Castleconnell Boat Club providing Tipp Rowers an Olympic path

Castleconnell Boat Club is one of Ireland’s biggest rowing clubs.

By Thomas Conway

And what it has in size, it also has in ambition. Located on a serene section of the Shannon which extends from O’Briensbridge to World’s End in Castleconnell, the scenery is the first thing that strikes you. The drive in to World’s End - with its disconcerting name and apocalyptic connotations - is flanked by ornate medieval walls, creating an almost claustrophobic atmosphere. But then the path ahead opens up, and the river appears, in all its majesty, a pristine stretch of water which meanders around the bend and powers its way down to a pretty little weir and beyond into Limerick. Usually there are boats powering up and down the crystal waters. It’s a training ground as much as it is scene from nature.

Right next to all that, on the shore, is an impressive clubhouse which houses Ireland’s largest boat shed - a massive, cavernous structure full of sleek carbon fibre beauties which the athletes tend to delicately. These are expensive vessels, costing anything from €15,000 upwards. Some of them are sourced in Italy, but there’s a distribution hub in the midlands.

The athletes themselves are just as impressive in terms of shape and physique. Most are tall and muscular. They’re rowers. You’d know it by looking at them. The majority, on this particular day, are fifteen, sixteen years of age and there’s Tipperary blood among them. Alex Kennedy and Cillian Gleeson are both Newportians who travelled down for a summer camp some years ago and never looked back. Alex instantly knew rowing was for him.

“I was going through a lot of sports at the time, and I couldn’t really find anything that suited me, then I came here, and I knew instantly - I enjoyed it, it was great,” Alex said.

Fiercely dedicated

Both lads are affable characters, but like everyone in Castleconnell Boat Club, they are fiercely dedicated. The hours these athletes put in are scarcely believable. The training schedule, as Cillian outlines, is hectic.

“On a weekday we’re here from about half-four or quarter-to-five to around seven, sometimes it runs until half-seven,” he reveals.

“Then on the weekends, we’re here at half-seven in the morning, until about half-twelve, it could run to one o’clock. It varies. And then as well as that, sometimes, on a Saturday, we might do a triple session, where we’d get an hour or a two hour break, and then continue on into the afternoon.”

It’s not all about slogging out on the water either. Rowers box clever. They are selective about how they train. That’s something Cillian has learned in the four or so years he’s been in the sport.

“To get the hang of rowing, obviously it helps if you’re fit, but you have to master the technique, your understanding of how the boat works,” he says.

“You have to know how to hold the endurance, where to put your power in the boat, how to manage your energy, things like that.”

Áine Bowen, also from Newport, has been coxing since she was eight or nine years of age. The coxswain steers the boat on the bigger vessels, the four-seaters.

Like the lads, it was a summer camp that then drew her. She’s from a rowing family, and her ideal future entails going to university on a rowing scholarship, like some of her older peers.

“I would love to go and row at third level, maybe get a scholarship. That would be a really big dream of mine,” she says of her future ambitions.

Áine candidly explains that she doesn’t feel she’s at that level just yet, but Nenagh native and friend Rose Cunningham quickly reassures her. The members are in it together at Castleconnell Boat Club - that’s evident. There’s a sense that each looks out for one another. All of them are devoted to the sport, but that breeds friendship, as Rose confirms.

“Once you get into it, you can’t get out of it. Rowing. It’s addictive. But there’s the social aspect as well. You make friends for life,” she says.

Vastly experienced

The man behind all of this, the individual who has fostered the growth of Castleconnell Boat Club over the course of the past sixteen years is James Mangan.

Now, it should be said that the club is home to many coaches and adults who invest copious amounts of time and help to run the show successfully, but James is at the helm of it all. He’s a vastly experienced and skilled coach, a man who spent years across the Atlantic prepping Olympians for their shot at the big time.

“I came here in 2008. We were a small club at the time, we had six rowers, juniors. And today we’ve 104. It’s one of the biggest programmes in the country,” he reveals.

Staggering numbers. James knows exactly what it takes to succeed in the sport. You’d think he’d be intense, hyper-focused maybe, but he’s not. Instead, he has a relaxed presence, an understated, casual demeanour. But he’s disciplined - he was in An Garda Siochana. That’s where he honed his skills as a young rower.

“The guards were a big club at the time, they were a significant force in Irish rowing,” he recalls.

“There were a lot of national team crews coming out of it. So, I was very lucky I was rowing for them. But then I went to the States, and I started with a small college - mainly to have some fun. I certainly wasn’t thinking this was going to be a career of mine. But I ended up finding that I had a kind of a talent for coaching - I really enjoyed it.”

His coaching career in America was laden with success. He progressed up the ranks rapidly, quickly becoming a highly established and sought-after coach.

“When I started coaching in the States, within two years one of the top rowers in the country came out of the group I was over,” he recalls.

“Then I ended up having a lot of athletes make the national team. We had our first Olympian by the year 2000. And then from 2000 to 2012 we had athletes in every Olympics. So that was significant, to see that athletes were coming from underneath your guidance and going on to compete at that level.”

For James, coaching is a vocation. When he’s not out on the water with the athletes, he’s reading sporting autobiographies - the stories of other coaches, to advance his own knowledge. He knows nothing about soccer but openly confesses to reading Jurgen Klopp’s book. That’s how seriously he takes it. He’s made a career out of coaching, but he was never interested in self-aggrandisement. The reason he coaches is because he enjoys it. Simple as.

“You have to enjoy it first,” he says.

“You have to have that passion. And I suppose that’s what I had. It wasn’t that I said to myself, oh I’m going to coach to this level or reach that height, it was just that I wanted to have fun coaching. I really enjoyed it, and if you’re enjoying it, you kind of get intrigued by it and you start asking yourself questions like how do I make an athlete better? And you have to kind of walk in the athlete’s shoes a little bit.”

Great Rower

So, what does it take to become a great rower, to go on and reach Olympic stardom, or head off on scholarships to Ivy League universities like Princeton - as one Castleconnell member has in recent years?

The first thing, and you notice it immediately when you meet most rowers, is height. Now granted, there are exceptions. Olympian Paul O’Donovan is only 5-foot-eight, and he’s the greatest rower this country has ever produced.

In general, though, height helps. Most of the sixteen year-olds in the club are already touching six-foot. The tallest lad James coaches in the university (of Limerick) is 6-foot-eight. We’re talking basketball size here.

Physical attributes are only one side of the equation. Elite rowers are rigorously disciplined, across multiple aspects of their lives. Many of them also thrive academically.

There’s a culture of attending top universities, of high-achievement in general terms. But like other sports, rowing is constantly evolving. This is something James emphasises. Whether you’re a coach or an athlete, you have to grow with the sport - that part is essential.

“A big part of your job as a coach, especially when you’re involved in the high-performance aspect of it, is learning how, when the bar is raised, how you bring athletes up to the next level, how do you create that environment?”

Exposure is another big component. Recently, many of the members headed off to national trials in the National Rowing Centre, in Skibbereen, Co. Cork. James says that such experiences are vital in terms of improving aspirant rowers. The athletes are thrown into the deep end, made to compete against everybody and anybody, including established Olympians. Intimidating, for sure, but highly beneficial.

Ireland’s recent successes at Olympic and World Championship level have catapulted rowing into the sporting spotlight. What was once a peripheral, niche sport is now growing more mainstream.

The phenomenon isn’t just confined to Skibbereen. Castleconnell is among the brightest and most vibrant clubs in the country. With so many young and dynamic athletes in the club’s ranks, Ireland’s next Olympic hero could well be among the many young people scything through the waters of the Shannon every weekday evening. It’s a waiting game.