Former Tyrone senior footballer Eoin Bradley will shortly be heading up an innovative new programme for player profiling available to all GAA clubs in Ulster.

The profiling service will be provided by Dublin based company the National Athletes Development Academy (NADA), and is designed to allow qualified performance coaches to carry out a range of physiological tests, assessing player's speed, power, strength and endurance, as well as physical competency and functional movement screening and assessments.

This will be the first time athlete/player profiling has been done to this scale in Ulster.

Over the past number of years NADA have worked closely with many leading names in Irish sports including The Irish Institute of Sport; The Sports Surgery Clinic in Santry; the Dublin Senior and U21 hurling squads; and the Cavan Senior, U-21, Junior and Development football squads; as well as AFL organisations Collingwood FC and AFL Europe.

Killyclogher clubman Bradley has recently returned to Ireland, having spent last year working with the Wigan Warriors rugby league team in England, while also completing his studies, and has since taken up a position with the highly regarded NADA organisation.

Reflecting on his time spent with the Wigan Warriors, Eoin was quick to recognise the educational benefits of experiencing such an environment.

"In a professional club like Wigan Warriors, there is as much emphasis put on plyometric work, stretching and recovery as there is anything else, which is obviously of great benefit to the players.

"Often in the GAA, the focus is on what happens on the field and everything else takes second place, especially the stretching protocol, which can obviously have a negative effect on a player long term."

And Bradley will be making good use of his experience in coming months as NADA begin their mobile athlete profiling and education service in Ulster.

"We are actually conducting these tests at the minute in Croke Park on behalf of the GAA and the Sports Surgery Clinic"

"At present there is one club from each county selected by the GAA to participate in these tests. The players come down to Dublin and are put through a series of tests, ranging from physiological, speed and agility and strength tests.

"These simple tests can show up where a player is weak. For example, some functional screening around a player's hips, will determine whether he is going to be slow and have problem with movement.

"We will then prescribe a series of exercises for them that they can work on to help to alleviate the problem or strengthen the area" he explained.

"The testing will also show up where players are most liable to get injured and again we can prescribe corrective exercises that will help to strengthen that area and hopefully help the player avoid injury.

"This sort of profiling is only usually available at county level, but we feel that it will be of great value to clubs" Bradley added.

And the focus will not be only on the players during these mobile sessions, as NADA intend to help to inform the coaches as best possible in how to deal with their players and their physiological needs.

"We will also spend time with the coaches and help them to understand what they need to do.

"NADA will have no problem setting up an education resource for the coaches and also offering a monitoring service for the clubs.

"It's amazing how spending an extra twenty minutes or half an hour each week doing these exercises would go a long way to helping to prevent these very common injuries that players receive and obviously extend their own playing careers as well" Bradley concluded.

For any clubs interested in finding out more about this mobile service that Eoin and the rest of the NADA team will be offering across Ulster, please contact Ronan Kennedy via email at [email protected]. Tweet

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