Last year, Dublin University Ladies Hockey Club (DULHC) enjoyed what was aptly described as the “perfect season of promotion”. Unbeaten in their drive to win the Leinster Division One title, DULHC achieved promotion to the top hockey league in Ireland after a win against Old Alex in April.
Sitting down with The University Times, first-team captains, Niamh Sweeney and Jenny Long, discuss their upcoming season in a new league. They reminisce over the fact that, last September, they were preparing for a “tough transition year”, having lost nine of their starting 11 players. After a surprise season that brought them the Leinster Division One title, the Jacqui Potter Plate and league promotion, DULHC are now preparing for a very different kind of year. One where they will be facing 10 of the best teams in Ireland, in an elite league that is recognised on the world stage.
Having tasted so much success last season, DULHC are excited, yet understandably apprehensive at the challenge that lies ahead. The top flight league is completely new territory. There are new rules and regulations to get to grips with on an organisational level, and that is before tackling the higher level of play that will be demanded from the players. Long is not wrong in her evaluation that, in every sense, this team are “throwing themselves in at the deep end”.
Last season’s campaign offers significant grounds for optimism, however. Sweeney stresses that their league triumph last year was not as easy as it seems on first glance: “We learnt how to work for success.” They have carried that work ethic into pre-season, with “a committed group of around 15 people” attending every training session. This marks a significant improvement on previous years, when, Sweeney says, “we’d have maybe four or five people turning up to the first few sessions”.
Other teams in the league are able to start pre-season much earlier than DULHC, so it is crucial for them to make small adjustments. Over the summer, they adopted an off-season programme to try to maintain fitness. While, as Long points out, the team have adopted a certain amount of the attitude “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, the intensity of their pre-season training has been pushed up a gear by their coaching staff.
Headed up by Brian Scully, DULHC are being guided through the transition by an excellent coaching team. Their staff includes Colin Stewart, the current Irish technical coach, alongside former Olympians David Fitzgerald and Kyle Good, both of whom have experience playing in the top league.
A faster pace is only one of the many things DULHC will be adapting to over the coming months. While most of the other teams in the league have, as Long points out, “been playing with the same group of girls for the last 10 years, give or take a few changes”, DULHC now face the challenge of quickly integrating new players into their team. Ahead of a pivotal season, they realise how crucial this will be if they are to retain their newfound promotion. In a bid to minimise disruption, Long and Sweeney, alongside club Captain Aoife O’Connor, have been working hard over the summer months to attract new talent. For example, they ran CAO nights where prospective sixth-year students could come and speak to current players about the club and their course.
Their ultimate goal, understandably for a team just promoted, is to maintain their place in the top league. However, if everything goes their way, DULHC hope to finish the year in sixth place. Both captains say this is a “realistic goal” for the upcoming season. Yet I’m not sure how much we can trust this prediction. At the beginning of our interview, Sweeney said that DULHC were “always just a team that survived in division one”, that they “were never dominant”. If last season is what “survival” looks like, this year could be one of DULHC’s best yet.
