GARY KEEGAN, IRELAND’s performance coach, has been credited with helping Andy Farrell instil a sense of belief in his team over recent seasons.
Keegan has been with Ireland part-time since 2020 and then joined full-time from the start of the tour of New Zealand last year. He made his name as the high performance director with the IABA’s high performance boxing programme and has helped the Dublin footballers and Tipperary hurlers to All-Ireland glory.
Keegan sat down with The 42 for a rare extended interview in 2020, which is available to all of our subscribers.
During a wide-ranging 70-minute conversation with Shane Keegan on the How To Win At Dominos podcast, Gary Keegan spoke about how he and Billy Walsh and Zaur Antia set about establishing the culture in Irish boxing which resulted in an incredible medal haul at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic games.
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“In many ways the culture had devolved, based on our experience of defeat, based on our experience of success – or not success – on the international stage.
“The culture devolved out of our learning and our growth not being stimulated by exposure to better teams, exposure to other coaches, where we could really engage in what good looks like.
“Part of our experience by way of failure on the international arena had affected our belief in ourselves. To protect ourselves, we started to look at excuses. In many ways we were saying the other teams were bigger than us, they had bigger talent pools, more resources, better facilities and we had a lot less.
“When we stepped into our national gym it had seven punchbags and one ring, and it was just a big open space.
“We really had kind of remained very traditional in our ways and yet the world had moved on. We were very traditionalist, using a lot of traditional methods, that excuse culture, and some of our limiting beliefs.
“We had practises which were holding us back – that we didn’t really understand because we weren’t measuring the effect of some of our ways and some of our practises.”
Keegan said he and his colleagues asked themselves two questions: What is preventing us from being successful? What is helping us to be successful.
“So when we began to separate out those two things we began to see what our culture was,” he said.
Keegan added: “Our ways of doing things effectively is what culture is. The things we value, the standards we hold for ourselves, and the things we consistently do ultimately were what our culture was.
“And we needed to get in and observe and look at that, even though we were coaches in the system, we were part of the system, we hadn’t looked at it in this way because we hadn’t got the time to look at it, and now we had the responsibility to do so. And we needed to figure that out.”
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