Indiana pioneers

An overly zealous official in the university athletics department spotted the eye-catching boast and asked the evangelists into his office to justify the claim. When she first learned the basic skills of camogie at Ballyboden St. Enda’s in South Dublin, club president Lorna Whyte hadn’t figured on ever having to take the stand in South Bend, Ind., to defend one of the game’s articles of faith.
“He said something to me about the lacrosse people being very upset and objecting to the slogan,” said Whyte, a former Dublin junior player currently studying for a PhD in cell and molecular biology.
“He told me that we either had to scientifically prove this was the case or else add in the words ‘Not been proven’ in brackets on the T-shirt. There was no point trying to argue about the scientific proof, so I just reminded him that the Notre Dame football [gridiron] team are the Fighting Irish and have a drunken Irish leprechaun as a mascot that we find kind of offensive but have never objected to.”
The T-shirts survived the censor’s cut and during a visit to Boston for the North American hurling finals last fall, Whyte came across three strangers wearing them.
More proof of how far they’d come since the days herself, and two other expats — Gerry Quinn and Jackie Whyte — began pucking around on the lawn of the North Quad during their lunch break.
Passersby stopped and stared, as impressed by the fluency of their stick work as they were baffled about the origins of this exotic game, and eventually, enough American students expressed serious interest that Quinn decided it was worth trying to harness their enthusiasm with some formal instruction.
An extensive trawl of the university yielded up a total of a dozen hurleys and at the first training session there were four more players than there were sticks for them to use.
Still, they unearthed a jewel or two. One of the recruits, Matt Connolly, who spoke with a broad Milwaukee accent, had never been to Ireland in his life but after hurling for eight years with a club up in Wisconsin had arrived at Notre Dame determined to start a club himself.
Another American convert caught the bug so bad that upon arriving in France to spend a year studying in Paris, he wrote to his mother to have her send on his hurley immediately.
“At first, people thought we were crazy and I was always getting questions about fatalities,” Quinn said. “It was a bit shaky to say the least but we got an email list off the Gaelic Society and once the fact that it was an Irish sport got out, the whole thing skyrocketed. At one point I was training 30-40 students at a time. We started out just doing drills and fitness training because the university would not allow any sort of contact or competition.
“We weren’t an official club at that point and they didn’t want to be liable for injuries. Although the club was getting more and more popular, we began losing people with great potential because of the lack of games. We were losing especially talented people with lacrosse and ice hockey backgrounds,” Quinn said. “Then one day without my say-so, the lads just broke into a game, no helmets or nothing, diving at the sliotar, swinging madly and luckily, no injuries. From that point on, we kept all our budding hurlers on board.”
Official recognition came down from the college this year. Now, the first university hurling club in America has a core membership of 60 and plenty of hurleys to go around.
In Croke Park, Pat Daly, the head of coaching and games development, received their first request for help and embraced the cause. He’s sent them batches of hurleys, sliotars, instruction manuals and videos. In tandem with the college’s Gaelic Society, the club runs evenings at a local bar where tapes of All Ireland finals are shown so that the fledgling hurlers can marvel at the standard of play and understand they are part of a much larger phenomenon.
“We have almost as many women as men so we play mixed games on campus,” Whyte said. “We try to make sure that girls mark girls and boys mark boys just to make it a fairer contest. There was no point in us trying to have a separate camogie club or anything because really, trying to explain the subtle differences would just confuse the issue even more.”
She added: “As it is I think we’ve done well just to get everybody to grasp the terminology of the game and the rules. In actual fact, most people who come to the sport are amazed about the lack of rules. They seem to think there should be more complicated rules than there is.”
In a nation so obsessed with college sports that every single Notre Dame grid-iron game is live on national television, the neophyte hurlers like to joke about being the best university team in the country. While the long-term aim remains to get enough members to ensure serious intra-mural competitions can be held on campus, they have already established links with other clubs around the Midwest. One weekend last April, Notre Dame sent hurling and camogie teams to participate in a quadrangular tournament with clubs from Atlanta, Milwaukee and St. Louis at Gaelic Park in Chicago. For an outfit not yet a year old, it was a giant step.
Progress can be measured in different ways. The Friday night before every Notre Dame home game, an enormous pep rally is held involving famous alumni, a marching band and a cast of thousands. When emceeing this ritual, the simian-featured leprechaun mascot (a sought-after role for which students compete fiercely) traditionally uses a shillelagh to conduct the crowd’s cheers. Earlier this season, Lorna Whyte looked up and saw he had a hurley in his hand instead. A reading from the new testament.