Athlone teacher and coach pens book of sporting wisdom

A number of years ago, Athlone secondary school teacher and gaelic football coach Eoin Jordan began highlighting passages from sports books which he found interesting or potentially useful from a coaching perspective.

He started adding them to a Word document on his computer and dividing them into different headings. Over time, the process gathered momentum and eventually led to Eoin compiling this sporting wisdom in the form of a book.

The result, Wise Words: Thoughts of The World's Greatest Sports Coaches, was published in recent weeks by Hero Books and has been met with a very positive response to date.

Eoin, known to many of his friends and sporting colleagues as 'Joey', is a native of Moydrum who currently resides in Monksland. A teacher of history and geography in the Marist College, he is also the manager of Athlone GAA Club's senior football team.

His parents, Kevin and Aideen, are given a prominent mention in the book's acknowledgements, his father for influencing his involvement in the GAA as a player and coach, and his mother for bringing her expertise as an English teacher to bear in reviewing the book's spelling and grammar.

Wise Words is divided into more than 70 short chapters, each one with its own individual theme or emphasis.

The chapters each begin with a story or anecdote and then include a range of related quotes from influential sporting figures on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Paul O'Connell, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, Ger Loughnane, Joe Schmidt, Pep Guardiola, and many others.

Eoin said he drew from well over 100 other books in compiling quotes and insights for Wise Words.

He first started to sense that there might be an opportunity for the book when he started the @GAACoachQuotes Twitter page a few years ago.

"I got a good bit of traction on the Twitter page, so I felt there was probably a market there for something," he said.

"I contacted a few publishers, and Liam Hayes of Hero Books got back to me. They did great work with me in bringing it all together," he said.

"The 'grunt work' was done by myself over a couple of years, and then once I actually started writing the book it came together in about six months."

Interestingly, despite his strong involvement in the GAA, Eoin said he often doesn't learn a lot from reading GAA books, and finds himself more drawn to reading about American coaches or soccer coaches.

When asked which sports coach he admires most, or finds the most interesting, he replied: "That's a tough one. Probably Bill Walsh, the San Francisco 49ers coach in the 1980s.

"His book, 'The Score Takes Care of Itself', is very practical about how, if you get all of the things that are in your control right, the score looks after itself. I would take a lot from him.

"Other ones would be Jim Gavin and Jim McGuinness, from the GAA perspective, and, even though I'm definitely not a Manchester United fan, there's a lot you can take from Alex Ferguson as well."

Wise Words began circulating at the beginning of May and has received several favourable mentions since then.

"There has been a good bit online about it, and I've had podcasters and different people contacting me to talk about it," said Eoin.

"There's been a huge amount of support and positive feedback on social media as well, which is great.

"Whatever sport you are into, it has a lot of different stories from rugby, soccer, GAA, American football, basketball, and so on."

"The way it's designed, you can pick it up and they're short chapters, so you can read a chapter, leave it down, and come back to it later and read another chapter. It's probably not something people will just pick up and read from start to finish."

He said that, as a coach, there were various lessons he learned from the process of writing the book.

"I learned a huge amount from putting it together, which was a brilliant side-effect of it. But, yeah, you are always trying to implement things you might take from these leading coaches from different sports across the world."

In his role as manager of Athlone GAA, with the league having ended, thoughts are turning to the championship.

"We have a few weeks until the start of the championship. We'll look to get a good bit of work done over the next few weeks, and a few challenge games to sharpen ourselves for championship. So we're looking forward to that," he said.

In addition to his other involvements, Eoin is doing a Masters in Applied Sports Coaching in the University of Limerick. Having written Wise Words, he said he wouldn't rule out the prospect of working on another book project in the future.

"I've definitely not been scarred by the process so, yeah, I might do something again down the line," he said.

* 'Wise Words' by Eoin Jordan is out now and can be purchased from The Athlone Bookshop in the Village at Burgess, on Amazon, or from the author by contacting: eoinjoeyjordan@gmail.com