How 'bio-banding' is helping Clare's young hurlers to reach their potential
FROM SMALL, AND sometimes large, acorns, mighty oaks grow.
Exhibit A: The Clare minor hurlers that will contest Saturday’s Electric Ireland All-Ireland minor championship final with Waterford.
That Clare group will include the first batch of players exposed to the bio-banding training process which kicked on for Clare U14 academy teams in 2022.
It is a disarmingly simple idea designed to max out every last ounce of potential in talented young players of all sizes – split them into separate training groups based on their biological age, not their chronological age.
So the smaller, lighter players, who may still be some way off Peak Height Velocity, or their growth spurt, train together, while the taller, heavier players, who are closer to full maturation, do likewise.
Now, instead of an early developing, six-foot powerhouse 14-year-old ploughing through a skillful but smaller defender, which does little for the development of either player, it is a much more level playing field.
Applying bio-banding to Clare academy teams was the brainchild of Rob Mulcahy, who headed up their underage athletic development department, and is now in its fourth season. In 2023 they played the first bio-banded challenge games against Limerick.
“It’s actually a brilliant idea, where the smaller lads would be in their pods, they’re all hopping off each other, and then the bigger lads who would usually be pushing away the smaller lads are now off in their own group and up against a guy who is the same size at 14 or 15,” said Clare minor manager Ger O’Connell, who has guided his team to Saturday’s final in Thurles.
“Now they have to use their feet more, they have to speed up their hurling because the other player they’re meeting is as big and they can’t push by him or push him away. It also helps the smaller lads to develop more confidence in tackling and winning the ball quickly and sharply. It’s a brilliant idea.”
Ronan Keane, Clare’s U14 technical coach, gave an insight into the approach in an explainer video put together in 2023.
“We’ve all seen mismatches that have occurred at this age,” said Keane. “But yet you’d say that you’d never put an 11-year-old out marking a 17-year-old because that would be illogical and that wouldn’t make sense. But in reality that’s what can happen at U14 with the biological and chronological ages being different. It can be as great as plus or minus two or three years.”
Left to their own devices, bigger players at underage level tend to run more in straight lines. Because the shortest route from A to B is a straight line and they can generally clear a path for themselves with their power.
“When they’re put with players of their own stature, they have to develop the finer skills, their agility and movement-based skills,” explained Keane of the early developers.
The same phenomenon exists in Gaelic football, of big players standing out in their early teens, often scoring goals for fun and dominating games, only to be overtaken as the years go on by players whose growth spurt came later. Often those late developers, like current Galway football powerhouse Damien Comer, worked harder on their skills at an earlier age.
“I see this now as a school-teacher working with younger lads – the smaller lads who are battling away might be struggling a little bit, but you know they will be fine,” said Comer earlier this year on The Puke Football Podcast.
“While the bigger lads who are getting it easy when they’re younger, they always struggle if they don’t work on their skills, they always struggle when they get older.”
What Clare did was to intervene and to give both the early and late developers a better chance of meeting their full potential. The process works well with the large, 70-plus group of players in the academy groups, at U14 and U15.
The data collected a couple of years back from one group of academy players, who were all born in 2008, was striking.
One player, aged 14 years and one month, had a projected adult height of over six-foot-two and had just 5% of height left to gain. Another player in the same group, who was projected to reach a similar height, had another 12% of height to gain.
In the Clare football academy in 2023, one player was six-foot-six and over 15 stone and another was five-foot-four and just over six stone.
The data helped Clare to group academy players based on three distinct groups; those who were less than 90% matured, those between 90% and 95%, and those above 95%.
Former Clare senior camogie manager O’Connell worked with Clare underage teams for three seasons before being appointed minor manager for 2025. He dealt with players who had been through the bio-banding process at U14 and U15 level. The hope is that, by the time they get to minors, they should all be more developed and better able to exist together on the pitch.
“When you get to, say, our minor team now, the likes of a Liam Murphy, who is a smaller lad, he has to be able to hold his own against a Jack O’Halloran or an Evan Crimmins or a Dara Kennedy who is six-foot-two or three,” said O’Connell.
“I think the confidence these lads build up from 14s, 15s, 16s is brilliant, for when they’re training with us now three or four days a week as minors
“These lads now would have been the first group that would have gone through it at 14. Now three years on, they’re minors. It’s a great idea and I know the U14s are continuing that on. It’s brilliant because it allows the smaller lads to gain confidence and it gets the bigger lads developing parts of their hurling game that they’ll need as they get older.”
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