Ten years ago, when Bandon Grammar School first joined Munster’s top-tier rugby institutions in the Senior Cup, they thought there was a secret sauce. Some mystery ingredient that needed to be uncovered.
They were “the little village of schools rugby” in search of some profound methodology through which they could compete with the provincial heavyweights.
The more time has gone on, the more they have shed that idea. By stripping everything back, they have made life less complicated and, in the process, delivered silverware.
Last March, they lifted their first major trophy when defeating CBC to be crowned Munster Schools Junior Cup champions. Now comes the task of transplanting that success to Senior Cup level, starting against PBC on Wednesday.
Where once Bandon Grammar might’ve wrestled with an inferiority complex, they have learned to leverage the benefits of their close-knit community.
“It’s very easy for us to say, ‘We’re tiny, we don’t have the same playing pool, we don’t have the facilities, we don’t have the money,’” says head of rugby Philip Murphy.
“We just started reversing it and saying, ‘Okay, we are the small school, we’re the little village of schools rugby, where can we find benefits in that?’
“You see all these little villages doing amazing things in GAA. Why can’t we do it with the school? And what is it that these little villages have? Why were Kilbrittain able to win the All-Ireland? Why are Newcestown a senior club?
“So we reversed it and said, ‘Look, we’ve a small playing pool, that means that we can be unbelievably well aligned as coaches through the different teams and through our coaching, our language, how we want to play.’
“There’s no crowd control. I’m head coach of the junior team and we might have 16, 17 lads training most days. There’s loads of negatives to that, but there’s also loads of positives. We can really give time and love to develop individuals, and that’s a gigantic positive. Guys aren’t just another number. We can really help and influence them.”
The Junior Cup triumph infused the school with extra belief that they are taking the right approach. They have already backed up that success by winning the U18 Bowen Shield against Christians in December.
BGS has 720 students, split between boys and girls. Around 180 of those are boarders. They draw students from all across West Cork and into Kerry, and east towards the city suburbs.
There’s also a cohort of students from Spain, Germany, and China. Not exactly rugby strongholds, but still, they recently boasted two German internationals and this year, two Luxembourg lads, totally independent of each other, came over to play rugby.
Their coaching group is equally small and diverse, mixing Irish influence with an international flair. Backs coach Santiago Gonzalez is both Argentinian and “proud Bandonian”. He has lived there for almost a decade and just bought a house. Not long after arriving, Gonzalez recruited strength and conditioning coach Guillermo Castex.
Their French head coach, Régis Sonnes, joined at the outset of their rugby journey as an A school. After a spell coaching European giants Toulouse to a Top 14 title, he returned to Bandon in 2023. Last November, he was appointed the Spanish national women’s team head coach, but continues to commute back and forth to see out the current campaign.
The biggest change when they became a Senior Cup school was the structure of the week. They train two mornings in the gym and one on skills. There are pitch sessions Monday and Tuesday, maybe a game on Wednesday, recovery Thursday, and then gym, pitch, and video analysis work on Saturday.
As Junior Cup head coach, Murphy sends elements of their attacking shape to the second- and first-year coaches to harmonise the message. This month, the first years began their introduction to gym work.
“They’re doing a lot of gymnastics and rolling and crawling and falling and just preparing their bodies for the years ahead,” says Murphy, who also preaches the benefits of video analysis for student engagement.
“What do kids do all day if they have their phone in their hand? They’re looking at videos.
“So we find that it’s a really good way to get info into them, just little snippets. You can make that as interesting as you want. You can have themes to it. You can put music to it.
“It’s funny because we’re all pushing on… We put Thunderstruck on a video a couple of weeks ago, and it went down like a lead balloon. The lads had no idea where that song came from or what it was.
“It’s very easy to fall into the trap of, oh my god, let’s train 200 hours a week. But we don’t really. We try and train when we should train, and we try and train the things that we should train, and not just do it for the sake of it.
“We used to think that there was a secret sauce, but there actually isn’t. That’s part of the belief, isn’t it? That there’s nothing we’re missing. We know that it’s there if we tap into the right things.”
