesis that I did when coaching the Galway Ladies Football team. It was live research that was being done throughout the season. I documented my journey from November to March implementing a games-based coaching methodology in a live inter-county environment and documenting my own progress.
How has the course benefitted you in your coaching roles and in the workplace upon graduating?
I started the course expecting to be talking solely about tactics, dealing with players and matches and I came away from the whole experience having the knowledge that first and foremost coaching is about relationships - taking that holistic approach with people, and understanding players or athletes as people first and as athletes second really opened my eyes.
For me, I have developed knowledge about sports coaching 100%, but I’ve actually gained more knowledge about myself as a person, how to treat people, and how to develop relationships. You don’t just learn about the college course, you learn tools around research that can be useful in business from buying vehicles to hiring staff.
Dr Phil Kearney is also involved in overseeing the skill acquisition framework with the GAA, so I gained a lot of knowledge from him to apply in my current role as skill acquisition coach with the Limerick Senior Footballers.
When Limerick came to me looking to see if I’d get involved with the team, I knew I’d like to focus on the area of skills acquisition. Pa Ranaghan, who also did the MSc in Applied Sports Coaching at UL is also part of the coaching team, along with Dr Micheál Cahill who is a specialist in the area of human performance so we have a real science-led management group. While the skills acquisition role is the only one of its kind in the country at the moment, we’re hoping it might be replicated elsewhere in the future because it’s hugely important.
The MSc in Applied Sports Coaching has opened up so many doors for me, the reputation of this course and with Dr Phil Kearney’s name attached to it, has given me so many opportunities. I’ve gotten a lot of work out of this course, which is not why I signed up originally, it was to upskill myself and to give myself a challenge. But it turns out that now I’m spending more of my time on GAA coaching work than the seaweed work.
I’m often introduced as ‘Evan Talty who has done the Master’s in Applied Sports Coaching at UL so listen up here!’ - they don’t mention all the teams I’ve coached. I found that the qualification has carried a huge weight for me.
I was involved in consulting on the new rules in Gaelic Football recently implemented by the GAA – I acted as a conduit with various county boards and teams on the ground, feeding back to the GAA. I also developed and delivered coaching workshops around these new rules.
At UL, we’re known as the ‘Home of Firsts’ – are there any important ‘firsts’ that you experienced as a UL student, that you would like to share?
As mentioned, the skill acquisition coach with the Limerick Senior Footballers is the first role of its kind at GAA inter-county level.
While doing the course in UL, when we were researching other sports I could see the coaching aids and the coaching tools that I felt we could bring to GAA. With my entrepreneurial background, I then began looking at what other sports are using, and asking how can I make these things to suit GAA.
I developed a digital tactics board specifically designed for GAA called IGaelicCoach.
You’d normally have a flipchart, marker and pen in the dressing room, which can be cumbersome and awkward to bring from place to place. I developed a digital stylus LCD screen device with a GAA pitch on it and a backlight to work at night-time. It was the first of its kind to be developed in Ireland. We patented the technology and from there, other companies have come on board.
What advice would you give to students starting their journey in UL who hope to excel in their chosen fields?
I work with a lot of under-20s groups and would always advise them to really embrace the journey and reach out and develop a network of friends. Don’t just stick with the network of people you know from home. Go to college and embrace life learning, not just the actual learning but the life skills you learn while in college.
Can you tell us about what you are working on at the moment?
Alongside my work with the Limerick football team and Wild Irish Seaweeds, I have developed a suite of coaching aids and tools for backroom teams and players under the banner of iGaelicCoach.ie.
While doing the course in UL, when we were researching other sports, I could see the coaching aids and the coaching tools that I felt we could bring to GAA. With my entrepreneurial background, I then began looking at what other sports are using, and asking how I can make these things to suit GAA. So, I’ve come up with about 10 to 15 products that are GAA coaching tools for GAA coaches that I’ve brought to the market and continue to do so.
I’m currently doing coaching workshops with USGAA – the American arm of the GAA – who have teams across the United States, working with their elite development squads putting coaching practices in place for them in their hubs across America.
What are your plans for the future?
I hope to return to education again in the future.
The interesting side of it is that I’ve caught the ‘learning bug’! If you told me that a couple of years ago, I would have laughed so I’m actually looking at going on to do some further studies in areas of sports analytics, technology, and innovation. Every day is a learning day for me.