IN 2014, when the surgeon told Grainne McGoldrick that he advised her to stop playing camogie, she wept.

“I remember someone ringing me from home and I just cried and cried as they had told me I shouldn’t play again.”

The timing of the leg break, which happened while she was playing for Eoghan Rua against Loughgiel, was terrible.

McGoldrick was at the pinnacle of her career as a camog. She had won Junior and intermediate titles with her club, and an Intermediate title with Derry, and helped both club and county reach the senior level.

The journey had been long and hard, and she felt that she was going to miss out on the rewards. And more importantly, she felt that she had let people down.

“I was captain, I felt that I needed to be there, but I wasn’t. So I felt for the team.”

To understand how crushing the blow was for McGoldrick you have to understand the story that led her to that point.

McGoldrick says that her parents are the biggest reason for her success in sport. They gave her the support and the drive to succeed.

Her father Sean and mother Schira have long sporting backgrounds. Her mother swam competitively and played camogie for Loughgiel. Her father is the current coaching co-ordinator for the Eoghan Rua club, and was a key player in building the team that won the club’s first Derry Senior Championship title.

“Mum and Dad always pushed us to work hard and to try our best at anything we do, relationships, school, work, music. They instilled a drive and determination in me, and in all my siblings.

“The more that I have thought about it, the more I think my motivation came down to wanting to make them proud.”

Camogie and the GAA were not her first sports. McGoldrick was a swimmer, and competed in athletics and cross country. She competed in all those sports up until she was 18. McGoldrick felt that those sports gave her fitness a boost when it came to playing camogie. But when she went to university camogie became her priority.

As a younger player, McGoldrick’s motivation and ambition comes from her parents.

Both her mother and father are ‘sporty’, as McGoldrick described it.

Her mother was a swimmer, and played camogie at UCD. Her father, famously has a background in hurling, football and basketball. Both parents also played squash.

Grainne has six brothers, and a sister, all of whom have played GAA at one level or another. She says that the sibling rivalry helped to an extent.

“The boys were stronger than me and that probably helped. I don’t know if it massively helped me to be more competitive.

“I don’t know if it is nature or nurture, but we have always been competitive in our house. We turned everything into a competition when we were young. Everything was about competing. So I am naturally very competitive.”

The Eoghan Rua club was a football-focused club in the 1980s. A group of men came together and decided that if the club was to succeed in the future then they needed a proper coaching structure which was then set up. From that came a camogie and hurling club was started in 1995, set up by Grainne’s father Sean along with some others including Pádraig Ó Mianáin. They trained on the hockey pitches at the Dominican College in Portstewart.

McGoldrick was 11 years old, what she describes as a late starter to camogie.

“I remember when I went to Loreto in first year, being so jealous of girls from Glenullin, Kilrea, Dunloy and Ballycastle and Dungiven, as they could hit out of their hands and hit off of their left and right side. I was still only able to hit the ball on the ground.”

The club had challenges at the start. McGoldrick didn’t play as part of a team till she was 15 because there weren’t enough numbers. They had to play hurling with the boys, and played with them until they were u-14. So McGoldrick and girls like Jane Carey had to try and compete with the boys.

“In hindsight that was the best thing for us, because we had to get stuck in. We had to be brave and try to pick up the skills as quick as the boys. Back then it pushed you on.”

Trying to compete with the boys was an early test of McGoldrick’s resolve, but her mental fortitude would receive a bigger test when the Eoghan Rua’s club got a girls team together a few years later.

“We would just get hammered week in, week out. Even with the hurlers we would been beaten a lot. Need I say, much of my underage career was spent just honestly getting hidings from teams. It wasn’t very nice. It is maybe where I got my drive from. I didn’t like losing.

“I think that makes you more resilient. It almost makes you hungrier to win.

“When I got older and was able to play on university and county teams, and I was playing around brilliant players I got the feeling of winning and it was nice.”

Padraig Ó Mianáin was an important coach for McGoldrick in those early years. He would go on to coach all the McGoldricks at senior level, but Grainne and her brother Barry benefitted from his coaching.

“He would have come and collected us when we were 15,16,17, and we would have went up to the university to puck the ball about. He would have showed us how to hit a ball with backspin, with top spin. He would show us how to float a ball into someone’s hand to make it easier to catch. I am terrible at catching, always have been. I am a bit of a wimp. I pull out at the last moment, and stick my stick up to make it look like I am going for it. Padraig used to take us out and hit high ball after high ball to make me and Barry practice our catching.

“He would practice a lot of technical thing with us. He would want to get our technique on point with striking, blocking and hooking.”

Making the step up to university and county camogie was an important step for McGoldrick.

“At university and county I was aware that I was playing with brilliant players. When you are playing with good players it is really enjoyable. I didn’t want to let them down. Playing with good players made me want to be as good as I wanted to be for them.”

McGoldrick joined the Derry panel in 2001, when Dominic McKinley approached her to come the squad. She was 16.

McGoldrick said she really enjoyed the experience in her first year, however she said she had no confidence. She joined a team made up of experienced players who had won the All-Ireland title in 2000.

“I had only started playing in 1995. All I had experienced when I was playing for Loreto was playing St Pat’s, Maghera and St Mary’s, Magherafelt, and you were getting beat.

“When I was playing for Eoghan Rua, we were getting beat. I was always playing against players who were better. I got onto the county u-14 team but I was always playing with superstars and I was never one of them.

“I was surprised that Dominic phoned me. They had won the All-Ireland the year before. Paula McAtamney was playing on the team and she was a superstar. There were lots of great players on that team. I doubted myself about that.”

McGoldrick was a player coming from a junior club, playing alongside girls who were from senior clubs like Swatragh and Lavey who were competing for Ulster and All-Ireland titles.

“It was something that made me doubt myself. But Dominic saw something in me and gave me the confidence.

“I remember thinking the girls were so old, but they were only in their early 20s. I remember a girl called Grainne Maguire from Swatragh, and I remember thinking that if she hit me in a game then I’d be knocked to the ground and I probably wouldn’t recover. I felt physically so small compared to them. I was still swimming, and playing hockey and running competitively against people who were my own age. Then I went into this Derry team with girls who I thought were absolute units. They were playing for Swatragh and Sleacht Néill and I was coming from a place where people surfed and played golf.

“What I did have was my friend Jane Carey who started the same year we had each other which helps.”

The experience of playing for Derry also showed her the levels that she could reach. She discovered that she could play alongside the best in Derry, but she also learned how the top players from other counties performed.

The player that she admired, and the one she aspired to be like was not far away.

“Jane Adams is not much older than me, but she was an unbelievable player. I played against her when I was 18 or 19. I thought she was amazing. One of the things that struck me about her wasn’t just that she was an unbelievable player and athlete but she was so consistent in her striking, shooting and tackling.”

The Antrim player, Adams, was at the University of Ulster (now Ulster University) at the same time as McGoldrick, and they played alongside each other.

“Talk about someone who spurs you on to be the best that you can be, she was that person. She was amazing. She was so encouraging. As a superstar of camogie in Ireland, she was so encouraging. I really enjoyed playing with her and Lisa McCrickard and Catherine McGourty. It was really fun playing with those girls.”

She also learned an important lesson. That even if you have star players, it doesn’t mean that a team will win, because while their team had a string of stars, they were not successful.

“I learned that you have to play as a team if you want to win. I also learned it is more fun winning as a team rather as an individual. If you win as a team it is better because you know the sacrifices that you have went through. It was more fun having success with other people. We learnt that year that no one person is better than the team.”

The experience of playing with Adams and of failing to win at university taught McGoldrick that hard work was important if she wanted to make sure she didn’t let her team mates down. As she had come from individual sports McGoldrick had the tools to improve herself. An athlete in running or swimming must do the work on their own, and that is what McGoldrick did to help her get to where Adams was.

“I spent hours up at the pitch on my own. I would take a bag of balls and strike from different areas on the pitch for hours.

“I wanted to be as skilful as I could be and as consistent as I could be so that it would benefit the team. You also feel good when you can consistently strike a long ball or put points over the bar. It helps the team and it helps your friends. It is a nice feeling.

“I just always wanted to push myself to be the best that I could be.”

From early on, McGoldrick was the free-taker and a key forward for her club. It is a role that helped define her. In the early days they didn’t win many games, so to have a chance of victory they had to take every opportunity. That meant scoring consistently

“If I didn’t score the club would struggle. When you are training with the team you don’t get an opportunity to do a lot of repetitive drills, of working on frees or shooting. In order for me to help the team then I had to put in a lot of time myself.”

Where McGoldrick lives, in a rural area of north Derry, there is plenty of time and space to go and practice.

“I used to make playlists and I would be up at the pitch for an hour and a half and I wouldn’t realise it as I would just be shooting from all angles for as long as possible. And I loved it. It was never a chore for me. I was aware that it helped me with consistency, but it was also something that I loved. I loved listening to music, and I would be out there listening to a song, and be thinking about being in Croke Park on the left wing and shooting the ball over the bar, and thinking it was a winning point in an All-Ireland final.”

What McGoldrick was doing is called visualisation, and it is a technique that lots of athletes use across a variety of sports.

“With the Derry team, they brought in sports psychologists in 2017. They asked if anyone used visualisations. I said, ‘I know this sounds sad’, and some of the girls laughed at me, ‘I used to love going to bed during championship season and I would close my eyes and visualise what I was going to do in the game in the next day.’

“I said to some of the girls, ‘you might think that I am crazy, but some of those visualisations come true.’

“I used to love nearly dreaming about what was going to happen in the game. Nobody ever taught me that. I don’t know how I came to be like that. It is something that I always enjoyed. It is something that I have innately did.”

McGoldrick felt a determination to succeed with Derry. She joined the county as a teenager and spent a long time with the same group of players.

“We were motivated to be the best that we could be to be successful as a team because there is nothing better than going out and celebrating wins.

“With Eoghan Rua I was driven to succeed because I wanted my friends and family to get the enjoyment out of it. I put a lot of pressure on myself to practice frees so that if we got frees then I could score them, and we could get victories from it. A lot of of our players had not had success at underage. We felt that we had to practice and be the best that we could be, otherwise the club might not have success. I just wanted that feeling of success, that euphoria.”

The same was not the case for Derry. Playing county camogie was a more personal pursuit. One of the goals that McGoldrick had held from early on was to play Division One camogie with Derry.

“I wanted to play with the best people in Derry, which I was able to do, and against the best in Ulster which I was able to do. But what I hadn’t done was play against the best people in Ireland. The only way you could do that was to play in Division One.”

It took about six years for McGoldrick to make her mark on the Derry team and to become a regular on the squad.

In 2006, Padraig Ó Mianáin took the team to an All-Ireland final in which they were beat. The following year they would go one better against Clare.

The campaign was a tough one.

“I remember a training game leading up to the final and everyone was fighting for their place. One girl had a stick broken over her leg, completely by accident but it showed you how much it meant to everyone.”

Having Padraig Ó Miannáin in as coach was important as he brought a lot of the skills and training techniques that he used with McGoldrick when she was a teenager.

“I think that one of the reasons why we won that year was because of his coaching. He is such a brilliant coach.”

They played Clare in the All-Ireland Junior Camogie final and it was a memorable day for McGoldrick. Not only the seven minutes of injury time that had to be played in order to get the decision.

“That was my first time playing in Croke Park. I remember the occasion being amazing.

“I remember playing with a goalkeeper’s stick. They used to measure the bas and they wouldn’t allow you to play with a wider bas. I got my smaller stick and got it measured at the start of the game and then went and changed it. I loved playing with the goalkeeper’s stick because the bas is bigger.

“I remember Aisling Diamond scoring the goal to win and the feeling being unbelievable.”

That season marked a moment when McGoldrick grew in confidence.

“I was playing midfield and I felt more confident. But I didn’t think I was a great asset. Padraig was from Eoghan Rua and he instilled confidence in me.”

They stayed in Jury’s in Dublin the night after and celebrated in Dublin. McGoldrick had work the next day but the principal gave her the day off.

McGoldrick said that she felt more confident as a camog as each year passed. She says that when Eoghan Rua moved up to senior camogie it gave her and her team mates a lift.

“If people asked me if I was confident going into a game I would say yes even if I really wasn’t. I felt that you had to verbalise confidence in order to make it happen.

“But in those years I became very confident. The minute you doubt yourself you are giving your opponent one up on them.”

Between 2009 and 2012, Derry reached three consecutive All-Ireland Intermediate semi-finals.

“It was getting to the point where we felt that we should have won an Intermediate title and playing in the top flight, and we were asking why it had not happened.”

The 2012 season was also important because it was the first season that McGoldrick accepted the captaincy.

“I had never been a captain of a team club or captain. A couple of managers had asked me to be captain before and I said no because I didn’t think I was good enough, or a strong enough leader. Then in 2012, John A (Mullan) asked me and I said yes.”

It was a fantastic year for Derry as they beat Galway after a replay.

“Eventually in 2012 we got over the line. We were fortunate. We won by a point, Karen Kielt scored a goal at the game. Winning that was great, but the three years before were so frustrating.”

Going into the final, there were pressure on McGoldrick. She had broken her finger a few months before and her finger was in a splint for eight weeks. There was also the pressure of the game being televised.

“I know we felt pressure going into the All-Ireland 2012. I know that I was awful in the 2012 final. Galway scored a goal and it was my fault. I was just sleeping for 30 seconds and my player drove through the defence and laid it off and they scored a goal. It was my fault. I remember as a team we were distracted that it was going to be televised. The 2007 final was televised but maybe I was too young to be distracted.”

The effect of the media spotlight on the GAA is something that McGoldrick has experience of. Her brothers played county football and hurling and she says that they had much more pressure on them to do interviews and things than she had.

“It is very different to the pressures that the boys have. We don’t feel the same pressure as the boys would. What I noticed when I watched the boys was that people would say things without knowing the sacrifices that players have gone through to get where they are. People can just make comments. Boys games are are more open to criticism because there is more interest and exposure and it tough and it takes its toll mentally.”

But she says that the increase in coverage of camogie can only be good for the game.

“Playing now, more coverage would only make me want to work harder to play better if the games were being broadcast.

“It is very beneficial that more games are being broadcast. I think it can only be a positive because you are opening it up to a bigger audience. You are getting to see the best players. Ulster Camogie should build on it and maintain it.”

Yet they got over the line, won the game and they could look to a big season ahead in 2013. Winning that year moved Derry up to the top tier of camogie.

In 2012 the Derry team won the Intermediate Championship and earned the right to play at Senior Championship level. Many players who might have stopped playing, hung on in order to test themselves against the very best.

“I was so excited for the 2013 season to start. I was buzzing to get a chance to test myself against Tipperary, Cork and Kilkenny. I could not wait to show them that we were a force to be reckoned with. I was confident about the team, we had some great players.”

She was a different player as well. She was a senior player, vastly experienced, and confident. She was also going to continue her captaincy into the new season.

“When we went up into Division One I felt that I needed to lead by example and help the girls be confident, and help them believe in themselves. I was 28 at that stage and older and wiser and a lot more confident, probably because of club successes.”

By 2013 Eoghan Rua had won two All-Ireland Intermediate titles. That year they won the Senior Ulster Championship when they beat Rossa.

The success of the club had come from a place of disappointment. They had lost three Intermediate Championship semi-finals. Then in 2005 they won. They had been 13 points down against Ballinascreen and came back to win by a point.

They built on that success. Joe Passmore came in to manage them. Grace McMullan transferred to the club from Loughgiel.

“She really helped us to believe. I had grown up hearing stories about Grace McMullan as a camogie player because mum had played for Loughgiel. She kept telling us that we were good enough, she told us that we could win a Derry senior. She probably helped us believe in ourselves. We felt that she was not going to lie to us. She is a Loughgiel and Antrim star, so we started to believe it.”

McGoldrick said the team bonded at the Dubai Sevens and the Kilmacud Sevens. And then in 2007 they won their first Derry Senior title.

McGoldrick noticed that players like Megan Kerr, who was a teenager on that team only experienced the days of success. Which was a contrast to McGoldrick’s own journey of suffering defeat after defeat.

So the experience of winning the club’s first All-Ireland title in 2011 was different for McGoldrick who had went through the tough days.

She said that the feeling of winning their first All-Ireland title was unbelievable.

“We were on a big yellow Chambers bus to our pitch. The car park was a sea of people. There were flags and blaring horns. It was the most amazing feeling I have ever had in sport, coming home to your friends and family.

“We won the 2010 Senior Camogie Championship and the boys won the 2010 men’s championship. When you come back after the boys won there would have only been a handful of people there. Everyone met in the Anchor and we went out. But there wasn’t the home coming. But in 2011 winning that All-Ireland, any player that you speak to that was a stand-out memory.”

So with that background of success, a confident McGoldrick went forward into playing senior camogie with the Derry team in 2013.

John A was still the manager, and they had a strong team.

“It was so enjoyable. We still got beat by a lot of teams. But I didn’t care. It was so enjoyable. We were getting to play with the best players and against the best players. It took your game to a new level.”

McGoldrick said the experience was important for her and her team mates so they could understand that they were capable of competing at that level.

“I think if you talk to a lot of Ulster camogie players they probably feel inferior. Whether that is something you just have from being from the north, or maybe you pick up from playing southern teams, I have no idea. But I loved it.

“The big plus for playing county was that you were going back to your club a better player and that benefits the club team. I always felt playing for the county was a privilege, but it made you a far more influential player for your club team.”

The favourite memories of 2013 included playing Tipperary in a league match.

“I remember going out thinking that they would be thinking that we wouldn’t be up to much. Myself and Katie McAuley were playing a two-man full-forward line. Between the two of us we scored 3-8. I reckon they thought they were going to win.

“I also remember playing Cork and Anna Geary got a yellow card. I remember the referee Owen Elliott warned her that she needed to stop, because she was just pulling and dragging me the whole game. But I loved it. She was the Cork captain a couple of years later. I loved that I could compete with her.

“They whipped us in the second half. Their manager went mad at half time and they ended up pulling away. We competed so well with them but they were stronger than them at the end.

“Beating Tipperary in a championship match, that is one of my career highlights. It was a brilliant feeling to be at the top table and know that you could mix it with the top teams. Any county player will tell you you have to be confident.”

What McGoldrick noticed was that the teams from the other provinces underestimated Derry.

“But we were very confident. I loved playing against them because you surprised or shocked them. Some of their defenders probably went out thinking that it would be easy against us. I felt that I couldn’t wait to show them how good that we were.

“Maybe it was our own inferiority complex that brought that out. But I used that as motivation. Back then we entered every game with confidence.”

However, then came the blow. The injury.

Eoghan Rua won the Derry Championship in 2014. McGoldrick felt confident that the club could go on and win a Senior All-Ireland title as they had played Milford in 2013 and had come very close to getting over the line.

McGoldrick felt that that year, in 2014, Milford – who had won a string of All-Ireland titles – may be there for the taking.

But McGoldrick would never get the opportunity, as she went out to play against Loughgiel in Ulster and suffered a leg break.

The extent of the injury was so bad that she needed surgery.

“The surgeon came down after they had finished the surgery. He said, ‘given the nature of the injury, I wouldn’t advise you to play again’. I had broken the joint of the knee. They had to put a few screws in it. It was right on the joint and not the shaft of the bone.

“I just cried. I remember someone ringing me from home and I just cried and cried as they had told me I shouldn’t play again.

“It took me a long time to get over that. I was very sad.

“Not being able to choose when to stop I had taken for granted.”

After all that work, all the tough games, all the battles, coming from a junior player to playing senior level, McGoldrick was heart broken. But her motivation was different now.

When she was younger she wanted to play with the best players, but as an older player she felt a determination to get back and support her team, and to make her family and her parents proud.

“So when I was injured it gave me the realisation of how much I needed camogie.

“After I got my head sorted after a few months I used that as an incentive. It motivated me to get back. The surgeon had advised me not to play sport again. That gave me the incentive to prove him wrong. I wanted to end my camogie career on my terms.

“I loved camogie when I was playing with the county. I loved the team element of the sport. I loved the craic. I loved the car journey with the girls from Eoghan Rua, listening to music. Just having chats with the girls. I suppose when I broke my leg then I wasn’t able to do that anymore. I always appreciated camogie, but that gave me a bigger appreciation because my career came to an end early and I didn’t get to decide when I stopped playing.

“As an amateur player you don’t play for the money. You play because you love the game. When I wasn’t able to play, if you ask any of my family or friends, I was really irritable and I wasn’t in a good place. I realised then how much I loved camogie and needed camogie. I needed the team around me to make me happy.”

The motivation to get back to play primarily was for Eoghan Rua’s.

“I thought that we had a great club team. I felt that we had a club team of winning an All-Ireland Senior title. We had a management team who understood us. They were professional of how we approached our preparation.

“I felt devastated for the team because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to play for a long time. I was also really enjoying playing camogie in Division One. I was captain, I felt that I needed to be there, but I wasn’t. So I felt for the team, but personally it was difficult.”

Her battle back was hard. She had to spend a lot of time in the gym working on her rehab.

“It is very isolating and lonely compared to a team environment. You have to spend time in the gym, before work, or after work, doing work for what seems like hours on end.”

She made an attempt to come back but slipped and fell and damaged cartilage and that extended her absence from the game. In total she was away from camogie for two and a half years.

“I never thought I would get back to playing for the county. I was focused on playing for the club. Even when I got back I had to accept that I was a different player.

“Mentally I felt that very tough. I couldn’t turn like I used to. I felt that I had to turn in roundabouts. I was a lot slower. I felt like my skills had deteriorated. It wasn’t that I was a lesser player. I was just a very different player. My contribution to the game was different.

“It was strange trying to get my head around that.”

Her goal was to get back onto the field and play for Eoghan Rua. She managed to do that and then she set a goal to win a championship. Unfortunately that goal coincided with the rise of Sleacht Néill who put paid to the dream of another home coming to the Eoghan Rua ground.

“A lot of girls in our team, who had been there when I left, had gone off to have babies or to get married.”

But another challenge arrived. The Derry manager John A Mullan contacted her and asked McGoldrick if she’d like to come back to play for the county.

She agreed to have a go.

“I remember being so nervous. It felt like it was my first time ever playing for the county. I was terrified. I was thinking I was adequate. But slowly and surely I got my confidence back. And I really enjoyed those couple of years playing for the county.

“I really enjoyed playing with some really great players. Playing county you are playing with the best players. You know you are going to get perfect passes to you. You are going to get some lovely passages of play. It is really satisfying. Playing at a higher intensity is so enjoyable. When you see things going form the training ground to the practice is really enjoyable.”

However, the time came when she couldn’t play county camogie anymore. It became a luxury that she couldn’t afford.

“I was 35, I was getting married. I had to wise up. There comes a point when your priorities have to change. And my priority for a very long time was camogie. A very long time. There comes a time when you have to reassess.”

The leg injury was such that it couldn’t handle the pressure of club and county, so one had to go, and of course it had to be club.

“I found that if I was playing for the county I wasn’t able to give it all to my club. I felt bad about that so I had to jack one in.

“I had played for the county for 18 years so I had played long enough. I finished when I was 35, there were some girls on the county who were in their late teens. There was a huge gap. And I felt that I had gave as much as I could.

“I wasn’t sad about it because it was my choice to leave, which wasn’t the case when I broke my leg in 2014. I didn’t have the choice to step away. I had to step away because of the injury. So it was nice having the option.”

Eventually it had to come to an end, and that year was 2019.

The break from county camogie allowed her to make sure she could give her all to her club. That is important because McGoldrick understands where the Eoghan Rua’s have been and where they are going to.

The achievement of Eoghan Rua’s winning Derry titles, or Ulster titles or even All-Ireland titles is remarkable if you understand the background of the area. As McGoldrick said. it is a place more famous for surfing and golf.

“There is no history of camogie. The senior camogie team was set up in 2000. The history of the football and hurling is of competing at junior level. We weren’t a GAA strong hold. You weren’t born and given a hurling stick or a football.

“You have golf, or swimming, or surfing, or there is soccer everywhere. There are all these options. You weren’t born into a GAA tradition.

“We didn’t have stories of success to spur us on were as now we do.

“We can show the younger players in the club that you might be from Coleraine, and there might not be the tradition that is there in Ballinderry, or Sleacht Néill, or Lavey or Swatragh, but you can still achieve success, regardless of underage success you can still be the best in Derry if you play for Eoghan Rua. You can still get to Croke Park. That is important for children to know.”

And McGoldrick believes that there is the potential for a bright future in the club.

“There are a lot of younger guys coming through. Dad is the coaching coordinator. The fundamentals started back and there were 95 four- or five-year-olds. That is fantastic. The interest is there. The GAA is so good because there is a community and family with the GAA.

“That is a good selling point up here. People are realising that in the north coast. hopefully it will continue to grow.”

With players with the attitude of McGoldrick, who believes in the importance of club, then Eoghan Rua will surely grow.