Derry footballer Brendan Rogers is every bit as lethal with a hurl in his hand, as he is with a football at his boot, and that is evident from his dual success with Slaughtneil.
The community is one of the very few clubs in Ulster who get the best out of both codes, winning county and Ulster titles in both over the past decade, and treating the two sports equally.
Loughmore Castleiney in Tipperary are arguably the most famous dual club in the country, because of how they combine the two codes in their training sessions.
It wouldn't be unusual for them to start the session with a hurling drill, before bringing out the size five O'Neill's balls and going into a football one.
Speaking on The Puke Football Podcast, in collaboration with the Sure What Do We Know? show, the multi-talented sports star explains how Slaughtneil have adopted a similar approach to their training sessions.
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Our GAA correspondent @PukeFootballPod finds out from @BrendanRogers6 just how @GACSlaughtneil handle their dual club status and how they have created a schedule that fits a whole community and keeps it thriving. @Doiregaa @officialgaa @Loughmore_Gaa pic.twitter.com/cv2HtyCh4P
— Sure What Do We Know (@SureWhatDoWe) September 18, 2024
"We do dual training sessions", Rogers' revealed.
"You split the time up, so say you do 50 minutes or an hour and 10 for one, and 35/45 for the other, whatever the balance needs to be, depending on what game is priority at the weekend.
"You obviously try and focal that, but you don't lose out on the skill orientation of it, but it's also a case of training smarter.
"You don't have to do the running twice, so say you had to get conditioning done for both teams - if you did them on different nights, then the dual player would have to do two sets of running, but it is all for the same one goal, which doesn't make sense.
"So the footballers will go first, and the hurlers will go second, but the hurlers will already have warmed up, so the dual players would just switch over and not have to warm up again, and whatever conditioning has to be done, will be done in that window, during that change over, so it's all done as a club, at the same time.
"Then the managers get to see what the other managers are doing in terms of like managing the players better, understanding the players, and because training is on the one night, you might find that people would do both because they're not out any more nights of the week."
Of course not every community has the capacity to do this, even if they are a dual club, but in an ideal world, this would be the end goal in terms of how the GAA could be ran as an organisation within clubs.
You can listen to the full conversation with Brendan Rogers on his GAA career on The Puke Football Podcast, or if you want hear the longer version where the Derry man speaks about his life, hobbies, school and everything you can think of, tune into Sure What Do We Know?
