Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an Irish independent podcast. Now, welcome. So I'm thrilled with our guest today, I have to say, because he has been hiding in plain sight for a long time now in Irish sport. He's had a remarkable career when you list it all out, along with Billy Walsh over 20 years ago now. Not to date us all, but he...
In many ways, pioneered the high performance unit that was so successful for Irish boxers subsequent to the Sydney Games. Did that for five, six years, then worked at the Sport Ireland Institute, we'll call it now, from 08 to 17. Again, putting various programs in place to try and...
Take Irish sport to the next level and then in the midst of it all words seem to get out that he was quite good because Jim Gavin came calling work with the Dublin footballers for 15 through to 19 give or take Liam Sheedy's hurlers the Cork hurlers various points including last year.
A couple of years at Leinster Rugby, London Business School lecturer and works in the business world through his business Uppercut and the Lions this summer. I suspect a whole bunch of teams we don't even know that. So I am, of course, talking about Gary Keegan. Gary has given us his time today because he spoke.
This morning at the Benacol conference, it was a habit stacking event, which we all need in January, I suspect, where people heard about how tiny daily habits can lead to extraordinary long term results. And so very happy to welcome Gary Keegan to the podcast. Gary, good to have you on.
Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.
So. You're described in various ways when I read about you. Sports psychologist, which I'm not sure is strictly true. Mental strength, performance guru, horse whisperer, you name it. How would you describe yourself?
I think I like the horse whisperer one. That's a nice one. Yeah, I'm not a psychologist.
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Chapter 2: How did Gary Keegan contribute to the success of Irish boxing?
I would consider myself a high performance expert. So I've been in the field for nearly 25 years. I've seen most of what could be seen in terms of individual sports and team sports. So I've built up a lot of experience over that 25 year period.
Could you take us back for a moment? I suspect it's something you're asked about a lot, but just to, for younger listeners even, because, you know, time is flying by. Post the Sydney Games in 2000, the Irish government, I mean, the sporting world at large, recognised that we as a country had fallen massively behind. And so a degree of funding came into Olympic sport.
One of those sports, I think there were three or four initially, I know, rowing, I think sailing as well, possibly athletics sport. But boxing certainly was earmarked as one of the sports where we could really get our act together and the funding could bear dividends.
And so you, I guess, being a performance director as such alongside Billy Walsh and from kind of 02 territory to 08 really got that thing off the ground. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, I think you've described it well in terms of I think our Olympic programs, our Olympic sports were falling off the Olympic map. We weren't achieving any consistency around kind of world-class performance, whether it be Europeans, world championships or Olympics. And the Paralympic side as well was also in consideration at that time.
So the Sydney Review had identified that the rest of the world had moved on, had professionalized their systems and had performance directors, coaches, science and medicine staff with facilities, et cetera, around their top athletes. And Ireland were doing nothing, so we were well behind everybody else. Some of these systems were up and running a decade and a half before we arrived to the scene.
So they chose four sports, and you're correct, Joe, boxing was one of those sports. And I think boxing may have been selected because it had a record for the most Olympic medals at that time, but that...
history of medals had gone right back to 92 and then the flow of medals had pretty much stopped after that and with no consistency in medals you know the success was never systemic so we got a chance to get some investment to put together a high performance unit and then a high performance program for Irish boxing.
That was established in 2002 and then we start to hire coaches, Billy being the head coach, Zorantia being the head technical coach and a couple of others in around the talent program from a coaching perspective. So literally, we were bringing something together for the first time. We were green. We knew nothing about high performance.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Gary implement at the Sport Ireland Institute?
So we were, you know, it was a fancy term now, we were stealing intelligence from the opposition and they weren't looking and they weren't paying attention to us. And we, over the course of, I'd say about three and a half years performance, grew. I remember speaking to the media in the first year and saying, guys, look, we're not going to be achieving major medals in year one, year two.
You have to assess us on performance improvement. I said, and we will progress. We graduated the competitions that we were going into to try and build a level of success and build a level of confidence and belief that the athletes could perform and achieve at that level. And
so we've done some pretty innovative uh things at that time and we got right into sports science you know we we and we didn't jump in and take everything on to begin with we brought a physio in johnson mcavoy we said okay we're breaking down with soft tissue injuries all the time can you have a look and tell us what you think and he felt that he felt that the boxers weren't robust enough physically
to be able to take on full-time training. And so then we hired an SSC coach and then we kind of built the team. Nutritionists came in next because boxers is a weight category sport and they have a challenge with eating properly and all that type of stuff and good diets. Then we centralized the program in Dublin, which was a major decision, you know, because nobody wanted that.
Nobody wanted that. And nobody believed that would actually work or boxers would come to Dublin. But they came because I believe that had to be centralized because if we had a decentralized that we would have had less control and the quality of work that was going on, it would have been harder to manage.
So having everything central and having our best resources in around the athletes in terms of coaching and sports science and medicine was a major deal for us. And then we transformed what was one ring and seven bags to three rings, an S&C area, a physio area, recovery area.
We built a dormitory in the attic and the guys lived there, slept there, ate there, socialized there, got together, got to know each other. And for an individual sport, I felt it was really important that we would build a team ethos, that we would share IP, we would share experiences, the guys would learn from each other. And that proved to be very beneficial over time.
And we put our ambition on the wall, Joe. That was pretty major. Because a lot of people said, you know, that vision is unrealistic. It's supposed to be unrealistic. It's supposed to be unreasonable. But our vision was to consistently stand on world podiums. We were naive, but we were excited about the possibility of that and had no idea how. we could make that happen.
And the how was really important, but we had the why, we were there. And we had a belief that if we could produce Irish boxers who could compete and win on the world stage. Well, then we also needed to produce world-class coaches, world-class science and medicine staff. So this big kind of development journey that everybody had to develop and grow together.
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Chapter 4: How did Gary transition from boxing to working with team sports?
This isn't meant to be like a pointed question. What qualified you to do all this? Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. I had been coaching for, at that point, 17 years within the organisation. Had worked my way up to the ranks. Austin Crute, Lord Reston and Gerry Storey had...
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.
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Chapter 5: What mindset techniques does Gary use with athletes?
It was wonderful. And it's stressful, difficult, but trying to find out, you know, break a new ground and trying to figure out things is an exciting place. And I was reading business books, anything that seemed to speak to where we were at culturally or whatever. and coming up with ideas and just experimenting with them. And many of them worked, some of them didn't.
But I remember, you might be aware, Joe, of Steve Bunce. He's a boxing commentator over in the UK. He came over to see us and he wrote a big article on us and he called us the Cubans of Europe. It was just brilliant because we were living, eating, sleeping the whole nine yards there. We traveled all over the world. Nowhere did we not. So there was no fear. We had no fear.
I'm not saying the athletes didn't have fear, but we didn't have fear. We knew that we needed to expose them, but in a clever, structured way. But we needed to show them what world class was. This is what it looks like. This is what you're looking to compete against. So therefore, this is how you have to prepare. to perform at that level. So that was really, really exciting. We used process.
We don't control outcomes, so let's not worry about the medals. We know where we want to get to, but let's look at what is the process to get there, whether it's from round one to round four or five or round three, or whether it's bout one to bout five, whatever it is, what is the process? What is the first punch to the second defense to the first move?
We broke it right down into the raw detail of it. And we start to give them more confidence. And I'll give you an example of why that program was one of the elements that made it really successful was our analysis of what works. So we brought in an analyst to work with the team when we felt we had the resource to do so and when we felt we had the bandwidth to start to look at that area.
So we didn't load it with everything. We took it literally step by step. And we were probably two and a half years in before... we brought the analyst in to build out this thing for us. And I think we spent 11 months just trying to figure out what the template would look like and what key features of the belt we were looking at from a technical perspective.
And when we got 11 pages when we finished that exercise, I said, we need it down to one page. And we got it down to one page. He said, okay, now can I start analyzing our boxes? I said, no. So we're going to look at the top five boxes in each weight division. And we believed we had seven divisions that we could beat. competitive and potentially even win medals in.
So I want to see those seven weight divisions. I want to know what those top five fighters are doing. So the analyst went out and started to analyze these fighters. Now we sent them out with our coaching teams out to multi-nation tournaments and the coach was saying, well, that's a jab. That's a right hand. That's a hook. That's a body shot. That's not a score. That is a score.
That type of, and we educated along the way. So he started doing that. And what we found out was that the best fighters in the world, did less, but did it better than everyone else. And we were trying to create the all-around boxer, you know? So it helped us narrow our focus and get much clearer that we were operating to the athlete's strengths.
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Chapter 6: What role does self-doubt play in an athlete's performance?
It sounds obvious, you know, I think Andy Farrell always talks about presume nothing to be over everything, you know, and we presume that that's how it should be. And that was a big learning for us. We stripped it back, worked to the athlete's strengths, make him feel really confident in what he's capable of doing. And then off we go.
Yeah. So, I mean, you could have stayed there for life, I suspect, and you very much didn't. And you went to work with, we'll call it now the Sport Ireland. It was Irish Institute of Sport, Sport Ireland Institute for a long time. And that was about building other programs and pathways and all of this big picture stuff.
So it's interesting in the midst of all that, that, you know, Bernard Dunn will say, Jim Gavin wants to meet you for a chat. And that three hour meeting morphs into you work with the Dublin footballers and I've mentioned some of the teams at the top of the show, be it the Tipperary Hurlers, the Cork Hurlers, the Irish rugby team now in a kind of full-time capacity for the last five years or so.
So you've kind of segued a little bit from that real programme director thing into maybe working directly with teams. And as I understand it, like one-on-one work with players and talking to the group a lot and kind of like into the weeds of a group. Is that right?
Yeah, well, it's indicative of my career, you know, that I wanted to explore different areas to see could I achieve in those spaces. And when I got to the end of the boxing program, I felt I wanted to try something different. I could have stayed there and enjoyed the sunshine, but I just felt I wanted to try something different. So that was really interesting.
And it just gave me exposure to performance directors, to coaches, to athletes across a wide range of sports who had all sorts of challenges and all sorts of insights and approaches to how they did things. And we put a performance planning process in place at the Institute because I felt it was important that we learn from each other.
So the strategies that the different sports were building was coming through the Institute for a technical assessment, essentially. And we learned so much about what was happening. And somewhere within that period, Jim Gavin came out to have a chat. And as you say, Bernard Dunn,
kind of asked me would I chat to Jim and of course I was very open I had no intention of getting into that space I was busy with the work that I was doing but Jim I think it was after the 2018 2014 final against Donegal. Was it final or semi-final? They lost that game. It was a semi, was it? Yeah. So they lost that.
And he was open and curious about how that happened and what he needed to do to make sure it didn't happen again. And that's Jim in a nutshell. So we sat down.
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Chapter 7: How can daily habits lead to extraordinary results?
as well as the guys who are more focused and clear, this is what's gonna make my performance impactful, if that makes sense. So getting the plan right and then getting clarity around where they focus. And then outside of that, from a mindset perspective. So I think some of the technical elements were easier. So I was describing skill as a behavior.
So I start to teach the players that performance is behavior and behavior is performance. So if you're a forward, a key behavior is movement. And if you become static, you're out of the game because you're going inwards. Right? You're saying, I'm not getting any balls, they're not helping me out. And you're gone, you're actually monitoring your own mind and you're out of the game.
So movement is a behavior. And I want you to focus on movement and create opportunities. And part of that would be that you're keeping opposition defenders right, busy. And you may be creating a channel or an opportunity for it. It doesn't matter who scores. It just matters that it's us and we do it. It doesn't have to be you. So I would say, well, what's your goal?
The goal is to score one three. I said, you have no control over that. That should not be it, right? So your goals need to be more process driven, target driven. What do you want to do? I want to go from, right, if tackling is a behavior, right, what's your current tackle count? Oh, about three a game. Well, you know, if I'm a forward, that might be all right.
But if, you know, if the tackle count is important to the outcome of the game, should that three be more? And where could you take it? So if I can get them to focus on behaviors, they can go out and have something to target, which is really, really powerful. So within the plan, I'd say, well, your training needs to match that.
Our environment needs to simulate what it is that we're going to face in the game. So
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of vulnerability in high-performance environments?
Coaches, good coaches will do that. They'll create chaos, unstructured games, unstructured practice. They'll pull people out, put people in, 12 against 50, all that type of stuff. They'll bring chaos so that the guys can bring order back. So they're creating this flexible mindset rather than, oh, tough. You look at all the Gaelic players that are in the county level, tell me they're not tough.
They're tough. Look at rugby players. Tell me they're not tough. They're absolutely tough. There's no question of their toughness. But are they psychologically flexible? Can they adapt? Can they deal with when momentum has changed? Can they deal with that? And can they stop that momentum shift and take the game over again? Can they remain present? Can they remain outward focused?
So the plan was for me that if a player... If a player thinks he's prepared, if a player feels he's prepared, he'll not cope with pressure because pressure is always there. He'll leverage pressure. he leveraged to up-level his performance. Pressure is always there. Pressure is always within the high-performance one, not just in the game.
It's in the training environment, selection, injury, all the sorts of things trying to stay atop your game is part of being in these environments. So the plan was really important. in my mind, how they shaped it was really interesting because players were innovating on ideas that I had. And then I'd say to a player, I'd say to you, Joe, Joe, you're really good at this, right?
If I send a player or two to you, will you show them how you did it? Sure, no problem, right? So we had forwards sharing their ideas with forwards who were trying to win the jersey off them. Same position, guys sitting down and having the conversation. Because I said all boats rise with the same tide, some of them rise higher than others, right?
Because of the capacity to have, the potential to have, et cetera. So that for me was the central tool I believe. And then we'd say, okay, well, how do you now prepare the mind? So that's part of it. I have a plan. I can trust it.
I have said to them, if you have confidence in what's in the plan and you get through that in the week, you should have confidence heading into the game because your preparation is evidence for your performance. But if you start questioning what you did in the week and you don't trust it, and therefore you don't trust yourself, well then your performance is going to be compromised.
So let's not question ourselves at the end of the week. Let's reinforce ourselves by what we've done and got through. Because if you don't trust the plan, change it. If you don't trust what's in it, put something different in it that gives you confidence at the end of the week. Does that make sense? It does. So it's that piece. So for example,
you have your plan and you've delivered it today in your two sessions, whatever that was. And at the end of the day, you can say today was worthwhile because... I've got through this, I've got through this, I've got through this. I did what I said I was going to do. I missed this, but I can bring it into tomorrow.
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