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32 // Ladies Gaelic Football Association GAELIC4TEENS – LATTON LADIES PEIL Summer | Issue No 2 | Volume 14 ilbhe Quinn is from Latton Ladies in Monaghan, what she describes as a "tiny club in a small parish". She was one of the club coaches that participated in the 2018 Gaelic4Teens programme. Ailbhe is a self confessed football fanatic and has found it really difficult to understand why anyone wouldn't want to get out and play with Latton. In recent years the Adult team in Latton have done really well, this resulted in a huge amount of u12 players joining the club – however Ailbhe describes the missing link that the club were struggling to solve. "One of things that became clear over the course of the programme was how beneficial it would be to have all the coaches in the club working off the same page, all working towards keeping as many players playing as possible. The coaches that participated in the Gaelic4Teens programme learnt a huge amount, we are now formulating a plan as to how we can share this information with the entire Ladies Football section. The Gaelic4Teens programme culminated in a blitz day in Abbotstown. There were information sessions with the programme ambassadors which gave the Latton Coaches another piece of insight into their teenage players. "We asked the girls on the bus home about what they thought of the day. It was interesting because the girls that rarely spoke up were full of chat and talking about how the ambassadors really 'spoke to them' and 'were on their wavelength'. This just made it even clearer that showing an understanding of what things are like for the players themselves can have a massive impact. " A "With our adult team doing well and big numbers coming in at u12 we thought everything was fine, but when we looked at it we had only 13/14 players in the middle age groups. We were losing a serious amount of players during the teenage years. We just didn't understand why. Myself and my friends were football mad and we just didn't get why younger players wouldn't want to come and play on the adult team. We were obviously missing something so we decided to apply for Gaelic4Teens and try and do things a bit differently" The central aim of the Gaelic4Teens programme is to support club coaches in developing a strategy to retain their players across the teenage years. According to Ailbhe that was one of the most interesting part of the Gaelic4Teens coach education programme. "I loved the Coach Education days. It was great to get more information about why teenagers want to play sport and what we should be providing for them. We need to understand the social aspect and use it rather than see it as a negative. Across the coach education days we got loads of ideas in relation to how to approach things differently." It is a common reality in clubs that coaches and ladies football section at large end up focusing on short terms goals with everyone working hard on their own team in the absence of a unified club wide approach. Captain Lavina Connolly of Latton GAA Club, Co. Monaghan, with the Junior Cup Fresh Approach Latton Ladies take a to Tackle Retention Problems