*Tony Griffin. Photograph: Ruth Griffin.
TONY GRIFFIN has said returning to a Clare hurling set-up is a case of going full circle.
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An All Star in 2006, Tony is regarded as one of the leading sports performance coaches in the country and has been involved with Brian Lohan’s Clare senior hurlers since the beginning of this year.
Getting the minds ready for battle has been a big focus for Clare ahead of Saturday’s crunch championship encounter with All-Ireland champions Tipperary in Thurles.
When Tony made his championship debut for the Clare senior hurlers in the 2002 Munster SHC quarter-final 1-18 2-13 defeat to Tipperary, he scored 0-6, Lohan was captain as the Cyril Lyons side reached the All-Ireland final that season. He made his first appearance for the seniors in the NHL in 2000, a year out of the minor grade when he scored 0-2 off the bench in the opening round against Kerry and backed this up with 0-2 when starting against Galway in round two.
Returning to the Clare hurling fold in a different guise has been a real treat for the Ballyea native. “There’s nothing like it, there really isn’t. After Kerry I had no intentions of doing any more GAA teams because with the Kerry lads it was three years and I moved down there, we moved down as a family so we were in the mix because the commute was big, I remember saying to my wife I won’t work with another team and I had talks about working with teams across the water but I didn’t want to be getting on a flight on a Tuesday morning, coming back on a Friday, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Then Brian (Lohan) rang and they already had a sports psychologist, Nollaig (O’Sullivan) which was brilliant, she does the one on ones, sometimes all I think I do is drink coffee and eat the jellies on the dressing room table but I’m just around, I feel so lucky. Now, there are some evenings I’m in Kildare and I don’t want to drive to Clare but every time I get there I’m like this is just bonus territory”.
Clear to see from Clare’s first two championship outings in Cusack Park has been Griffin’s enthusiasm at being involved, the forty five year old fits in well with the panel in the pre-game puckaround. “I have to try tell myself to get off the field now, I just love pucking, I’m playing in Wicklow so I want to be pucking, even tonight (Friday) at training if one of the goalies say will you come in and help a drill, I’m like a nine year old being asked to play. When I left Clare, I didn’t leave on great terms, I felt frustrated and even going to the games for a few years after was hard. In 2013 and 2014, I got really into the team, yet I still felt I could still be playing but after that I went on this journey with Kildare and Kerry which took me away but I always watched the games and always messaged Tony and Paul from Ballyea on the morning of a game and I always text Brian the morning of every game, to be back now is like full circle”.
Lohan the manager has brought the “unbeatable” traits he carried with him from his days at full back with the distinctive red helmet. “You never really got to know Brian the player but Brian the player was amazing, he was such a competitor, having marked him you knew you were going to have to be ready and find every way to get around him, he was so mentally strong, there’s a few people like Seánie O’Shea and Michael Jordan who are the elite, they are winners but they are warriors and their mindset is almost unbreakable, Brian is one of those and his team have that. Brian the manager without giving too much away because he is so private, as a manager you can see in spades is Brian cares about his players, they know he does, they love the jersey, they love the panel and they have a great atmosphere. Brian as a player was unbeatable but Brian as a manager has brought that into his squad but he also cares about his player”.
As he admitted, the commute from Kildare to Cusack Park can be taxing but Tony is hopeful it will be continuing for a few more months at least. “We hope it will keep rolling but it won’t be from want of trying by those guys. The thing about the Brian Lohan set-up is it is not about Brian, it is not about him, he brought in Nollaig, me, he brings in people and there is no ego with Brian, it is not about Brian and that is rare, I’ve worked with other managers and they want to win because it is for them as much as the team, with Brian I honestly think he is so rooted in Clare and the Clare people, he talks about it all the time, it is not about Brian and the players know he cares about them, Brian is a sound fella”.
Tony was the guest speaker at an event organised by the John Conroy spear-headed Clare GAA health and wellbeing committee at Hotel Woodstock which helped teenagers to understand how to play their best game on and off the field and proved very worthwhile for young and old in attendance.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, he explained what is the role of a performance coach. “It is quite a new term in lots of ways but in most teams the role of a sports psychologist is covered within the performance coach but for some other teams it goes much further than that so you could end up liaising between the players and the management, doing work with the management on stuff like team culture, one on ones with players on counselling or therapeutic intervention due to circumstances, it is very broad. Where it works very well for some teams is when they have a sports psychologist who is very good at that and someone who is working more broadly around the culture of the sport and is there for players to turn to if they need”.
Having a psychologist with a performance is “the way to go,” he outlined. “I tried to do the one in Kerry and it is almost impossible to do it in the way that you’re covering a bit of everything. You’d be surprised, even some Premier League teams and teams that are high profile might not even access to a full-time sports psychologist, the way the modern game and the GAA world is going you need someone with that skillset to be able to help players play the mental game because if you think about performance as technical, tactical, physical and mental, the other three are covered well and I think the GAA is starting to get very good with the last one and is better than some professional sports because we get the fact that our players will perform better if they have some mental or mindset techniques”.
Reflecting on his playing days, Tony noted he would have benefitted hugely from working with a performance coach. “In some ways I would have loved to be playing now, I was someone who wanted and probably required input across the board physically, we see the way players are conditioned now, my body type I was always losing muscle tissue, bulk and size by June and then the season went to September so when you needed to be at your best was when I was starting to fatigue and atrophy physically so now their load is watched, some players might want to play on but they are told they are finished and have hit their numbers for tonight, there was none of that so physically I would have been a better player. Tactically, when I was playing, you stayed in your position or thereabouts, if you went you then you were shouted at ‘get back to the wing’ whereas now the game is almost played in a flow up and down the field like ice hockey or something, I would have thrived on that because it would have suited me much more. Mentally if I had someone to work with mentally I just would have enjoyed the thing more, I would have been able to reset much better, sometimes I felt like I couldn’t make a mistake so I was afraid to make a mistake, now I work with players around that and they are so much more mentally evolved and they know they will make three or four mistakes, my man might get four points off me but he won’t get more than that whereas in my day it was different”.
In 2022, Tony was part of the Kerry backroom team as the Jack O’Connor managed Kerry outfit ended an eight-year wait for All-Ireland success. He had worked with O’Connor and the Kildare senior footballers in 2021. Griffin had previously been performance coach to the Dublin senior hurlers managed by his former teammate and manager, Anthony Daly when they ended a 72-year wait for Division 1 success in 2011 before securing an historic Leinster SHC crown two years later, their first in 52 years.
On some of the common themes he discusses with the modern-day GAA player, Tony explained, “with the GAA player some of them are around habits, they are younger whereas the demand is huge, sometimes it is just about cleaning up routines and how they prepare, that is less and less. The big one is confidence, it is the same in different sports, I’m working with a fourteen year old tennis player who will turn professional soon and will be Ireland’s first professional tennis player of this era, it is the same for him and that is confidence, what happens when I get beaten, what happens if I’m injured, it is versions of that and very often it is the confidence to play and players today with all the data can get stuck that I have to hit all these metrics and they can forget the part of enjoying the play of the game so a lot of the issues in sport is the same as it always was and always will be, doubt of can I do this, am I this good and having to win over that battle in your mind”.
Ballyea itself is developing a niche for its array of sports performance coaches, ex Clare footballer Gary Brennan held the role currently occupied by Griffin in 2023 while two-time All-Ireland winner Paul Flanagan is in the same role but with the Clare senior footballers and he works with the majority of Clare underage sides. “Paul is a class act, when I did the walk for Palestine for my buddy working in Gaza, as I was going from Killaloe to Ballyea, Paul drove around the backroads of Quin to find me with a bar of chocolate and a flask of tea, he is just a class act. I’m more of a generalist whereas he is a brilliant sports psychologist”.
Alongside Karl Swan, Tony co-founded the Soar foundation in 2012, inspired by the late Jim Stynes in Australia, to help teenagers realise and fufill their potential. In the last fourteen years, Soar has worked with over 75,000 teenagers. “I stepped away in 2019 and I had brought it as far as I thought I could, it is still going, it is brilliant because with some people they start something and it just falls away, Soar is continuing and it is growing,” Griffin said of his current involvement.
Clare hurling is just one project keeping Tony occupied. “My full time is I do a lot of human connection, I work with three companies in particular and do a good bit with them on the human connection of their team, with the rise of AI the one thing it can’t replace or what we need to focus on most is human connection and how people create and find a way to harness their potential. I’m about to start a new book which I’m really excited about which is for teenagers and is on mindset for teenagers into sport, it is cool because it is like full circle for me as it is like the book I’d have love to have read when I was fourteen and I wanted to do this thing but didn’t know could I, it will be that type of book for young people”.
