Thomas mc wrote: ↑Mon Jun 09, 2025 5:24 pm That's up to players and managers and parents to help manage that, whatever way you look at it 17 and 18 year old kids left with no choice is just silly particularly in clubs where they are needed.. if you look at the likes of West Offaly where young lads are joined up to that age and aren't gettin a game with the joined up clubs but might be good enough to play a part with their own club at adult level, it's very unfair and plenty lads in this situation who won't wait til u19 to get a kick of a ball, plenty of those lads lost and will be lost but they get the chance to play with their club where they get game time at a decent level, build a bit of confidence and wanted and part of a team and they stay at it.. plenty lads played senior at 16 and 17 never did them any harm. If you're under 18 next year who do you play football with?
(1) First of all, there's nothing "unfair" about it. It's the same rules for everyone.
(2) Plenty of lads played senior at 16 and 17 and it never did them any harm, plenty of lads played senior at 16 and 17 and it did. And there have never been more overuse injuries in the GAA than there are right now. Moreover, adult players are built different now, they hit differently. Sure, there aren't anything like the same number of corner backs who made a career out of dishing out sneaky digs to clip the wings of a teenage corner forward, but the average 25 year old club player is now 100kg weight, 10-12% body fat, and able to move at pace that when he arrives to give a shoulder, even if it's perfectly fair, it's delivered with vastly more force than used to be the case.
I think we can all agree too that Cillian Bourke is not your average 18 year old, you can't make rules based on the likes of him. For every Dan Ravenhill, there's an Adam Screeney - you have to make the rules to cover all, not just the six foot, broad-shouldered lads.
(3) You can say it's up to players/parents/managers to manage that, but we've a long history in the GAA of how that will be managed., Players will want to play every game they can. Some parents will try to protect their kids, some won't - and the manager will do what he needs to do for his team to win the next game, he will not think of the long-term consequences, barring he also happens to be the teenager's father, or a friend of the family. And in all cases, the manager and the club will expect Offaly GAA to manage the situation for them, i.e. to magically create a fixture schedule that somehow gives lots of games to the lad who only plays for one team, and yet simultaneously gives decent breaks between games to the player whose playing for 4-6 teams. Their idea of "managing" the situation will be for someone else to fix it for them.
(4) Nobody will be left "waiting until U-19 to get a kick of a ball". There will be U-18 competitions, and they will be good competitions. Just because the games don't get covered by the local paper doesn't mean that they're bad games. In fact in a lot of cases, the level of development at a good and progressive U-18 team will be a lot better than what a player will get with a struggling IFC or JFC team, where everything is geared towards survival. And if it's the case that they aren't getting that with their club/combined U-18 team, then the problem is that club/combination. That's what needs to be fixed, not changing the whole games programme to work around it.