IT IS BASICALLY ‘School of Hard Knocks’ Limerick style. ‘A Sporting Chance’, which airs this Wednesday on Setanta Sports, sees former Leinster and Munster flanker Liam Toland team up with former Ireland international Rosie Foley to coach a group of disadvantaged Limerick youths and try to help them turn their lives around through rugby.
A lot of the participants had dropped out of school at a young age, and some were teenage parents. As an experienced player and coach, Toland was charged, along with Foley, with preparing the group to compete in an international tag rugby tournament in London.
And while that was the tangible reward at the end for the group, the educational aspect of the series was something that Toland was drawn to, because of how little schooling some of the youths had.
“Some of the kids we were working with had never left the county,” Toland said.
“They didn’t have passports. But there was a fundamental goodness there. I lot of them would have dropped out of traditional education at a young age and wouldn’t have had a chance to go on to third level education.
“We just wanted to show them that the door never closes and a lot of them got very excited at the prospect of going on to third level. The main reason I became involved is because the show was about sport and education – two things that I am really passionate about.”
It wasn’t an easy experience for Toland and Foley; most of the kids had never even held a rugby ball, let alone played with one, and some others just didn’t want to get involved with the sport. Sometimes there were other obstacles that the youths had to overcome, even if they really wanted to take part.
“We had some young mothers on the team and sometimes they would miss training and you would ask them where they were and they would say ‘my child minder let me down’,” Toland said.
“You would forget that they were actually living life too. You would never see Brian O’Driscoll saying that but it was just so different for them.
“The group all had to live their lives as well. Sometimes they would show up and they wouldn’t have the right gear or they couldn’t play because they would say ‘I’m too hungry’.”
Some members of the group didn’t warm to outsiders easily and it took time for Toland and Foley to build up a level of trust with them. Others just never really took to rugby and preferred other pursuits.
“It took them a while to get into it because some of them had certain perceptions of outsiders,” Toland said.
“Some of them never bought into it at all and refused to play which was very frustrating. One of the kids was really into magic but didn’t really want to play rugby.”
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Former Ireland international Foley, brother of Munster coach Anthony, has teaching experience and Toland thinks that helped in dealing with the wide-ranging personalitlies and attitudes within the group. The duo had to work together to teach the young adults the game of rugby, but also to help them develop as people away from the field.
“Rosie comes from a teaching background so she had experience dealing with a lot of different people,” Toland said.
“We got on really well and she had very high standards for what she wanted from the group. There were a lot of trials and tribulations and there were challenges.
“But huge strides were made during the series and we showed them what they can achieve when they are part of a group.”
The series is over now, but after seeing the group develop so much, Toland hopes the work done serves as a stepping stone rather than just a temporary fix. He was keen to stress what they had all accomplished during their time together.
“I hope it doesn’t stop because the series is over,” Toland said.
“They did things they had never done before. They interviewed Keith Earls or Marcus Horan or John Hayes and had their articles published. They achieved things over the course of the series. Some of them have been raised in an environment where people didn’t go to college or get that plum job but we wanted to show them that you can.”
