One of the key pillars of the Waterford Rising strategic plan is to make the player development pathway more smooth for underage players.
Strategic committee member Fergal Hartley outlined that the goal would be to create a simplified player development process where players would no longer be tasked with completing several training programmes designed by several different parties.
"You notice that there’s schools of excellence. That’s about broadening the base, for example, at U14 level you’d have 150 kids or thereabouts – 30 per school across five school clusters – exposed to those standards of excellence. As opposed what would typically just be the academy."
"Those schools of excellence will feed the academy and those two things will work hand in glove."
"At the moment, what’s happening in terms of the academies of excellence – Jerry Fitzpatrick is the athletic development officer for that."
"Jason Ryan (Former Kildare and Wexford football manager) is heading up these. He’s doing a complete review and overhaul of our academies of excellence."
"What’s happening at the moment is, they’re recruiting interns to work under Jerry Fitzpatrick, all from health and exercise backgrounds, to work with all our academies and schools of excellence."
In order to develop this new approach, the ultimate goal will be to recruit a sports science officer who can design a player development pathway that can be implemented by several panels and codes.
"In addition to that down the road, in conjunction with the commercial committee and ensuring that we have the finances available, we are looking to employ someone who will be from a sports science background – not just in terms of athletic development – but will be able to implement best practice in terms of nutrition, in terms of performance coaching, sports psychology etc and have a coherent approach from thirteen to twenty."
"As opposed to what’s happening at the moment, which is probably happening in most counties – that depending on the manager and depending on the age-grade, they can have all sorts of different programmes. You could have the same guy on two panels across two codes on potentially three of four different programmes. That’s happening between school, club, county and academy. We’re looking to streamline that so that every kid has a pathway that’s suitable to them from thirteen to twenty."
"That’s what we’re looking to do. That’s the idea of the sports science officer."
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wTq8t1pRSo20v8fRymSro?si=zSlFFm3kQ9Gmp0GND2mwgA
