ON a cold, dry night in late November 2014, three women piled into Marie Buckley’s car and began their quest: a recruitment drive for Castlehaven ladies football club that was formed in the summer of 2013.
Marie, Tina Browne and Linda O’Donovan had compiled a list of potential players. They had 30 names. The plan was to call to each of them and ask if they would join the new club. Many were local girls who had to play football outside their home parish as there was no ladies’ football in Castlehaven, but times were changing. This didn’t need a hard sell. Good news spreads fast, and in football-mad Castlehaven, they were knocking on open doors. ‘By the end of the night, we had 50,’ Tina previously told The Southern Star.
At the club’s registration evening on January 23rd, 2015, 100 players signed up. Twenty more soon followed. Castlehaven ladies football club had seven teams in 2015, just two years after it was set up. If you build it, they will come, and in March 2016 Castlehaven fielded its first-ever adult ladies’ football team. They competed in Division 4C of the county football league and lost their first game, 5-16 to 2-6 against St Peter’s. Haven had no subs that night. They had the bare 15. (A piece of trivia, Emma Daly was the first player to ever score for Castlehaven’s adult ladies football team).
Six years on from that first game Castlehaven are now a senior ladies’ football team – St Peter’s, in contrast, are in the county junior D football ranks – as a group of trailblazers powered their way from the junior D grade to the senior ranks in just six sensational seasons.
‘It’s great that our girls get to wear the blue and white jersey and represent the parish like our boys have for years. We have always known senior football so our expectation of football is always high in Castlehaven. It’s great now that our girls can play at that standard, too,’ the ladies’ club’s first and only chairperson Marie Buckley told The Southern Star this week. Castlehaven now has women’s and men’s senior football teams. The days of local girls having to leave the parish to play football are long gone. This season, their tenth in existence, they had teams from U6 right up to their county-intermediate winning heroes. The junior team, in its third season, reached both the county and West Cork finals, while the U21 team also contested the county final. Three defeats, but there were positives to all campaigns. The conveyor belt is in good shape. The U14 and minor teams won West Cork titles this season, while the U12s lost by a point in their West Cork final replay. It all shows there are deep foundations rooted in the Haven’s ladies club. That’s a lesson Marie Buckley learned from a training course in Mallow, just before the club was set up.
‘James McCarthy called a meeting of mothers in the parish who had young girls. It was about organising a Gaelic4Girls programme. He sent three of us off to Mallow for a meeting, but we didn’t know what we were heading to. We thought it was a meeting, but weren’t told there was a training course on the same night!’ Buckley recalls.
‘We didn't go dressed as appropriately as we should have. James said it was like we were going on a hen party, but he is exaggerating that a bit! That’s how it all started. We learned how to set up a club from scratch, to build it step by step, so that you don’t go all in, and we built from there.’
Six players on the Castlehaven panel that won the recent Cork LGFA intermediate final kicked their first ball with their local club when it was formed a decade ago. Ellen Buckley. Hannah Sheehy. Rebecca Sheehy. Emma McCarthy. Ellie McCarthy. Grace O’Connell. The supply line is delivering. Laura O’Donoghue is another young gun making her mark. All played at some stage of the championship this year and also in the county league, and they are pushing the established names. Castlehaven named a panel of 30 for the intermediate final, with Maria Buckley reserving special praise for all the club’s underage coaches. It’s a club effort.
One of the coaches who has played a central role in Castlehaven’s rise is Dinny Cahalane, manager of the club’s all-conquering ladies team. He is the man that ties it all together, captain Siobhan Courtney explained.
‘The commitment and dedication that he gives, he expects the same from the rest of us. He leads from the front,’ she says. Cahalane certainly has the Midas touch. His CV is impressive. The four successive county title triumphs – junior C (2019), junior B (2020), junior A (21) and intermediate (2022) – is incredible. This group has momentum, but Cahalane feels the spark for these fireworks was lit in October 2017 when Castlehaven captured the Cork LGFA Junior D title. They beat Mallow after a replay. Alice O’Driscoll was the captain. Mairead O’Driscoll scored one of the goals. Siobhan Courtney, Aideen Santry, Rachel Whelton, Emma Daly, Shelly Daly, Aine Daly and Jessica McCarthy are some of the players that won the junior D title in ’17 and lined out in the recent intermediate final.
‘That was the one that got us started. We won the double, league and county, and we pushed from there,’ Cahalane says, but it wasn’t all county titles and celebrations.
‘When we started first I remember us playing Dohenys down in the Black Field, walking off the field scratching my head after we were beaten by about 40 points. That isn’t too long ago.’
Castlehaven's Rachel Whelton nailed the winning free in the recent Cork LGFA intermediate final. (Photo: David Ribeiro)
They also lost the 2018 Cork junior C final to neighbours O’Donovan Rossa. A bump in the road, as it turns out. They regrouped. Castlehaven didn’t shy away from the challenge. Fierce hard work is key, insists Cahalane. Pride in the jersey, too. They saw the club’s men enjoying glory day and wanted the same. Success breeds success. And that 2017 triumph got this train moving. It hasn’t stopped powering forward since, and has now arrived at senior level where Castlehaven, a junior D team six years ago, will now rub shoulders with the mighty Mourneabbey next season.
‘It’s an opportunity and a challenge we are looking forward to. It’s where we wanted to get to. It will take a bit more to be competitive at that level but we are willing to put in the hard work,’ Courtney says.
It is a huge step up, from intermediate to the oxygen-sapping heights of senior. Cahalane watched the recent Cork LGFA senior final between Mourneabbey and Éire Óg. It’s a different world, he thought.
‘Their strength and conditioning, they are like professionals compared to intermediate teams,’ he confessed, but in August Castlehaven defeated senior club Clonakilty, who contested the recent senior B county final, to win the West Cork LGFA Division 1 title. That suggests Haven can hold their own against senior clubs. Each season they meet to set out their targets: the senior B crown is reachable. ‘We are not going up to make up numbers,’ Cahalane insists. ‘We will compete.’
It’s eight years since Marie Buckley, Tina Browne and Linda O’Donovan embarked on their recruitment drive. Look at how far Castlehaven has come, at all levels. This is a club effort. From the players to the coaches, the volunteers to the fans.
‘The backing is there within the club. Everyone wants the women’s side to be as successful as the men. People want to see the ladies’ set-up doing well, and that includes the underage,’ Siobhan Courtney says.
‘People are involved in all areas of the club and are willing to give their time freely, and multiple volunteers are overlapping with the men’s and underage clubs, and it’s benefiting everyone.’ And Castlehaven’s women are not finished yet.
