THE MORNING AFTER this year’s camogie All-Star award ceremony, the Player of the Year recipient was togging out for training with her club in Waterford.
When Beth Carton was announced as the sport’s MVP, she became the first woman in her county to accept the honour. There was no indication that it might be her name that was getting the call ahead of Cork pair Amy O’Connor and Saoirse McCarthy, but the De La Salle woman’s selection was a fitting tribute to her exceptional output in 2023.
Carton chalked up a colossal 6-121 in this year’s championship, spanning 13 games in the Munster championship and All-Ireland series. Her county lost the All-Ireland final to an experienced Cork outfit who limited Carton’s influence to two points from play.
She wasn’t her imperious self that day, but her overall imprint on the championship was undeniable. Still worthy of a vote of confidence from her camogie peers at the All-Stars.
Yet Carton did not savour the achievement for long. She was on time for De La Salle training the next morning. They had a Munster semi-final against Tipperary’s Drom & Inch coming up. The wheel keeps on turning.
“I just felt I had to,” Carton tells The 42 as she reflects on a season of individual brilliance mingled with collective disappointment.
“We played Drom two weeks after it and I felt we had been training very hard so it was a big one to get down for. It was nice to be down as well to meet the club girls after.
“The personal accolades are lovely but at the end of the day, when you look back at the year, the All-Ireland final sticks out a mile. It’s the main thing you remember from the year.
“You’re looking at that and you’re still fiercely disappointed with the way the day went. We went on to win with the club and that probably helped a small bit. That was a big achievement but it’s still very mixed.”
That Munster semi-final ended in disappointment for Carton and De La Salle. For the second year-in-a-row, they had been bested by the Tipperary side who are also the reigning Munster champions. De La Salle have some work to do to make inroads on the provincial competition, but at home, they’re the dominant camogie team.
After just being established in 2008, De La Salle are now back-to-back champions in the Waterford senior championship. They reached the Déise summit for the first time ever last year.
“Around then, a lot of us played for the boys teams,” Carton says as she describes the time before their camogie club was formed. The juvenile camogie scene is flourishing in De La Salle now, and she’s contributing to that growth by coaching the local U8s team.
But she remains grateful for those years she spent hurling with boys, and maintains the view that girls can still learn a lot from that arrangement today.
“It was all I knew growing up at the start,” she says. “My brother is a bit younger so we would have played a bit together. And then I got to an age where they are getting a bit bigger and a bit tougher.
“I do think if girls could start playing with lads from a young age, it does help bring on their game. It’s something I think should still probably happen. It’s not as frequent in our club because the camogie has numbers underage but I do know a lot of country clubs down here.
“There was a good few girls playing for the lads, and we were about 10. So, it was either going to be start playing with the camogie club somewhere in the city or go out and try ourselves and that’s what we did. We just got a good group of girls together and there’s still a good crowd of us who played all the ages the whole way up to senior.
“The work going on at underage level is phenomenal and I never thought it would get to the stage it’s at at the minute. There’s always work to be done but it’s in a good place at the minute. There’s great people involved.”
Carton also benefited from the hurling wisdom of her father, Joey. He was coaching teams when she was first learning how to put stick to ball. She followed him to whatever training session or match he was attending.
“He’s a mad GAA man and when I was growing up, I was happy enough to go wherever he was going whether he was at a match or training,” she says.
“He’s heavily involved in De La Salle and in developing the camogie club so we just have that in common. That has continued as I got older. I’m lucky that I had that start. And I have an older brother who doesn’t play at all so I suppose I was the next.
“But my Dad just always brought me along to everything he was involved with. I loved playing with the lads and there’s still a lot of the lads playing senior hurling with De La Salle. They’ve very good supporters here as well.”
All that foundation work has helped to forge the player that Carton has become, a deadly accurate player from frees and from play. Becoming a dead-ball specialist demands a lot of hours, and Carton prefers to put that work in on the nights when she’s not training. She prefers the quietness of having the pitch and the posts to herself.
“I find it you’re doing it before or after training, the nights can be a bit long so I prefer hitting them on my own on separate nights. If I have a late start in school, I’ll hit them in the mornings. I don’t mind it too much because I like hitting them and I find hitting them on my own gives me a bit of headspace as well. You can get away from everything.”
Waterford’s challenge was all but in ribbons by half-time in the All-Ireland final. They lost key defender Vikki Falconer to an early injury that was later confirmed as a torn cruciate, and from there, Cork assumed supremacy.
The Leesiders plundered for four goals in the second half, including an Amy O’Connor hat-trick. Carton’s tally of seven points accounted for Waterford’s final haul of 0-9, and Cork refused to spare them any further graces. It was the county’s first senior All-Ireland final appearance since 1945, but this was not what they envisioned for the end of that 78-year wait.
There’s no antidote for that pain of course, but Waterford still have their compelling All-Ireland semi-final win over Tipperary to look back on this year. Cork, Kilkenny and Galway are considered to be camogie’s big three, while these two counties have been jousting to make the breakthrough and create a top four.
Waterford shook off their quarter-final hoodoo last year, advancing to the semi-finals on their fifth try after beating Limerick. They fell to Cork in that final-four tie, and in the opening 20 minutes of their semi-final against Tipperary this year, Waterford appeared to be making another exit at the penultimate stage when they drifted into a seven-point deficit.
Seán Power’s side recovered from that slow start to crawl over the line with a one-point win. Even if their All-Ireland final display didn’t unravel in the same way, there is some comfort to be drawn from their semi-final achievement.
“That is a day that you’ll probably look back on fondly when you’re older,” says Carton.
“The support we had that day in Nowlan Park was amazing. Everything went right for us that day and the reverse happened in the final. That’s sport I suppose but we got the rub of the green against Tipperary.
“In a way, it nearly felt like the Waterford hurlers were playing with the crowd that was there. Waterford people are very good to support us no matter where we are. That support is increasing. A huge crowd went up to the final as well.
“It’s something that I will remember in finally getting over that line and finally knowing you’re going to be playing in an All-Ireland final.”
On the day we speak, Carton is training alone with a gym programme while she waits for the 2024 campaign to begin under new Waterford management. Seán Power vacated the role after the All-Ireland final, citing family reasons at the time of his exit. Midleton’s Jerry Wallace has since been appointed as the successor having stepped down as the Cork minor camogie manager.
There was some relief for Carton at the conclusion of her season. A break was needed after a long campaign. But after the relaxing of the muscles comes the itch to get moving again.
Waterford need continuity, Carton says, to retrace the steps they walked into 2023 and hopefully surpass them in 2024.
“It doesn’t take long to be ready to get back into it.”
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