O’Sullivan Striving For Bright Future With ‘Close-Knit’ Ballincollig Squad

Then there are the others. The ones who spent their childhoods waiting for teams that did not yet exist, who learned the rhythms of rugby by standing on the touchline watching a sibling train, or more latterly driving long distances for the chance simply to belong somewhere the game was being played.

Ballincollig’s 22-year-old back Kate O’Sullivan belongs unambiguously to the second group, and perhaps that is why she carries herself with a kind of grounded optimism that stands out even in a league where resilience is a prerequisite.

Her story is threaded with detours and distances, small towns and long drives, near misses and hard lessons, and she speaks about all of it the way someone does when they still feel slightly amazed to be here.

Her team’s season so far has not been easy. One win in six, a heavy defeat to Old Belvedere last time out, the sting of a losing but promising performance against Railway Union, last season’s beaten finalists.

Ballincollig have been caught between what they were, what they hope to become, and the stubborn middle ground where potential has to be converted into results.

But for O’Sullivan, even the setbacks appear as part of the climb. When she talks about losing to Railway (31-19) earlier this month, she does so with the tone of someone who still carries the match with her.

“It was tough with Railway,” she told IrishRugby.ie. “Because obviously we were very happy to have given them such a good game and to kind of show the potential that we had.

“But then also it was so much tougher because it was such a close game and we knew that we were so close to getting over the line. It was a nice game to play but sometimes it’s almost tougher losing when it is so close.

“We’re definitely excited to play Tullow now (this Saturday) after the break. They are bottom of the table, but they are a very physical side so we’re just excited to focus on our own performance and hopefully get a win from that.

“Prove to ourselves that we can go out and get a win, especially after a few losses there the last little while.”

For some teams, that sort of optimism might feel naïve. For this Ballincollig group, young, evolving, still establishing its identity in a league where experience is currency, it feels entirely in character.

O’Sullivan describes their away form as a burden that has weighed more heavily than expected, especially in the narrow 17-12 loss to newcomers Ennis, but even there she finds threads to pull on.

“I think it’s tough (not winning away) because we’ve been working so hard, and I definitely think that the Ennis game was a bit of a blow. Just because obviously it’s their first year in the AIL, so we were hoping to give them a good test.

“I think it was challenging then to not get the win, especially against a team that would be quite similar to us. So yeah, it was challenging but definitely kind of almost motivated us as well to go into these next games now to hopefully get a win.”

To understand the weight of these reflections, you have to understand the place she comes from. O’Sullivan is not a product of a well-established conveyor belt of local rugby talent, she is a product of longing.

Growing up in the west Cork village of Rosscarbery, her exposure to rugby came through her brother’s time with Skibbereen RFC. There was no girls team for her to join, no clear route towards the game she was drawn to.

What she had instead was patience, and whatever internal spark pushes a child to keep imagining a version of their sporting life that does not yet exist.

“I’d always kind of been playing football through the years,” she explained. “Then my brother started playing rugby with Skibbereen when he was quite young, but there wasn’t a girls team.

“So, I definitely learned to love rugby so much more from when he was playing, and I had always wanted to start but there were no teams really around me. There was Bantry but that’s about like 45 minutes for me, so that kind of wasn’t going to work.

“So then finally they started one, it was actually an Under-16 team, I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time but I started away anyway because I just wanted to play so bad. So yeah, that was great then.

“There were so many people who wanted to join and it just kept growing year by year, so that was really nice to be able to start. Especially when I had been wanting to for so long after seeing my brother go out and play.”

She played junior rugby with Skibbereen and learned the game in a space that was supportive but not yet designed to prepare a player for the country’s top competition. The jump from there to the All-Ireland League was vast.

“It’s definitely been a huge learning curve but it’s been really enjoyable. Obviously it is quite a step up. I was with Skibbereen playing junior rugby before.

It’s definitely a big step up but this is my third year with Ballincollig now. I played dual for one year, and then went full last year. So this is kind of my third season now, so I feel like I’m really growing into it.

“It’s nice being around such quality players and obviously such a strong coaching team (headed up by Santiago Gonzalez) as well. I’m obviously, as you said, quite young for the team. We definitely have a very young team so it’s quite nice.

“Everyone’s very close. Some of the younger girls that are coming up, I guess to be able to help them to come up…even though honestly some of them are more experienced than me. They’re unbelievable some of the younger girls that we have this year.”

There is something revealing in the way O’Sullivan talks about the young players who have broken through, as if her own youth is almost irrelevant in the context of the group around her.

That is perhaps the clearest sign of growth. She no longer sees herself solely as a player desperate to catch up. She sees herself as someone responsible for helping others to settle, someone whose presence in the squad carries weight.

It is an early form of leadership, unforced and natural. But none of that makes the gap in standards any smaller. Going from junior rugby to facing provincial and international players every week is a shock to the system, even for someone with O’Sullivan’s drive.

“It’s a massive step up alright from junior. You’re facing provincial players and international players, so it’s definitely a very high standard.

“But I think the help from the girls who have been there before and obviously all the coaching like the S&C, the analysis, everything like that, you definitely get on board quite quickly and it helps you improve so much.

“I played with Michelle O’Driscoll before in Skibbereen, and it was nice as well because myself and Emma Connolly kind of came together. So it was nice to have someone that was also kind of starting out with you.

“But also to have people that you knew as well, who had been there maybe for a year or two before to kind of show you the ropes.”

Her move to Ballincollig did not happen instantly. It was a process of hesitation, loyalty, ambition, and practicality. When she began college at the MTU Cork Campus, the idea of joining Ballincollig was placed in front of her almost immediately, but she resisted.

Not because she lacked the motivation, but because leaving a home club leaves an imprint. Skibbereen was where she learned the game, where the team grew around her and she grew with it. It is not a simple thing to step away from that.

“I was in college in MTU,” she recalled. “When I went up in first year, I think someone in Ballincollig actually reached out and asked if I wanted to join. I was kind of on the fence about it, we were going quite well with Skibbereen at the time.

“I said I’d leave it for a year, and then Michelle O’Driscoll actually ended up moving and a few of the girls from Skib ended up moving to AIL clubs.

“That was kind of when myself and Emma were like, ‘Look, we’re up in Cork and we want to be playing at a higher standard of rugby’.

“So that’s when we decided to go dual because we were kind of still unsure. It’s tough because you don’t want to leave your home club when you’ve grown up playing with those girls.

“But then obviously you do want to play at a higher level, so we went dual and then last year then decided to go full with Ballincollig which was definitely a really good decision. It’s definitely just made me improve further.

“To be able to be with them full-time, and not only be I guess like strapped to your six appearances or whatever it is with dual, I think that was quite tough. So it was nice to be able to go out and be able to be there to play every single week.

“I have moved back home to Rosscarbery since graduating so it definitely is a bit of a distance. It’s about an hour for training but I definitely just wanted to keep playing at such a high standard, so I think it’s worth it anyway.”

Most 22-year-olds view an hour-long trip for training as a barrier. O’Sullivan speaks about it as though it simply folds into the natural rhythm of chasing something bigger than herself.

That commute, the commitments layered on top of college and work and the normal pressures young players feel, this is the geography of her ambition. There is nothing glamorous in it, but there is meaning in the repetition. For her, the route from Rosscarbery to the western side of Cork city is one she has earned.

That sense of shared earning is what she sees most clearly in the current Ballincollig squad, led by captain Aoife Madigan (pictured below). Results have been hard to come by, and the league shows little mercy, but O’Sullivan describes a group that refuses to fracture under strain.

“We have some amazing girls that are coming in each week and definitely the effort never drops. It’s always there so even after some of the tougher losses, I think there is a good work-rate with the group.

“I think we show up for each other. It’s a very close-knit group, as I said we’re quite young still and we’re all around similar age, so it’s nice to be able to push ourselves there even if we don’t have someone a bit older to show us the way.

“Definitely I think we have been really trying to push towards a higher level and we know we can get there, so we just have to keep putting in our performances and hopefully trying to get a few more points on the board as we go now towards the second half of the season.”

What she describes is a team still at the beginning of what they hope becomes a longer arc. Their target this season was not simply to improve their standing in the table, it was to prove something more fundamental. That they can compete.

That they belong among the league’s higher-ranked sides. That the gap between themselves and the Blackrocks, the Old Belvederes, the UL Bohemians, the Railway Unions of the world, is one that can be closed through application rather than pedigree.

With that, the of Ballincollig’s season is not merely about tight losses or away-day frustrations, or the battle for points in a competitive league. It is also, inherently, about players like O’Sullivan, players whose presence continues to reshape what the club can be.

When she speaks about the next block of fixtures – Tullow away, Wicklow at home, and title holders UL Bohs waiting before Christmas – she does not frame the upcoming games as hurdles but as opportunities to show the work the group is putting in.

“I think it’s more that we set up this year that we really wanted to be able to compete with the top four teams. I think we really showed that with Railway that we are able to compete with them.

“I think even with Blackrock, although the scoreline (60-14) didn’t show it at the end, I thought we put in a really good 60-minute performance. It was just towards the latter end then that they really showed their quality.

“That was one of our main goals this season, just to be able to compete with those top four teams that are really, really so strong. I think we are proving ourselves with that, obviously we have UL Bohs coming up so we are just hoping to really push on.

“Just show that although we didn’t get that high up in the table last year, that we really can compete with those (teams) and show what we can do.

“After the last few games, we’re just hoping to push ourselves as much as we can now before Christmas, and I guess show what we’ve been working on and bring it out on the field for a full 80 minutes. That’s the most important bit,” she added.

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