There haven’t been too many setbacks for Cavan since returning to adult level camogie after a decade’s absence in 2020. They won the Nancy Murray Cup in the first Covid championship at All-Ireland junior A level, and even reached the premier junior final that same season. The followed on from that to win the Littlewoods Ireland Camogie League Division 4 title and were anticipating making a bold bid for championship honours. A painful lesson followed.
Last year we took our eye off the ball in the championship,
admits Aideen Coyle, this year’s joint captain with Josephine Maguire.
We underestimated the challenge Roscommon were going to throw at us because we’d beaten them in the League and they came up to our pitch and beat us. You live and learn and that’s one thing we learned from last year. We were guilty of looking past Roscommon and we shouldn’t have. They came and were deserving winners on the day. So this year, we’ve never looked past the next game.
Despite being from a county with such a rich football tradition, the big ball was always secondary in Coyle’s world.
For me, camogie was always front and centre. I played club football but it was always the camogie I preferred. I grew up in a family that had all played camogie. My auntie and my mam would have been heavily involved in the local club as well.
A native of Drung, where she plays her club football, the 25-year-old PE and biology teacher at Virginia College lines out for Laragh in camogie, winning the county championship for the first time in 31 years last October. A supreme talent, Coyle actually played on one of Cavan’s last county junior teams prior to them being disbanded when she was just 14.
