Gary Keegan

i guess co-opted me onto the national coaching committee maybe as an administrator but prior to that i was i was running the uh you know at a part-time basis voluntary basis i was running the kind of international squad training um and i was starting to put some ideas uh to some of the more senior coaches some of them rolling their eyes at me and stuff like that but i had an idea that we could do better

how we should approach it more professionally, get proper training plans in place, not just on the back of a matchbox, that type of stuff.

And I remember Billy, at that time, I'd asked Billy, he'd been coaching with Nicholas Cruz in the lead-in to...

It was Atlanta 96, or the lead into Sydney, actually.

He'd been doing some work with Nicholas Cruz.

He was coaching the national team.

And I'd ask him, would he go and coach the youth team?

And he wasn't too impressed.

But I felt we needed our best coaches down at the younger age grades and that that was the future.

And we needed to create a legacy for youth.

Irish boxing by thinking longer term in terms of the pathway and we were always kind of focused on this season and this championship as opposed to how do we build out for the longer term so I had a bit of a strategic muscle didn't realize that that's what it was but I was

thinking about, okay, what would it take for us to be in a place in five years time and start to put the structures and processes and systems in place to begin to achieve that.

So I ended up in, I was chair of coach education for boxing, for all the coaches.

And I ended up in a meeting reporting to the Irish Sports Council at the time, now Sport Ireland, on this, where we were with our coaching process, because they were obviously funding the organization at the time.

And the guy who was sitting across, Shane Keane, who worked for the Irish Sports Council at the time, sitting across the table, he said, well, what about the Athens Enhancement Programme, which was the first high performance investment?

And I said, what's the Athens Enhancement Programme?

He said, well, it's investment for high performance and boxing has been chosen.

as one of the programs, one of four programs.

And we have failed to get an application last year.

And there's five days left before the application window closes.