‘The camaraderie and friendships last long into the future’

THE Mayo U-16 girls team should heed the words of Teresa Ward, the first and only woman ever to captain Mayo to an U-16 All-Ireland title.

The year was 1976. Liam Cosgrave was Taoiseach, Pope Paul VI was in The Vatican and the Ladies Gaelic Football Association was just two years old.

That year, Mayo won the inaugural U-16 All-Ireland championship with a thumping 4-13 to 0-4 win over Kilkenny.

The football never quite took off in Kilkenny, needless to say. However, the closest Mayo came to replicating that success was in 1996, when a team captained by future All-Ireland senior champion Martha O’Malley fell to Waterford in the final.

Teresa Ward has been steeped in sport since becoming the first Mayo woman to captain an All-Ireland winning Gaelic football team.

Teresa (née Higgins) took her first solo in her native Claremorris, where her family were steeped in football and where ladies football thrived in the early years of Mayo LGFA.

Together with her clubmate Anne O’Brien, Teresa scaled Kilkenny in the All-Ireland final – ‘jinking and darting her way through a mesmerised Kilkenny defence, as one account recorded – to score 2-2 from full-forward.

Back then, teams travelled to games in car-loads instead of buses. There were no post-match meals or bonding trips like the ones enjoyed by the current Mayo U-16s, but that did not make it any less enjoyable.

“We went all over the place and we had wonderful times playing football,” Teresa tells The Mayo News. “The camaraderie and friendships last long into the future, you meet these people all over the place that you played football with way back in the time. We had wonderful memories, I have to say, of football.

“When you are 16 you don’t realise the seriousness or the enormity of it. When you’re young, you take everything in your stride, you just go out there and play the very best and you hope things work out.

“We were very determined, we played with such freedom and expressed ourselves in such a way that we weren’t inhibited in any way. I look back now, and we didn’t understand or appreciate what it meant.”

Now domiciled in Charlestown, Teresa has witnessed at first-hand the joy her adopted and native clubs brought to both their communities in recent years.

The Claremorris ladies’ recent All-Ireland junior club final adventure is one that stands out.

“The women playing for Claremorris that day have no concept of the joy they gave to so many people,” says Teresa, who became a driving force behind the Special Olympics some years after her playing career finished. 

“I know a neighbour of mine in Claremorris, he had a grand-daughter playing, he was in his 90s. What joy it brought to him and so many more people like him.”

It’s only when she looks back that she realises the magnitude of what Mayo achieved back in 1976.

“I think when you’re young…you have no idea of the joy and excitement you’re providing the community and all of the flags up. There is a spirit of community and everyone getting behind you.”

This Saturday, 35 of Mayo’s finest young footballers will bring the joy of ‘76 to the summer of 2024.

The old man that travelled to Dublin to watch his grand-daughter play play for Claremorris knows that feeling all too well.

There’ll be many more like him in Ballinasloe this Saturday.