{"id":669445,"date":"2026-10-30T02:34:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T02:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/669445\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T02:34:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T02:34:15","slug":"coaching-takes-its-toll-tumilty-explains-ireland-exit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/669445\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Coaching takes its toll’ – Tumilty explains Ireland exit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Tumilty admitted the strain of coaching can take its toll as the now former Ireland men’s hockey head coach outlined the reasons behind his decision to step down<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Co Down man has been in charge of the senior men’s side since September 2019 and guided Ireland to the Paris Olympics two years ago and more recently to a creditable 10th place finish at this summer’s FIH Hockey World Cup<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But with the road towards the next Olympics looming large, Tumilty told RT\u00c9 Radio 1’s Inside Sport that despite the progress that has been made during his tenure, he felt the time was right to hand over the reins.<\/p>\n

“Why resign? Coaching takes its toll on many people, and I think for me to give what the squad need and what the other staff need as they move towards the LA qualification in March 2028, I needed to have a lot of energy, and as people who know me, probably a bit of fight in me,” he said.<\/p>\n

“And I’ve recognised over this last number of weeks and months that I don’t have that fight and energy to keep going, and I think it’s best that somebody else leads the group forward in what is a really important phase of the sport.”<\/p>\n

Tumilty, who will be initially succeeded in an interim capacity by his assistant Neville Rothman, added: “We’ve had a successful period there with both the Olympics and the World Cup. I know there’s a lot of energy needed to try and get to LA.<\/p>\n

“It’s certainly probably a more difficult qualification route than we’ve had in previous goes at going to the Games, so you definitely need somebody with more energy and I recognise I’m not the person to do that and possibly there’s somebody better in the organisation to carry that forward.”<\/p>\n

\"Team
\nTumilty during the Paris 2024 Games<\/p>\n

The next challenge for Irish hockey for both men’s and women’s is how to build on the steps made in the last few years.<\/p>\n

Tumilty acknowledged that would be a huge challenge in a competitive environment globally within the elite level of the sport.<\/p>\n

“I think the real challenge for the sport is how do we get to that next top eight stage and be a team that can constantly compete in the top eight and the investment that’s needed in that, and probably to change our programme to be a more full-time programme to cope with the other nations, does make it challenging,” he said.<\/p>\n

“And it brings that piece when you go to the tournaments, what are you really competing for?<\/p>\n

“I think I’ve been very fair with the guys and when we set our objectives we’re realistic around knowing what we can achieve and I think in the World Cup we definitely achieved probably what we set out to do.<\/p>\n

“We weren’t far away in the Spain game<\/a>, which I think our performance was probably one of the best performances under myself of stealing a quarter-final place.<\/p>\n

“But while we were close in that one-off game, are we really that close is probably the challenge from a coaching point of view.”<\/p>\n

Tumilty also outlined the structural challenges of keeping pace with the sport’s leading lights.<\/p>\n

“We have to be realistic around what is needed to become a top nation and the funding and the programme you’re competing against,” he said.<\/p>\n

“If you look at the GB squad or the India squad or even the Dutch and the Belgian squads, they spend three days a week together on a consistent basis and also probably a lot of those nations have really competitive leagues, professional leagues.<\/p>\n

“Whereas if you look at the programme that we operate in within Ireland, our league is not at the standard of those teams and also the programmes don’t have the same amount of investment or the opportunity for the players to be together and that certainly is challenging.<\/p>\n

“But at the same time I think we must recognise we are very, very appreciative of the support we get from Sport Northern Ireland and Sport Ireland and without them the teams, I don’t think, would be competing even at World Cup or Olympics.<\/p>\n

“I do think that there’s decisions to be made in relation to how do we increase investment to help the teams compete at those next levels or else we have to accept that our gold medal is qualifying for Olympic Games or World Cup or that even with the competition we face from teams like New Zealand and France that maybe even the Olympic Games becomes unrealistic.<\/p>\n

“I do think in the men’s programme we have an excellent group of players at the minute that can push to qualify for LA and I think there’s a really exciting group coming behind as they proved in the Junior World Cup.<\/p>\n

“So I think there is an opportunity to remain competitive. But it’s just the cost of everything has gone up as well and where tournaments are held is definitely an extra burden that the organisation has to deal with at the minute which is definitely an additional challenge that we didn’t have in the past.”<\/p>\n

As for his own future within the sport, does Tumilty still have aspirations of being a head coach elsewhere?<\/p>\n

“I can’t say that for definite that I’ll definitely not be back in a box but I’m not 100% certain I’ll be back as a head coach,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Would I like to coach in a different role possibly or take another role in sport possibly? Whether I coach again, I think coaching takes its toll, after 21 years, it’s certainly taken its toll on myself.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Tumilty admitted the strain of coaching can take its toll as the now former Ireland men’s hockey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-669445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}