By Niall Gartland

DUNDALK IT will return to the Sigerson Cup football next season having triumphed in the Trench Cup final showdown against Trinity College in February.

It’s no mean feat when you consider the institute caters for roughly five-a-half-thousand students, a world away from the recent winners of the Sigerson competition (St Mary’s historic 2016/17 success the very noteworthy exception).

Billing itself as the “leading higher education institute of the North Leinster/South Ulster Region”, there’s a strong Ulster theme to their remarkable progress in colleges football.

A leading member of the management team is Monaghan legend Eamonn McEneaney, who can call upon a host of Monaghan and Armagh-based players in particular on their Freshers and Senior teams.

Indeed, the star of the show in their Trench Cup win was Monaghan’s Stephen Mooney, who came on as a sub last weekend in his county’s near-miss against Donegal.

They also captured the captured their Freshers championship title, backboned by the likes of Monaghan’s Kian Mulligan (back-up keeper to Rory Beggan at senior intercounty level), Oisin McCormac and Kian Duffy as well as Armagh’s Michael McCreesh and Darragh McMullen, just to name a handful of their Ulster contingent.

McEneaney, who resides in Blackrock, a seaside village just to the south of Dundalk, says the management team led by himself, Wayne Kierans and Darren Clarke made no secret of their Sigerson aspirations.

“In the three years we’ve been there, the aim has been to try to get up to Sigerson level, and we’ve worked towards that with the Fresher teams. We won their Division Two league twice and then this year we won the championship.

“We got to the Trench Cup two years in-a-row and then got over the line this year, and that means we’ll be playing in Sigerson level next year.

“It’s massive for the college as we’ve been trying for so long.

“In 2016/17 we played at Sigerson level but it was only for one year, and we’re hoping to guard against that happening again.

“Next year we have a lot of our Trench Cup team available again so they have experience of winning at a relatively high level but we appreciate it’s a big step up to Sigerson.”

As well as a relative lack of numbers, McEneaney and co. also have to contend with the fact that Dundalk IT is very much a commuter college. They make the most of the cards they’ve been dealt, though.

“It’s one of the challenges we have compared to the likes of DCU or Ulster, where they have a lot of guys living on campus or in close proximity.

“We’re a commuter college so for example we had three guys from Crossmaglen and they’re commuting up and down and that presents a challenge, where they’re also involved with county set-ups and they’re trying to juggle everything. We try to make it as easy as possible for them but it’s still a challenge.

“We don’t have the pick of the bigger colleges, and we’re conscious we’re trying to punch above our weight if you like. We’d maybe have the pick of 40 or 50 Freshers whereas the bigger colleges have the pick of maybe 180.

“There’s a lot of good work going in though, there’s a lot of strong courses and graduates do get jobs. There’s a lot of local businesses, north and south, who come in and talk to our students.

“On the football front I should also mention Shane Lennon, who was there for 14 or 15 years before me, he had a strong connection with Louth GAA and put in a lot of time and effort raising the profile of GAA in the college.”

Third-level competitions like the Sigerson Cup are shoehorned in around the beginning of the National Leagues, which creates an obvious area of potential conflict with intercounty set-ups. McEneaney says that intercounty managers have been accommodating, but that the GAA needs to take another look at the scheduling.

“Some counties seem to prohibit their players from lining out at college level which is a shame, as all lads want to do is play football.

“You have to consider that some of these players are coming from clubs where they maybe don’t win a lot, and I think colleges football is so exciting to watch and I can’t wait to see it next year under the new rules as I think it will be even better.

“Obviously county football is massively important but colleges football is at a really high level and I think the GAA needs to do something to alleviate the way the competitions are just squeezed into the calendar.”

“Something I discovered back in the day when I was playing myself is the friendships you make from playing alongside lads from different counties.

“When we won the Trench Cup this year we stayed a night in Galway, the lads all socialised and had great fun together and you could clearly see the friendships that have developed.

“It’s a great opportunity to play alongside lads from different counties and I think the GAA don’t always fully appreciate that,” McEneaney added.