Foyle duo in Ulster squad

Foyle duo Niall Adair and Ben Christy along with Limavady Grammar foursome Jack McCool, Colt Callaghan, Jamie Millar and Scott McLean are all in David Barnett’s squad.

For the first time in Foyle College’s history, the Ulster Under 17 development squad will be training at Springtown, throughout the summer and Barnett, who has taken over from Gerald McCarter at the school, believes the training camp can only but help the sport throughout the city.

“Having summer training camps in the city will also promote the sport in the city and the surrounding areas,” admitted Barnett.

“There are two from Foyle and four from Limavady Grammar, so there a good representative from the North West in the Ulster 17 Development squad.

“Bevan (Lynch) has done a good job the last few years that he has been with City of Derry, they have got promoted and it’s good to see a lot of local boys from Foyle and Limavady making up the team.

“It’s good because you have local role models playing for City of Derry, for the young boys coming through to look up to. They are probably saying ‘that could be me in a seven or eight years time’.

“Rugby is more or less the only professional sport within Ulster now and these guys at this level are all really chomping at the bit, they want to impressive and they want to progress.

“I’m sure for some of them they want to see that dream of becoming a professional rugby player and hopefully maybe two or three from this squad can make that transition into professional rugby.”

The Killyclooney man also knows that taking over from McCarter is a big responsibility and he also knows that in recent years the school have been very successful on the cricket pitch.

“It’s a big set of boots to fill, Gerald done well and he has been at Foyle for a long time; he has brought a lot of success to the school, so hopefully I can also bring as much success to Foyle,” he added.

“The cricket in the North West and in particular Foyle has been quite successful over the last three or four years and we have a couple of good young junior teams coming through and we have a lot of staff here at Foyle who are willing to help out at both cricket and rugby, which is good.”

Barnett also admits that the current squad of 70 players will be whittled down to around 40 in preparation for next season’s inter provincial series.

“We start from under 16 level with around 70 guys, then in the under 17 level ideally we would be able to trim the squad down to around 40 for the Ulster Schools Under 18 squad for next summer, where at the Under 18 level they start playing Inter Provincial rugby.

“That is their sort of competitive season, so as I have said it starts at under 16 level and we try to keep getting the players to build up and then start to narrow the squad down as we progress each year.

“There has been a lot of changes and there are new staff moving up and we have appointed David Funston as our new rugby development officer, so things are looking positive for the future.

“It’s good to see that Ulster Schools Under 17 Development squad is at Foyle College throughout the summer training, they are using Foyle as a base for there first few sessions.”

Another man who will be guiding the youngsters this summer is former Ulster coach Brian McLaughlin and Barnett feels his experience and knowledge will benefit the young players.

“The way we have split the training schedule up is that we train at Foyle the first two Tuesdays every month, then we move to Dungannon for the next two, before going to the Institute of Sport at Jordanstown for the last four sessions and we are hoping in those last four sessions ex-Ulster coach Brian McLaughlin will be stepping in to his role to work with these young guys and that will be great.”