It was the final piece of the jigsaw at the recent Squash Ireland awards, the revealing of the National Club of the Year winner.
Ballymena, Galway, Highfield and Tullamore had all just been presented with their respective best-in-province awards… and it was the Leinster representative that ultimately took home the big one.
What stood out, according to the judges, was how the Co Offaly club was “well organised, ambitious and constantly looking to improve, becoming a benchmark and trailblazer for clubs of similar size across the country”.
Club captain Morgan O’Donnell and member Imelda Murray were blown away. They had travelled the 100 kilometres up to Fitzwilliam more in hope than expectation, but what materialised on the night was a vindication of “the energy, patience and dedication within the club to accelerate development and strengthen its community.”
Tullamore SC has been around since the 1970s, but the three-court set-up at Puttaghan has never been busier than it currently is.
The list of activities across the week is extensive: Saturday coaching for all levels, six‑week blocks of Leinster League training, Wednesday women’s coaching, Friday night mixed‑level round robin, Junior coaching every Saturday plus extra midweek sessions, three ladies’ HIIT blocks per year to help get more women into squash, social blitz tournaments and a year‑round internal league.
It’s a lot done, but there is plenty more to do, according to O’Connell, when Squash Ireland caught up with him some weeks after the warm glow of Tullamore winning the National Club of the Year award had fully sunk in.
From his perspective, becoming a more regular participant on the Leinster League circuit in recent years had opened the eyes and concentrated minds about what could be achieved. “Throughout the years, there have been a few teams entered in the Leinster League; it depended on who was running the club at the time,” he explained.
“I can’t give you a number of how many times we have entered over the last 20, 30 years, but I would say once every few years that a team got thrown in and then it lost momentum, and it didn’t get thrown in again for another five years or whatever.
“But the last two or three years now we have had our main team in, our men’s As in, and then once the ladies started getting interested and more players started coming to the club, we decided to throw in another two teams this year, which was great.
“We’re up to about 80 or 90 members now and since we started playing the Leinster League, our members have noticed how other clubs develop, noticed better facilities and a lot of the players playing in the Leinster League are getting involved in the club now.
“They want to grow the club; they want to get the club up to a certain standard now, so there is a fair bit of motivation now with regards to what the members want to do and where they want the club to go.”
Bolstering this ambition to spruce things up is the momentum in the women’s section, with the doors also thrown open to encourage junior-level growth. “Since we started the HIIT programme, we have had an awful lot of interest,” O’Donnell continued.
“Squash Ireland funded our first HIIT programme, and this is our second one this year. We have now started a ladies’ training night every Wednesday. It seems like where there is structure in the club, activities are going on, people are more willing to partake and that is where the membership growth has come from.
“Now we have a lot more juniors, about 30 rotating in the 10-week blocks we are doing. We don’t enforce membership for the juniors, it’s just getting them used to squash, but what we have noticed is the families are getting interested from coming down to the club, realising what is going on in the club and we are after taking on about seven or eight new families just from the juniors.”
Essentially, Tullamore’s warm welcome has gone a very long way in making a lasting impression. “There is a buzz in the club because of the community we have developed. When you come into the club, people are hanging around, people are talking.
“The Leinster League, any of the home games, they are getting advertised and people are coming down to watch. Some of the visiting teams come down and go, ‘Oh my god, 20 people are watching the game. We don’t have that at our club’. That is definitely attractive.”
Attractive, but with the vignette that there is still much room to get better. “Between four and eight o’clock every evening, two courts are nearly always flat out but we don’t have enough power in the club.
“Our third court is not very warm and people are very reluctant to play on the third court. People are waiting to get court one and court two rather than court three, so court three is used as a last resort type of thing. But we are in the process of upgrading things, so hopefully this time next year we have all this heat that is needed.”
Growing the junior section is also on the agenda. “A lot of players wouldn’t have hand-eye coordination, so we really are starting from scratch, just getting them holding a racket right, hitting balls.
“We can’t really progress with most of the juniors until they are at a stage where they are actually able to hit a ball well, but we do have one or two players coming through in the boys and girls juniors who are developing quite fast. They have come from GAA backgrounds, so they have hand-eye coordination.
“One of the juniors is going to start playing with me, Brian Lalor and Saki Muhammad, which will be a good, fast development. We do have a round-robin in place for the juniors that gets them to a certain stage, but we want to get them to where they can start playing with us.
“You need a structure in place to keep kids involved. You need a warm environment. Our club is a little bit dated; it’s not very welcoming, so we are in the process of making it a welcoming club that kids will actually come down to because none of the juniors are actually coming down to play on their own; they are only coming down to the coaching lesson, so we need to change the structure.”
O’Donnell himself was smitten by the sport at junior level, and it remains a regret that, for whatever reason, he stepped away at the age of 16 and didn’t take squash up again until 14 years later when, by chance, he played a game with his son on holiday.
“I started at 14 but stopped playing when I was 16,” he said, recalling his squash journey. “My best friend at the time, Anthony Frahill, we went hell for leather at it when we were kids for two years, just played non-stop, got coaching from Eoin Ryan up in Sutton.
“We used to go up there and we played on Leinster teams. Anthony went on to be Junior No.1 at U19s, but he passed away about nine years ago.
“I played for years and then I stopped, only coming back when I was 30. My eldest son, when we were over in Canada, we went to play on a squash court and he loved it. So we went into Tullamore and the young fella started playing, started playing quite well, and he went down the same route.
“I set him up with Eoin Ryan for coaching and he started playing for Leinster and made squads. But there were no other juniors here at the time, and he stopped when he was 19. He’s travelling at the moment, but hopefully he’ll come back to it.
“He did come back from his travels last year, and I asked him to do one of the coaching sessions. He went to the club and went, ‘Oh wow, there is actually a community here, there is a nice vibe here compared to when I was playing’.”
O’Donnell’s own break from the sport remains a frustration. “It’s probably the only regret I have in life,” he reckoned, looking back.
“I realise I have a certain determination about me and I reckon if I had just kept on in the loop when I was that age, especially with the lads about me, I could really have had a fruitful squash career. It is my biggest regret, it really is, but circumstances and life get in the way.”
