The position for a senior men's full time national coach has been advertised by the Irish Hockey Association (IHA) over a number of international websites.
Following the untimely departure of Australian Andrew Meredith over the New Year the IHA has begun to look for a replacement as the national team prepare to go into another Olympic cycle.
The long term hope is that a new coach will get the team into a similar sort of position as Paul Revington did (seconds away from qualifying) prior to the London Olympics last year.
The stated aim for the national team, according to the advertisement, is to “compete for medals at World and Olympic level tournaments.”
Some might say that losing a coach midterm is not the best way to go about that but it is also better to agree a termination of something that clearly wasn’t working from both sides.
What the IHA now seek is a coach to take the team through the Olympic cycle of 2016, with annual reviews by the Board of Management of the IHA.
The position is full time and unlike Meredith, who was based in Germany, the candidate “must be able to live and work in Ireland”.
While there is some pressure to have a coach in place as Mick McKinnon looks after the team on an interim basis, the time frame for the application seems quite short.
The post was advertised on Wednesday evening and the closing date for applications is Monday January 20th. That's just about 12 days for any potential coach to study the job spec and decide whether they are interested.
Remuneration
The remuneration was not listed on the advertisement and will be commensurate with experience but it is believed that Meredith was earning around €60,000 per year.
The important thing for Ireland now is to get a coach who the players respect as they did Revington – surely the biggest loss to the Irish game in years – and hold on to him, especially if he looks like he can take an Irish team to an Olympics for the first time in the sport’s history.
