WHEN JOHN SUGRUE was in college in Belfast, his northern base and physiotherapy studies didn’t prevent him maintaing his link to his roots in Kerry.
Before motorways snaked around the country, Sugrue would set off in a Volkswagen Jetta at weekends for eight-hour journeys to play league games for his club Renard at the southern tip of the county.
That commitment to home never wavered. He was midfield when South Kerry ended a 22-year wait for a county senior title in 2004 and played around the middle when they retained that honour twelve months later.
A decade on he answered the call to revive the divisional outfit’s fortunes. Sugrue was back on the road, this time as a manager travelling from his base in Portlaoise to their midweek training location in Barraduff outside Killarney, and conducting the sessions that primed South Kerry to grasp silverware again after a two-game county final saga with Legion.
He moulded a team where a veteran Declan O’Sullivan coaxed another triumph out of himself, where Bryan Sheehan cemented his status as one of the outstanding club players in his county and where his club-mate Killian Young, who has often cited Sugrue as an inspiration, anchored the defence.
“I did South Kerry just for one year, again it was a brief and fruitful romance,” recalls Sugrue.
“It was a team I played with before and like it’s a part of the world I’ve a great affinity with. We had some great days in South Kerry in the past. They had kind of taken a bit of a slide for a few years and I felt there was a bit more in them.
“It was one of those things I had a real passion and a real excitement about doing. I went down for one year and that was really all I could realistically because it was before we actually started building our house. It was great. It worked out nicely at the time.”
If Kerry was where he started out, it is Laois where his loyalties now lie. Park-Ratheniska are his adopted club and his Laois Physiotherapy Clinic is established nearby in Portlaoise. In 2012 and 2013 he was physio to the Laois senior side.
His football nous and the coaching acumen he displayed with South Kerry attracted interest. There was a swell of support for him to take over in the winter of 2016 but the timing was better for the Kerry native to be in charge of Laois when 2018 commenced.
“That was mooted before. But look in life, I’ve got two young kids, we were building a house and stuff like that. It’s a huge undertaking, I’ve probably learned that, it’s probably slightly bigger than what I thought it was even.
“Look the time was just right this year to have a good crack off it. My wife God bless here, she’s rowed in great and given me great support throughout. It takes an awful lot of understanding on a personal front at home to try and get the organisation level and time commitment right.”
Sugrue never graced the inter-county stage as a player but was exposed to elite environments. A couple of years after winning those county medals with South Kerry, he was drafted in by Pat O’Shea and found himself entrusted with the responsibility of tutoring a dressing-room filled with decorated figures in football.
Kerry defeated Cork in the 2007 All-Ireland final, lost to Tyrone in the 2008 decider and along the way Sugrue learned plenty.
“When you’re a player, you play club first and you might play divisional as is the case in Kerry. Then you always want to go out and play county, it was a thing I never achieved as a player myself and I now know why to a great degree.
“When you go into coaching and management then, it’s a case of you want to try it at club level or underage, then county championship level and then if there’s an inkling there that you can do something, then you have to try yourself out at inter-county level.
“Pat (O’Shea) was a great guy and you know I think to some degree might not have got the credit he deserved at the time. Pat brought me in to train Kerry and to be honest hand on heart I was a little bit green at the time, I was a little bit wet behind the ears.
“Maybe looking back now, I would say the job I did was maybe not in keeping with what I would demand of fellas now. So it’s one of those things, it was a great experience and all that like but I think Kerry players might look at it and wonder at the time.
“You’ve got to back yourself and you’ve got to have an idea and a plan. In fairness myself and Pat would have met very frequently to set out our training sessions and agree our training plan and decide what we wanted to work on.
“It was a challenging environment, there were a lot of big characters in there but look you live and you learn and you try and push on from that. We were lucky and we were unlucky. We were lucky we won an All-Ireland in 2007 and we were unlucky we lost an All-Ireland in 2008.
“That was a very strong group and that was a group that had a real strong identity about how they played football. To a certain degree it was only a matter of trying to keep them going.”
He was thinking of tilts at Sam Maguire a decade ago but now the aims are more modest and the landscape is altered. Laois were languishing in the basement tier when the league started in late January but by the last day of March they were toasting a final success in Croke Park after an unblemished run during the spring.
It’s the start of strides Sugrue hopes to make with this bunch.
“In Kerry there is that kind of expectation level that you’re going to be hard at the business end of the championship. In Laois it makes no difference to me. As far as I’m concerned any team you’re involved with, you want to try and improve the standard and what they’re doing and improve their mindset.
“If you do that, I think you can rise the tide a small bit and that’s ultimately (what) you’re going to do when you go into any dressing room. In Leinster look Dublin have set the bar. They’re not going to make any apologies for that and neither should they. Lots of teams have decided to lie back and look at them.
“We’re trying to get our guys in order to compete with those around us and try and get a leg up on them who are around us and that’s everyone bar Dublin (and) Kildare to some degree as well.
“Dublin are clear leaders. But then if you take Dublin, if you put them into any other provincial championship I think they’re going to be clearly ahead of most others to a great degree as well.”
Consistency of performance is a theme he is keen to hone in on. The league was a start in that regard. The players retreated to the sanctuary of their clubs for a chunk of April and now are gearing up for Saturday night against Wexford, the first stop on the championship road.
“We achieved our objective of getting out of Division 4. To be honest at the end of the league it was important to get out of each other’s hair a small bit as well.
“We were down in Division 4 for the first time in a long time and we were good enough to get out of that. Where we can get to, I don’t know. It’s very hard to say at this moment in time.
“I definitely think there’s more in us than what we probably showed in Division 4 but we’ve got to produce it.
“Laois teams in the past have been to some degree can turn up and more days they mightn’t. So we’ve got to achieve a level of consistency first and then see where we can get to after that.”
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